At both the plate and in the field, Joe DiMaggio was one of baseball's
most graceful athletes. During his thirteen seasons with the New York
Yankees, he played in ten World Series and won nine world championships.
For his career, he was a two-time batting champion, three-time Most
Valuable Player, hit 361 home runs, and maintained a .325 batting
average. His fifty-six-consecutive-game batting streak in 1941 has yet
to be broken.
DiMaggio's baseball career began in 1932 when he filled in at shortstop
at midseason for a minor league team. In 1934 he became the property of
the New York Yankees, which marked the beginning of his road toward
greatness in the nation's most famous city on one of the most hallowed
fields in the sport. Off the field, his life was marked by a famous
marriage to and divorce from Marilyn Monroe, a late-1960s popular song,
and a somewhat unhappy retirement.
On baseball's one hundredth anniversary in 1969, he was voted the
greatest living player of the game, and the Yankees erected a plaque to
him among the memorials to Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. On March 8, 1999,
at the age of eighty-four, DiMaggio died after a five-month battle with
cancer.
In I Remember Joe DiMaggio, dozens of the great ballplayer's
contemporaries, teammates, coaches, fans, friends, and relatives recall
their favorite memories and anecdotes of this man who became an icon of
America. It is a warm, entertaining, and inspiring book about a man
whose fame has been the stuff of legend for more than half a century.
