Major League Baseball's favorite punctuation mark has long been the asterisk. Roger Maris got one when he broke Babe Ruth's record and you might have heard that Barry Bonds' 756th home run ball will be emblazoned with one before it heads to Cooperstown. There will probably be more to come as the juiced up stars of recent years set marks. How then, amid all this asterisk-mania, did Joe DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak avoid getting the treatment?That question is being asked by a Canadian magazine called Walrus and they've uncovered a fair bit of evidence that suggests DiMag's streak may not be free from controversy. It's not because of anything Joltin' Joe did or took but because the official scorer for his home games was Dan Daniel.
Daniel was a local sportswriter who would today be considered something closer to a PR man. He was friends with the players, traveled with the team and had his expenses paid for by the Yankees. He was also the sole decider on hits and errors at Yankee Stadium and serving his team and friends may have trumped his objectivity according to the article's author David Robbeson.
