Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio, the “Yankee Clipper” who carried his celebrity with the same amazing grace and skill that made him one of America’s greatest baseball players, died Monday at his home in Hollywood, Fla., of complications following lung cancer surgery.
He was 84.
DiMaggio, who had been in failing health since undergoing the surgery in October, died shortly after midnight, said Morris Engelberg, his longtime friend and attorney. Friends and family members, including his brother Dominic, a former major league outfielder, and two grandchildren were at his bedside Sunday.
A funeral will be held Thursday in his native Northern California, with burial to follow in the San Francisco area.
Engelberg, his next-door neighbor, described DiMaggio as “the consummate gentleman on and off the field” and said he fought his illness “as hard as he played the game of baseball, and with the same dignity, style and grace with which he lived his life.”
Hospitalized for 99 days, DiMaggio battled several life-threatening lung infections following surgery. He lapsed into a coma at one point and was described as near death, but he rallied after a change in medication and gradually regained enough strength to leave the hospital in mid-January.
Two weeks later, NBC News mistakenly reported that he had died.
DiMaggio, the son of a Sicilian immigrant, “represented the hopes and ideals of our great country,” baseball Commissioner Bud Selig said in a statement.
“I never saw a player who was as graceful. There was an aura about him that was amazing. I idolized him. He’ll always be my all-time favorite,” Selig said.
The Hall of Fame flag in Cooperstown, N.Y., was lowered to half-staff, and a wreath was placed around DiMaggio’s plaque inside the Hall. The flags at Yankee Stadium, including one at Monument Park in left field where another plaque honors DiMaggio, were at half-staff as well.
DiMaggio was named baseball’s “greatest living player” as part of the professional game’s centennial celebration in 1969. More than almost any other American hero, DiMaggio was a central, uplifting character in the drama of the 20th Century. He was legendary long before television brought baseball and its standouts into every living room.
Ernest Hemingway wrote him into “The Old Man and the Sea,” having the old Cuban fisherman suggest he would like to take “the great DiMaggio” fishing some day. Songwriter Paul Simon revived his name again in the turbulent ’60s when he asked, “Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you,” in his song “Mrs. Robinson.”
DiMaggio was an old-fashioned hero, to be sure, a quiet, reserved man who was wary of strangers and uneasy with celebrity. He let his performance do most of his talking and kept to himself when he was not on the field.
If fabled Yankee Stadium was the “House that Ruth Built,” it was the stadium that DiMaggio helped fill, almost from the time he began playing for the Yankees in 1936, the year after Babe Ruth retired.
Ruth was skeptical of the long, tall Californian, whose minor-league pedigree included a 61-game hitting streak for the Pacific Coast League’s San Francisco Seals as an 18-year-old in 1933.
In spring training at St. Petersburg, Fla., in 1936, Ruth said DiMaggio “must first show something in the stadium. . . . They all look like a million dollars under a palm tree.”
DiMaggio quickly swept aside any doubt in his first year. He batted .323, hit 29 home runs and drove in 125 runs.
At 6 feet 2 inches and 195 pounds in his prime, he gobbled up huge chunks of Yankee Stadium’s center field with a long, graceful stride, never appearing hard-pressed to get to anything hit his way. His arm was like a rocket, making him easily the best center-fielder of his era.
His lifetime batting average was .325. And he was the antithesis of the free-swinging power hitter, striking out only 369 times while hitting 361 home runs in 6,821 career at-bats.
But neither figure was his trademark statistic. In 1941 DiMaggio had at least one hit in 56 consecutive games, a record that still stands and has never been seriously threatened. He batted .407 with 91 hits during the streak and struck out just six times.
That was also the season in which Ted Williams batted .406, but it was a measure of DiMaggio’s all-around skills that he was voted the American League Most Valuable Player over Williams on the strength of the streak, a .357 average and a league-best 125 RBIs for the pennant-winning Yankees.
DiMaggio was also voted MVP in 1939 and 1947. He was an All-Star in nine seasons and played for nine Yankee World Series winners. He was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1955.
That was enough statistical grist to fuel the baseball hero mills long after DiMaggio had shifted to selling Mr. Coffee coffee makers, devoting his time to raising money for the children’s hospital that bears his name and golfing with his buddies in Florida.
Carefully guarded, perfectly groomed and always well-spoken, he cultivated his image and protected his reputation until the day he died. He lavished affection on his four great-grandchildren and happily called them the joys of his life. He neither was impressed by his own fame nor swayed by the fame of others.
