Book Review: "56"

Actually, the full name of the book is "56, Joe Dimaggio and the Last Magic Number in Sports." As you can no doubt figure out, Kostya Kennedy's book is all about the 56 game hitting streak of Joltin' Joe back in 1941.

Now if you are student of the history of the game, you may be thinking, "what can this book tell us that we don't already know or haven't already read about this seminal event in baseball history?" Well, perhaps there isn't a lot of new ground that can be covered concerning the streak per se, but Kennedy does add some twists to the book that make this well worth reading.

• He sets the story of DiMaggio and The Streak against the background of events that were taking place in the world at the time. Europe was fully engaged in WW II, and President Roosevelt was gearing up the nation to the inevitable fact that the USA would soon be needing to enter the fray. The story of how the whole country stopped - including the action at the baseball parks - to listen to one of FDR's fireside chats is quite compelling.
• Kennedy also paints the picture of the discrimination faced by Italian-Americans, including that directed to Joe himself, at a time when Mussolini was joining with Germany to overrun Europe quite vividly.
• I learned a lot about Joe's marriage to his first wife, actress Dorothy Arnold. Joe does not come across in a favorable light here.
• Kennedy separates the book with several sections called "The View From Here", meaning the present day. In those chapters, he talks of The Streak from the present day, often with current day ballplayers who present their viewpoint on a hitting streak of this magnitude. Of particular interest was the chapter on Pete Rose, whose 44 game streak in 1978 is the closest anyone has come to DiMaggio's 56 game streak. Rose called his 44 game streak "the hardest thing I ever did in baseball." As many of you know, Pete Rose is not one of my favorite human beings, but I'll listen to him when he talks about hitting a baseball.
• (Interesting bit of trivia, in the course of pimping himself out and selling autographed baseballs, Rose goes through about 17,000 balls a year. Only the 30 MLB teams buy more baseballs from Rawlings than Charlie Hustler.)
• In the final chapter, Kennedy goes on in much more detail than needed on the statistical probability of someone, anyone hitting in 56 straight games. He spends a lot of time going on and on about stuff only an actuary could warm up to, but it all comes down to one thing. No mathematician, actuary, or other type of number cruncher can explain it. Hitting in 56 straight games is simply impossible.

So, this is another book that I recommend to the baseball fans out there. I would also recommend that if you like this, you also get a hold of Robert Creamer's great book from 1991, "Baseball and Other Matters in 1941." I read this a few years back, and it's a wonderful story about a season that included many terrific and interesting events, chief among them being Joe D's streak and Ted Williams .406 batting average.

Kennedy's book is also going to prompt me to read Richard Ben Cramer's 2000 biography of DiMaggio, "The Hero's Life." This was a book of my dad's that has been sitting on my bookshelf unread for several years. I need to blow the dust off and read it soon.