Joe DiMaggio, the Yankee Clipper, had an excellent 13-year baseball career. While his .325 batting average and 361 home runs have been dwarfed by other diamond immortals, he retains a special hold on fans more than a half century after his retirement.
DiMaggio joined the Yankees in 1936, little more than a year after Babe Ruth's departure. The fabled franchise, which had begun winning championships only in the 1920's as Murderer's Row, had managed only one in the 30's. Fans were eager for a new hero to ignite a new dynasty, and future Hall of Famer Lou Gehrig had apparently labored modestly too long in the Ruthian shadow to assume that role.
The rookie from the West Coast responded admirably with four straight years of well above .300 batting, annual home run and run production above 30 and 125, respectively, and fine fielding, culminating in 1939 in a career-high .381 for the batting title and the first of three Most Valuable Player Awards. More important, the Yankees, now known as the Bronx Bombers, won an unprecedented four world championships in those first four years and Joe D. was hailed as the indispensable factor.
After a one-year break from the title run, the Yanks won again in 1941, and this time DiMaggio entered not just baseball history but American lore. His new record of hitting safely in 56 consecutive games so captured the public imagination that a popular song about "Jolting Joe DiMaggio" was composed. The feat, which has withstood all challenges while most other offensive marks have been surpassed, completely overshadowed Ted Williams's .406 batting average, a full 50 points above DiMaggio's.
The Yankee Clipper, as he also became widely known, helped win another pennant in 1942 before spending three World War II years in the Army. His return in 1946 with his first sub-.300 average was a downer, but he won MVP honors again in 1947 as the Yanks cruised to another world title. However, injuries and the wartime interruption were taking an obvious toll. Joe D.'s last superstar-level performance came in 1949. After missing more than two months recuperating from heel surgery, he returned with four home runs in his first three game series and batted .346 the rest of the way to spark a relatively punchless Yankee team to another world championship. After barely making .300 in 1950 and slumping to .263 the next year, he bowed out at 37.
But baseball fans were far from through with DiMaggio. He remained the supreme attraction at Old Timers and memorabilia events and continued to be voted to "all-time" teams for decades after his retirement. And if he had not been fully immortalized in 1941, he was--a quarter of a century later-- with Simon and Garfunkel's inquiry about his whereabouts in "The Graduate" movie.
What accounted for this unique hold on the baseball and larger public? Certainly it resulted in part from his New York showcase and from his club's consistent fielding of an outstanding supporting cast, which included stars in their own right like Gehrig, Bill Dickey, Red Ruffing, Charlie Keller, Phil Rizzuto, and Allie Reynolds. But a lot had to do with some of the unmeasurables that don't show up in box scores but are discerned by aficionados of the game.
Long-time New York sports columnist Jimmy Cannon famously articulated this perspective when he wrote, "Baseball isn't statistics. It's DiMaggio rounding second." He meant that Joe D. knew when to take the extra base, and that he made it happen when a game depended on it. He covered the Yankee Stadium center field expanses with a flawless grace that became apparent only when others struggled there. His hitting was timely ernough to intimidate pitchers. He exuded a winning spirit, and the bottom line is that his teams won ten pennants and nine World Series in his 13 seasons.
There have been better hitters, fielders, and runners than Joe DiMaggio among baseball's all-time greats. He is arguably the most valuable of them all.
Source: Baseball-Reference.com