Five years ago, while DiMaggio was having lunch with friends at Chasen’s in Beverly Hills, he was spotted by former President Ronald Reagan and his wife, Nancy. The Reagans waved and DiMaggio waved back. But it was the Reagans who ultimately went to his table to visit, not DiMaggio to theirs.
He was one of the few public figures who remained as famous as his life approached its end as he had been when his career was at its peak before World War II. He made his money on commercials and promotions, but he always managed to control the boundaries he set around himself.
DiMaggio’s privacy, including the details of his nine-month marriage to Marilyn Monroe in 1954, would stay intact he said when he once was asked by an interviewer to talk about his life. Even the offer of a $3 million book advance could not turn his head.
Even after the divorce from Monroe, his friends said, he maintained a deep affection for the troubled actress. He handled the funeral arragements and made certain roses were delivered to her grave for 20 years after her suicide in 1962.
DiMaggio was married in 1939 to Dorothy Arnold, an actress. They had one son, Joe Jr. She sought a divorce in 1944. During World War II, DiMaggio was a sergeant in the Army Air Force and served as a physical instructor at Hamilton Field near San Francisco.
In an era in which celebrities crack and crumble in most public ways with depressing regularity, DiMaggio’s stability made him unusual. There was nothing fleeting about his fame, and nothing tentative about the way he used it. He was never touched by scandal and worked diligently to preserve the mystique that surrounded him from his earliest days in baseball.
DiMaggio was born Nov. 25, 1914, in Martinez, Calif. His father operated a fishing boat out of San Francisco and wanted his sons to follow him into a life at sea. But DiMaggio and his brothers, Vince and Dom, had little time for fishing because they spent so much time playing baseball after moving to San Francisco’s North Beach area when Joe was 1 year old.
Although their father viewed baseball as “a bum’s game,” all three brothers became professional players, at first with the hometown Seals.
A West Coast scout for the Yankees, Earl Essick, signed DiMaggio in 1934 to a contract that allowed him to play one more year with the Seals. His 61-game streak had attracted the attention of scouts from every major-league team, but a knee injury sustained in an auto accident hampered him enough that other teams lost interest.
Essick persuaded the Yankees to buy DiMaggio from the Seals for $25,000 and five players. The transaction is viewed as one of the greatest bargains in baseball history.
Although DiMaggio had played third base for the Seals, the Yankees put him in center field.
He was only 21 when he faced his first New York audience at Yankee Stadium in May 1936. DiMaggio hit two singles and a triple, remaining a star of the highest magnitude for the Yankees until he retired after one last graceful game at the end of the 1951 World Series.
Although DiMaggio followed in the footsteps of baseball standouts who were viewed as bigger than life–Ruth and the notorious Ty Cobb among them–at least a part of his strength was the sense of normalcy that seemed to surround his life on and off the field.
He was so skilled at the game that he made everything seem easy, whether it was catching or hitting 400-foot drives or making long throws to exactly the right spot to stop advancing base runners.
DiMaggio was so astute that he had studied the wind and weather conditions and how they affected hitting in Yankee Stadium, not a friendly place for right-handed batters like himself.
DiMaggio was plagued by a series of ailments that might have ended the career of a lesser athlete. He endured operations on his right arm for bone chips and more on his fragile knees. His physical problems, the most serious a chronically sore heel, became so acute late in his career that Yankee teammates shifted their positions in the outfield to cover for him, knowing he was probably only good for one long throw a game.
He believed he stayed in baseball one year too long, that he should have retired after the 1950 season.
“I told the Yankees I would be back in ’51,” he said. “I came to spring training and I knew it was a mistake. I hadn’t listened to my body. It was telling me that I was through.”
But DiMaggio didn’t just go away. He maintained his ties to the Yankees, an old-timers-day favorite, and started doing endorsements for Mr. Coffee and New York’s Bowery Bank, building on the small fortune he had amassed during his playing career.
He made millions from endorsements over the years, collecting a reported $9 million from Scoreboard, a memorabilia firm, for a two-year deal that involved signing bats that memorialized his 56-game hitting streak.
DiMaggio always had a soft spot for children, particularly children who were ill.
That interest expanded when he moved to Florida to find a climate more favorable for the arthritis that plagued him.
He has been connected with the children’s hospital in Hollywood, Fla., for years and been host of an annual baseball legends game to raise money. When he was in better health, he visited the hospital at least once a month.
Visitors to his Florida apartment noted there was only one baseball picture on the wall, a team photo of the 1936 Yankees, his first major-league club.
And there was only one baseball to be seen, one that was autographed not by any of his contemporaries but by his great-granddaughter, Vanessa.
