Joe DiMaggio

Joseph Paul DiMaggio was born on November 25, 1914, in Martinez, California, a small town on the Carquinez Strait northeast of San Francisco. He was the eighth of nine children of Giuseppe and Rosalia DiMaggio, immigrants from the fishing village of Isola delle Femmine in Sicily ^[1]. Within a year of Joe's birth the family moved to the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco, where Giuseppe worked as a crab fisherman and expected his sons to follow him onto the boats ^[2].

Joe wanted nothing to do with fishing. The smell of the boats made him ill, and his father for a time dismissed him as lazy, good for nothing but sandlot ball. School held little more appeal: he dropped out of Galileo High School and drifted through odd jobs, selling newspapers and working in an orange juice plant, while playing ball on the playgrounds and semipro diamonds of San Francisco ^[1]. Two of his brothers, Vince and Dom, also became major league outfielders, an unusual family record that later gave sportswriters an easy storyline about the fisherman's sons who conquered baseball ^[3].

It was Vince who opened the door. Playing for the San Francisco Seals of the Pacific Coast League in 1932, Vince persuaded the club to give his younger brother a late-season trial at shortstop. Joe stuck, moved to the outfield, and in 1933, at age eighteen, hit safely in 61 consecutive games for the Seals, a Pacific Coast League record that made him a West Coast sensation ^[2].

A knee injury suffered in 1934, when DiMaggio's leg buckled as he stepped out of a taxi, scared off most major league suitors and drove down his price. The New York Yankees took the gamble, acquiring him from the Seals for cash and players while leaving him in San Francisco for one more season, during which he hit .398 ^[1]. He arrived in New York in 1936 carrying expectations that would have crushed most rookies: the Yankees had not won a pennant since 1932, and the press cast the quiet 21-year-old as the heir to Babe Ruth.

He delivered at once. As a rookie DiMaggio batted .323 with 29 home runs, and the Yankees won the 1936 World Series, the first of four consecutive championships in his first four seasons ^[4]. Sportswriters struggled to convey how effortless he looked. In center field at Yankee Stadium, with its vast left-center expanse, he seemed to glide to balls other outfielders chased in vain, and he ran the bases with a long, economical stride that earned him the nickname the Yankee Clipper ^[2].

By 1939 he was the best player in the American League, winning the batting title at .381 and his first Most Valuable Player award ^[4]. Off the field he remained reserved, a careful dresser who said little and guarded his privacy, a temperament that New York interpreted as class rather than coldness. The image of DiMaggio as the dignified professional, never showing pain or temper, took hold early and never left him.

Any account of Joe DiMaggio achievements begins with the summer of 1941. From May 15 through July 16 he hit safely in 56 consecutive games, a streak that gripped the country in the anxious months before Pearl Harbor. Radio bulletins tracked it daily, a novelty song celebrated Joltin' Joe, and when Cleveland pitchers and two fine plays by third baseman Ken Keltner finally stopped him on July 17, he promptly hit in 16 more games ^[5]. No major leaguer since has come closer than 44. That season he beat out Ted Williams, who hit .406, for his second MVP award ^[5].

The career totals understate him because of the seasons he lost. DiMaggio enlisted in the Army Air Forces in early 1943 and spent three prime years, ages 28 through 30, playing service baseball and instructing at bases in California and Hawaii before his discharge in 1945 ^[1]. Even so, he finished with a .325 lifetime batting average, 361 home runs, and a statistic that still startles analysts: only 369 career strikeouts, barely more than his home run total, a combination of power and bat control with no real parallel among sluggers ^[6].

He was named to the All-Star team in each of his thirteen seasons and won a third MVP award in 1947. The team record is the most emphatic argument of all: in his thirteen years the Yankees won ten pennants and nine World Series ^[4]. In 1949, after a bone spur in his heel kept him out for the first 65 games, he returned against Boston and hit four home runs in three games at Fenway Park, a comeback that added another layer to his legend ^[3]. The Baseball Hall of Fame elected him in 1955 ^[4].

DiMaggio married the actress Dorothy Arnold in November 1939 in a San Francisco wedding that drew enormous crowds to the church. Their son, Joe DiMaggio Jr., was born in 1941, but the marriage frayed under the demands of his career and his remoteness at home, and Dorothy obtained a divorce in 1944 ^[1].

His second marriage made him a permanent fixture of American popular culture. DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe wed at San Francisco City Hall in January 1954, a union of the country's most famous ballplayer and its most famous actress. It lasted barely nine months. He was uncomfortable with the machinery of Hollywood and with the public display of his wife, most famously during the filming of the subway grate scene for The Seven Year Itch, and Monroe filed for divorce that October ^[7].

What followed complicated the simple story of a failed celebrity marriage. The two remained close, and DiMaggio helped Monroe leave a psychiatric clinic in 1961; some accounts suggest they were considering remarriage before her death in August 1962. He claimed her body, arranged her small private funeral, barred most of Hollywood from attending, and for twenty years had roses delivered to her crypt several times a week ^[7]. He never married again and rarely spoke of her publicly for the rest of his life ^[1].

A heel injury, worn shoulders, and his own refusal to play at a diminished standard ended his career early. After batting .263 in 1951, his lowest full-season mark, DiMaggio retired that December at age 37, saying he no longer had it and would not hang on ^[4]. The Yankees had a rookie named Mickey Mantle waiting in the outfield, and the succession in center field passed with the pennant intact.

Retirement made him wealthy in a way playing never had. After brief stints as a broadcaster and a Yankees spring training instructor, and a short tenure as a coach and executive with the Oakland Athletics in the late 1960s, he found his most visible role in television advertising, spending years as the calm, trusted spokesman for the Mr. Coffee machine and for the Bowery Savings Bank in New York ^[1]. A generation that never saw him play knew his face from those commercials.

He policed his legend carefully. At old-timers' events he insisted on being introduced last, as the Greatest Living Ballplayer, a title bestowed during baseball's 1969 centennial celebrations, and he withdrew from anyone he felt had exploited his name ^[1]. In his final years he lived in Hollywood, Florida, devoted much of his energy to the Joe DiMaggio Children's Hospital that bears his name in that state, and battled lung cancer through the winter of 1998 and 1999. He died at his Hollywood home on March 8, 1999, at age 84 ^[8].

Few athletes have crossed so completely into the general culture. Ernest Hemingway's old fisherman in The Old Man and the Sea talks of the great DiMaggio, son of a fisherman, and in 1968 Simon and Garfunkel's song Mrs. Robinson asked where he had gone, a line DiMaggio initially found baffling since he had gone nowhere, only to be assured by Paul Simon that it mourned a vanished ideal of the American hero ^[1]. The Yankees retired his number 5, and his monument stands beyond the outfield at Yankee Stadium ^[4].

Students of Joe DiMaggio facts still argue about the streak. Statisticians have calculated the improbability of 56 straight games so many times that the number has become a standard example in probability writing, and each hitter who reaches 30 games in a row is measured against the summer of 1941 ^[5]. His playing record, compressed into thirteen seasons around a war, keeps him in every serious conversation about the greatest center fielders, alongside Willie Mays, Ty Cobb, and Mantle ^[6].

Biographers, most exhaustively Richard Ben Cramer, later portrayed a private man far more complicated than the flawless public image: suspicious, solitary, shrewd about money, and wounded by fame ^[1]. Yet the darker portrait has not displaced the older one. Any Joe DiMaggio biography must reckon with both, the guarded man and the effortless ballplayer whose dignity on the field gave mid-century America one of its most durable ideas of what a hero looked like.