Beyond Joe Di Maggio: Italian American in Baseball, by Lawrence Baldassaro
Berra, Rizzuto, Lasorda, Torre, Conigliaro, Santo, Piazza. Casual baseball fans – in fact, even many nonfans – know these names, not as Italian Americans, but as some of the most colorful figures in Major League Baseball. Ever since future Hall of Famer Tony Lazzeri became a key part of the Yankee’ Murderers’ Row lineup of 1926, Italian Americans have been among the most prominent and intriguing players in the game.
The first comprehensive study of the topic, “Beyond DiMaggio” is also a social history of baseball, tracing the evolution of American perceptions toward those of Italian descent as it chronicles the baseball exploits that influenced those perceptions. Lawrence Baldassaro tells the stories of Italian Americans’ contributions to the game, from Joe DiMaggio, who transcended his ethnic identity to become an American icon, to Mike Piazza, considered the greatest hitting catcher ever.
Baldassaro conducted more than fifty interviews with players, coaches, managers, and executives – some with careers dating back to the thirties – in order to put all these figures and their stories into the historical context of baseball, Italian Americans, and, finally, the culture of American sports. Lawrence Baldassaro is a professor emeritus of Italian at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He is the author of numerous articles on baseball, coeditor of “The American Game: Baseball and Ethnicity”, and editor of Ted Williams: “Reflections on a Splendid Life”. Dom DiMaggio (1917 – 2009), the younger brother of Joe and Vince DiMaggio, played for the Boston Red Sox for his ten-year career.
Pre-publication praise for “Beyond DiMaggio: Italian Americans in Baseball”:
“People used to say the Yankees won a lot because we led the league in Italians. All I’ll say is there’s a real good history of Italians in baseball, and this book has excellent history.” – Yogi Berra
“Can the story of America, and the story of immigrants to America, in the last one hun- dred-plus years, be told through the story of Italian baseball players and Italian contributors to our so-called national pastime? Absolutely, as Lawrence Balda- ssaro demonstrates decidedly, informatively, and entertainingly in ‘Beyond DiMaggio.” – Ira Berkow, Pulitzer Prize – win- ning author of “The Summers in the Bronx: Attila the Hun and Other Yankee Stories”.
“Beyond DiMaggio is a major contribution to American sports history and, in a larger sense, cultural history.” – Judith Testa, author of Sal Maglie: Baseball’s Demon Barber.
More information can be obtained at: www.nebraskapress.unl.edu
Kenneth Scambray is the author of A Varied Harvest: The Life and Works of Henry Blake Fuller (U. of Pittsburgh P., 1987), and The North American Italian Renaissance: Italian Writing in America and Canada (Guernica, 2000), and Surface Roots: Stories (Guernica, 2004). His most recent book is entitled Queen Calafía’s Paradise: California and the Italian American Novel (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2007). He has been book critic for L’Italo-Americano since 1978. In 2007 he won the Editor’s Choice Award for the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Prize for his poem “Piece Work” awarded each year by the Paterson Literary Review. He is currently at work on a project on Italians in the West.
