The Pirates Couldn't Beat Vince DiMaggio, So They...
Made him into a colorful baseball card...and an All-Star
1941 Play Ball Vince DiMaggio (#61) - Card of the Day
Major League Baseball’s trade deadline was last Tuesday — July 30 — and there were some interesting moves, as usual. Some will directly impact the pennant races, some will have more subtle effects, and some will end up being deadends.
The actual deadline has changed a bit over the years and now exists along a squishy Easter-like timeline — “no player shall be traded and eligible for postseason play after 11:59:59:59 PM on the first Tuesday after the first full moon following the All-Star Game, Bud Selig shrugs his shoulders and decrees differently from his retirement cheese wheel.”
So, it’s sort of tough to figure when that will fall. What we do know, though, is that August trades are pretty much a thing of the past, at least for now.
That wasn’t always the case, though.
Up until 2019, we had the July 31 non-waiver deadline, and then the August 31 playoff deadline. Basically, teams could do whatever they wanted before August. But if they wanted to make a trade after July 31, they had to pass the players involved through waivers before the deal could go through.
Any player who ended up traded — by whatever means — up through August 31, was eligible to play for their new team in the postseason, assuming October baseball was in the cards for that new team.
All of which brings us to today. There have been a handful of August 5th deals involving teams who eventually made the playoffs, scattered throughout baseball history. At least one involved a really famous name.
On August 5, 1939, the Yankees traded Vince DiMaggio to the Reds for players to be named later and some cash. Joe DiMaggio’s older brother had spent the first four months of the season in the minors after the Yanks acquired him from the Boston Bees in February.
Vince was the player to be named later in a larger deal between the clubs, from way back in August of 1938.
It took more than a month before DiMaggio got a chance with the Reds, but he finally made his Cincinnati debut with a pinch-hitting appearance on September 18. A couple more replacement gigs followed before he made his first start, but he got the call in right field against the Pirates on September 24.
Hitless to that point in his Cincy tenure, DiMaggio went 1-for-3 with two walks against Pittsburgh. More importantly, his one-out double off Ken Heintzelman in the bottom of the eighth inning drove in Billy Myers and Billy Werber…to put the Reds up 11-2.
Paul Derringer shut down the Bucs in the top of the ninth, so the Reds didn’t need DiMaggio’s “heroics,” but it’s always nice to have a couple more runs. In the third, though, DiMaggio had walked and then scored on Ernie Lombardi’s three-one double.
That was the extent of DiMaggio’s damage for Cincinnati at the plate in 1939, as he went 0-for-8 in four more appearances. That left him batting .071 on the year.
But DiMaggio’s big game contributed to big things for the Reds. Four days after his “breakout” against the Pirates, the Reds beat the Cardinals to win the National League pennant.
DiMaggio didn’t play in the World Series against his old team, as the Yankees swept the Reds in four straight games. And he wasn’t with the Reds long in 1940 — Cincinnati traded him on May 8.
Can you guess which team he landed with? Those same Pirates who he “lit up” back in late September of 1939. If you can beat them, join them. Or something like that.
Baseball cards were few and far between back in those days, but a smiling DiMaggio landed in the 1941 Play Ball set, as you see above. That would turn out to be his peak season, as he batted .267 with 21 home runs and an even 100 RBI while starting 150 games in center field.
Vince D. never did play in the World Series, and he never played in the American League, let alone for the Yankees. But he did play through 1946, doing his best work in five years with the Pirates and hanging up his spikes with 125 home runs, 209 doubles, and 584 RBI under his belt.
Not exactly Joe or Dom DiMaggio, but not exactly Joe DeMaestri, either.
Mr. Coffee Encore
While the three DiMaggio brothers were done in the bigs by 1953, retro sets kept Joe fresh in collections through the early part of the next decade. In 1961, for example, Nu-Card included two Joe D. cards in their “Scoops” set, and Golden Press included the colorful DiMaggio entry in their “Hall of Fame Baseball Stars” issue.
You can read about the Golden Press card and related trivialities right here.
Speaking of Trivialities…
I’ll leave you with something fun and completely frivolous…Batter Up!
This is a silly little game I put together a while back, a baseball version of Hangman where you’re trying to figure out a player’s name — I call it “Batter Up!”. I had forgotten about it until the other day when I was combing through some old articles on the Wax Pack Gods website.
Anway, it probably has bugs, and I don’t intend to fix or update it anytime soon. But it seems to still work at the moment, and you’re welcome to give it a shot. Who knows? It might just reveal a baseball name you don’t know and send you down a rabbit hole.
You can play “Batter Up!” right here (scroll down on that page to get the “game board”).
And, of course and as always, thanks for reading.
—Adam
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