The last season played, 2021, was the 80th since 56 consecutive games with hits by Joe DiMaggio.
And only one bigleaguer, Pete Rose (Reds), in 1978, has threatened the mark. But he was stopped at 44. He had 12 games left.
Tomorrow, Tuesday the eighth, it will be 23 years since DiMaggio died, a victim of lung cancer.
Joe DiMaggio is one of the first bigleaguers to be mentioned when talking about unbeatable records. And he is one of only five that have been with the five skills to play baseball…: easy to hit the ball, power at bat, good hands, strong and educated arm, fast legs.
The others, Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays, Roberto Clemente and Alex Rodríguez. But DiMaggio once decided to quit baseball, considering it too tiresome.
“That’s right, it happened at 14 years old,” Joe told Baseball Digest’s Frank Graham. “Actually, I had no ambition. I didn’t want to be anything, or anyone, I annoyed myself playing baseball, I wasn’t interested in any sport.
“Dad, who was a fisherman, asked me to be a fisherman too, and mom told me to study economics. But I just wanted to have fun.”
Joe said so during Yankees training in March 1946.
At age 14, when boys are most feverish to play ball, Joe DiMaggio stopped playing. And he was out of all sports activities until he was 16 years old, when a young neighbor encouraged him to be an outfielder for a team of neighborhood boys.
His brother Vince, two years older than him, who always praised Joe’s abilities above his own, and who was already an outfielder in the minors, later took him to the Seals, as a third baseman and shortstop. Joe had turned 17 years old.
“I wasn’t as passionate about baseball as the other kids I saw on the field,” Joe later said in another interview, “but I got paid, and I never got any money because I hadn’t worked at anything. That’s why the few bills they gave me in exchange for my game encouraged me”.
He played four years in Triple-A San Francisco, 1932-1935, hitting over 300 three times, including 398 in 1935, and hit 74 home runs in those four seasons. Tremendous prospect!
The Yankees introduced him to baseball’s high society on May 5, 1936, and he retired at the end of the 1951 season.
“Major League Baseball and the Yankees were something very different in my life,” DiMaggio commented, “so that environment led me to love baseball and my team, to the point of publicly thanking God for allowing me to wear that uniform.”
Vince and Dom also played in the Major Leagues
Vince DiMaggio, also an outfielder, also played in the Majors, with five teams, 1937-1946, for 10 years.
Another DiMaggio outfielder was Dom, three years younger than Joe. He played for the Red Sox from 1940 to 1953, but spent three years in World War II, 1943-’44-’45.
By the way, Joe also stayed out of the Yankees those years, for the same reason.
The first notable record for straight games with hits had been 33, by George Davis (Giants) 1893. It was surpassed with 42, by Bill Dahlen (Cubs), in 1894.
The mark lasted for three years, because in 1897, Willie Keeler (Baltimore Orioles), surpassed it with hits in 44 consecutive games. So no one came close, until DiMaggio (56) and Pete Rose (44).
Unhappy in his two marriages
Joe DiMaggio loved movie actresses. He first married Doroty Arnold and then Marilyn Monre. In both marriages he was very unhappy.
Possibly Joe’s greatest happiness was hitting at Yankee Stadium. Or maybe baseball people argued, since his retirement, that he was the best player in history.
He never cared that a legion would fit Willie Mays, Roberto Clemente, Mickey Mantle and Babe Ruth with that label. The problem is that there is no such thing as a stable peloterometer.
A TIP
King of the hit Joe DiMaggio, the eighth of nine sons of the Italian fisherman, had hits in 61 straight games while playing triple-A in 1933.
different player. Phil Rizzuto said of Joe: “He has a very special aura. He walks differently and everything is born very easily”.
