DiMaggio, Joe (25 Nov. 1914-9 Mar. 1999), baseball player, was born Joseph Paul DiMaggio in Martinez, California, the son of Giuseppe Paulo DiMaggio, a fisherman, and Rosalie DiMaggio (maiden name unknown). He was the fourth of five sons and the eighth of nine children of immigrants who came from Sicily in 1898 and shortly after his birth settled in San Francisco's predominantly Italian North Beach area. Two brothers fished with their father, while Vince, Joe, and Dominic DiMaggio all became major league center fielders. After Joe dropped out of high school, having attended for one year, his brother Vince got him a tryout, and he signed to play baseball with the San Francisco Seals in the Pacific Coast League.

Three games as a shortstop at the end of 1932 were followed by the launching of DiMaggio's career in 1933 with a season that made him the most talked-about minor leaguer in the country. He batted .340, hit 28 home runs, and drove in 169 runs as an 18-year old "phenom," while also maintaining a 61-game hitting streak. The next two seasons he batted .341 and .398; complementing his 1935 average were 48 doubles, 18 triples, 34 homers, 154 runs driven in, and brilliant play in center field. Although some teams were scared away by his having suffered a knee injury, the New York Yankees sent the Seals five players and $25,000 for DiMaggio. The young center fielder was an instant sensation with the Yankees. Babe Ruth had been released after the 1934 season; the Yankees had lost three straight pennants; and even with Lou Gehrig, the game's best first baseman, the team needed the spark of inspiration the newcomer provided. Despite missing the first few weeks with a foot injury, DiMaggio took the American League by storm, batting .323 with 29 homers and 125 RBI and becoming the first rookie to start in an all-star game.

The next year DiMaggio was even better, leading the league with a personal high of 46 home runs while batting .346, scoring a league-best 151 runs and driving in 167. When he held out for a $40,000 salary the next spring, he began a yearly ritual, with the Yankees general manager Ed Barrow consistently underpaying him. Before free agency, players had little leverage, and DiMaggio finally signed for $25,000. In his first five seasons, he missed four openers because of injuries or holdouts.

DiMaggio's struggles for more money did not seem to limit his on-field performance. In 1938 he hit .324 with 32 home runs and 140 RBI, and in 1939 he won the first of his three most valuable player awards when he led the league at .381, with 30 homers and 126 RBI in only 120 games. He repeated as batting champion in 1940 with a .352 average, walloped another 31 homers, and drove in 133 runs. Yet that season was an oddity: the only one in the seven leading up to DiMaggio's military service in which the Yankees failed to win the pennant. He was, quite simply, a winner, and four straight pennants and World Series victories in his first four years set a record, which later was surpassed by the Yankees of 1949-1953.

The year 1941 helped make Joe DiMaggio a legend. That season he won his second MVP award, batting .357 with 30 home runs and a league-leading 125 RBI. More historic, he demolished Wee Willie Keeler's 1897 record of hitting safely in 44 consecutive games when he reeled off a streak of 56 straight, capturing the imagination of the nation with his daily pursuit. The record stopped on a dramatic note: Cleveland third baseman Ken Keltner made two brilliant backhand stabs to throw DiMaggio out; he was walked intentionally once; and shortstop Lou Boudreau survived a tricky hop to get DiMaggio in his final time at bat. Incredibly, he launched a new 16-game streak the next day. He came that close to a 73-game string. That was the year Ted Williams hit .406, the last .400 season of the twentieth century, but the Yanks won the pennant again and DiMaggio had his MVP award. He tailed off a bit in 1942, batting a modest .305 with 21 homers and 114 runs driven home. On 3 December 1942, he joined the Army Air Forces and spent the next three seasons playing baseball in the service. Tellingly, the Yankees lost two of the three pennants in his years away.

DiMaggio's favorite haunt in New York was Toots Shor's restaurant, where he sat at a back table and spent a good deal of time socializing with reporters, who--in an era of less intrusive journalism--did not write about his private life. DiMaggio early on developed a penchant for blond showgirls, and on 19 November 1939 he married Dorothy Arnold, a blond Universal actress he had met while she was making a movie in 1937. They had a son, Joe, Jr., in October 1941, but the marriage crumbled and ended in divorce in 1944. DiMaggio was later estranged from his son as well.

His brothers, meanwhile, were compiling impressive records in their own careers. Vince, two years older, played from 1937 to 1946 on five National League teams, batting .249 with 125 homers, two all-star game appearances, and six years as league leader in strikeouts. Dominic, two years younger, played from 1940 through 1953 with the Boston Red Sox, with three years off in the navy during the war. The "little professor," nicknamed for his glasses, was, according to a song popular in Boston, "better than his brother Joe, Dominic DiMaggio." He batted .298 for his career, though at 5 feet 9 inches and 168 pounds he was far smaller than Joe's 6 feet 2 inches and 193 pounds and lacked his more famous sibling's power.

