I was born in May 1941, in the nick of time. I had 11 days to get my bearings before it began–The Streak. It was the greatest event of the baseball season that flared dazzlingly on the eve of darkness.

There were just 16 teams in 10 cities, and St. Louis was baseball’s westernmost outpost, but the future–California–was present in San Francisco’s Joe DiMaggio and San Diego’s Ted Williams. Williams was as volatile as a colt and as one-dimensional as a surgeon. DiMaggio’s cool elegance concealed a passion to excel at every aspect of the game.

Williams used a postal scale in the clubhouse to make sure humidity had not increased the weight of his bats. An official of the Louisville Slugger company once challenged Williams to pick the one bat among six that weighed half an ounce more than the other five. He did. He once sent back to the factory a shipment of bats because he sensed the handles were too thick. They were, by .005 of an inch.

Williams was hitting .39955 going into the season-ending doubleheader in Philadelphia’s Shibe Park. Daylight savings had ended the night before, so the autumn shadows that made hitting hard there would be even worse. If Williams had not played, his average would have been rounded to .400. Instead, he went 6 for 8, including a blazing double that broke a public address speaker. He finished at .406. Today when a batter hits a sacrifice fly he is not charged with an at bat. In 1941 he was. Williams’s manager, Joe Cronin, estimates Williams hit 14 of them, so under today’s rules his average would have been .419. Since then, the highest average was George Brett’s .390 in 1980.

Williams’s achievement is one of the greatest in baseball history, but not the greatest of 1941. Nothing in baseball quite matches DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak.

The Yankees were on a tear, so at home they rarely batted in the bottom of the 9th. DiMaggio had to get his hits in eight innings, and in the 38th game he was hitless entering the bottom of the 8th with the Yankees ahead 3-1. He was scheduled to be the fourth batter. The first batter popped out, the second walked and Tommy Henrich was up and worried. He was a power hitter who rarely bunted, but if he hit into a double play the streak probably would end. He returned to the dugout and got manager Joe McCarthy’s permission to bunt. Then DiMaggio hit a double.

On July 8 in Detroit the American League won the most exciting All-Star game when, with two out in the bottom of the 9th and the National League leading 5-4, Williams hit a three-run home run to Briggs Stadium’s upper deck. When play resumed after the All-Star break, with DiMaggio’s streak at 48 games, he erupted for 17 hits in 31 at bats. As the pressure intensified, DiMaggio’s performance became greater. He had four hits in the 50th game, went 4 for 8 in the doubleheader then ran the streak to 53, had two hits in the 55th game and three in the 56th. The streak ended in Cleveland when the Indians’ third baseman, Ken Keltner, made two terrific stops of rocketed grounders. Both times his momentum carried him into foul territory, from which he threw DiMaggio out by a blink.

In those 56 games DiMaggio hit .408 with 91 hits, 35 for extra bases, including 15 home runs. He drove in 55 runs and scored 56. The next day he began a 16-game streak. When it ended he had hit safely in 72 or 73 games (not counting his hit in the All-Star game).

Most records are improved by small increments. Not this one. The consecutive game-hitting record for a Yankee had been 29. The modern major league record had been George Sisler’s 41. The all-time major league record had been Willie Keller’s 44. DiMaggio fell short only of the record for all professional baseball, 61, set in 1933 by an 18-year-old playing for the San Francisco Seals: Joe DiMaggio.

The Yankees clinched the pennant Sept. 4, earlier than any team before or since. In the National League the perfectly matched Dodgers and Cardinals (they played 23 times, each winning 11, with one tie) scratched and clawed down to the wire. The Dodgers won by 2-1/2 games, even though in late September the Cardinals got 20 hits in 12 games from a young outfielder from Donora, Pa. Stan Musial had begun producing one of baseball’s prettiest numbers: 3,630 hits, 1,815 at home, 1,815 on the road.

Today, Robert Creamer writes in his book on the 1941 season, the Yankees are like Austria, “an unimportant little country” full of monuments to golden days. That is unfair. To Austria. However, in 1941 the Yankees were the Bronx Bombers. For decades the Dodgers had just been the Bums, often aspiring only to mediocrity. In one five-season stretch they finished sixth, causing a newspaper to say “overconfidence may yet cost the Dodgers sixth place.”

In the 1941 World Series, with the Yankees leading two games to one, the Dodgers were leading the fourth game 4-3 with two outs in the bottom of the 9th and two strikes on Henrich. Dodger pitcher Hugh Casey was one strike from evening the series, and he got it. Henrich swung and missed. But Dodger catcher Mickey Owen missed it, too. Henrich sprinted to first. The next batter was DiMaggio. The Yankees won the series 4-1.

During DiMaggio’s streak, radio broadcasts had been interrupted to bring bulletins about his progress. But once radio interrupted baseball. On the night of May 27, when the Braves were playing the Giants in the Polo Grounds, both teams left the field for a while at 10:30 and the public address announcer said, “Ladies and gentlemen, the president of the United States.” About 17,000 fans listened to FDR’s radio address describing the lowering clouds of danger.

Michael Seidel, author of “Streak: Joe DiMaggio and the Summer of ‘41,” says DiMaggio was a lot like the taciturn, enduring characters then played in movies by Jimmy Stewart and Gary Cooper (who was soon to play Lou Gehrig). DiMaggio (number 5), was the successor to Lou Gehrig (number 4), who died on June 2 of the disease that now bears his name. Gehrig was 17 days shy of his 38th birthday. He died 16 years to the day after he became the Yankees’ regular first baseman, in game two of a streak of 2,130 games. DiMaggio’s similar stance toward life–a steely will, understated style, relentless consistency–was mesmerizing to a nation that knew it would soon need what he epitomized, heroism for