When he returned from the service, DiMaggio's skills had declined a bit from his first seven seasons. He played another six years and led the Yankees to four pennants during that stretch. In 1946 he hit .290 with 25 homers and 95 RBI, his poorest season to that point, and the Yanks finished third. Then in 1947 he won his third MVP award with another subpar but pennant-winning year--a .315 average, 20 home runs, 97 RBI. His only postwar season on a level with his earlier glory came in 1948, when he hit .320 and led the league in homers with 39 and runs batted in with 155. The following year he missed the first half of the season with painful bone spurs in his right heel, returning for a crucial three-game series with Boston at Fenway Park. He led a Yankee sweep with four home runs in the three games and later helped his team capture the pennant by beating Boston in two must-win games to conclude the season. He averaged .346 with 14 homers and 57 RBI for the half season. In 1950 he hit .300 for the last time, but his .301 average included an impressive 32 homers and 122 RBI as he led the Yankees to another flag. He was clearly slowing down in 1951--his average dipped to .263 with 12 homers and 71 RBI as the Yankees won their third straight pennant. DiMaggio's successor as the team's center field super hero, Mickey Mantle, flanked him in right field as a rookie. On the eve of the World Series against the Giants, the Dodger scouting report on DiMaggio was leaked to Life magazine; its unflattering portrait of a player on the downward slope of his career helped move DiMaggio to decline a $100,000 contract for 1952 and retire before he embarrassed himself, a move consistent with the class for which he was famous. In his thirteen seasons, he compiled a .325 batting average, played in eleven all-star games, and led the Yankees to nine wins in ten World Series.

DiMaggio on the field was the picture of grace, both as a fielder and as a batter. In his distinctive batting stance, his legs were spread so wide that the right-handed hitter took only a short step with his left foot before swinging; an approach that allowed him to wait longer than most batters to commit himself to swinging at a pitch. As a result, he rarely struck out--his career marks of 361 home runs and 369 strikeouts are astoundingly close compared to the figures for any other slugger. In the field, he combined good positioning with quick reflexes and deceptive speed. He never seemed to crash into a fence or dive for a ball--he just glided and was there when it came down. DiMaggio was an ideally versatile player: he could hit, hit with power, field, throw, and run. Although he did not steal many bases, reflecting the style of the game at that time, he was as good as anyone at going from first to third or second to home on a hit and reputedly was never thrown out trying to take an extra base. He wasn't the best ever at any one thing, but he transcended statistics. The New York Times eloquently summed up his special quality in an editorial when he retired: "The combination of proficiency and exquisite grace which Joe DiMaggio brought to the art of playing center field was something no baseball averages can measure and that must be seen to be believed and appreciated" (quoted in the Times obituary).

On and off the field, he cultivated an image of consistent professionalism, pride, and courtliness that captivated the nation. He was sure of himself, cool, and seemingly emotionless--his stoicism just added to his mystique. When Al Gionfriddo robbed him of a hit in the 1947 World Series, the disgusted DiMaggio kicked at the dirt between first and second base, an action so rare that it became a major news story. He struggled to protect his privacy and maintain his reserve, yet he quietly reveled in being the center of attention. When he attended Old Timers games after his retirement, he insisted on being the last player introduced, assuring himself the biggest ovation. During his playing days, the custom-tailored star was, in the words of sportswriter Roy Blount, "the class of the Yankees in times when the Yankees outclassed everybody else" (quoted in the Times obituary).

In retirement, he pursued his second career: Joe DiMaggio, legend. He had some cameo roles to play in baseball, such as occasional appearances at Yankee Stadium, the Hall of Fame, and all-star games; he earned a lot of money making appearances, signing autographs, and later being a television pitch man for a bank and the Mr. Coffee brand of coffemaker. He also served on the board of directors of the Baltimore Orioles. He was to leave at his death an estate estimated at $40 million. But the DiMaggio legend was most burnished by his marrying Marilyn Monroe, the Hollywood sex goddess, on 14 January 1954. While DiMaggio was a buttoned-down type who made a devoted practice of being a gentleman and hardly ever showed emotion in public, Monroe remained the extravagant exhibitionist wholly at odds with quiet domesticity. The stormy marriage lasted just nine months. They divorced amicably and remained close friends. After Monroe's death in 1962 from a drug overdose, a grief-stricken DiMaggio arranged for her funeral, and he nursed the feeling that had she lived she would have taken him back. He had roses delivered to her grave weekly for over twenty years. The legendary status that continued to cling to DiMaggio reflected his having become, in 1949, the first ballplayer to command an annual salary of $100,000. His competition with Ted Williams of the Red Sox, both in batting and in earnings, enhanced both their reputations. In later years Williams said he believed he was a better hitter than DiMaggio, but he acknowledged the "Yankee Clipper" as the greatest player of his time--he could do it all. Baseball observers noted the irony of where they each played: DiMaggio in Yankee Stadium, a park built for Babe Ruth and greatly favoring left-handed hitters, and Williams at Fenway Park, where right-handers had the advantage. Perhaps their rivalry would have reached an even higher plane had they been traded for each other.

The larger-than-life DiMaggio image was reflected in Les Brown's 1941 hit song "Joltin' Joe DiMaggio," Ernest Hemingway's Cuban fisherman ruminating on "the great DiMaggio" in The Old Man and the Sea, and Paul Simon's haunting lyrics in his song "Mrs. Robinson" from the movie The Graduate (1967): "Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio / A nation turns its lonely eyes to you . . ." In fact, the lonely legend lived for years in San Francisco with his widowed sister Marie, but his arthritis needed a warmer climate, so he made a new home in Hollywood, Florida. For many years a chain smoker of the Camels he endorsed, he finally kicked the habit, but surgery for lung cancer in 1998 led to lung infections and pneumonia. He died of those complications at his home in Hollywood.