DiMaggio was a three-time Most Valuable Player Award winner and an All-Star in each of his 13 seasons. During his tenure with the Yankees, the club won ten American League pennants and nine World Series championships. His nine career World Series rings is second only to fellow Yankee Yogi Berra, who won ten.

He was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1955 and was voted the sport’s greatest living player in a poll taken during baseball’s centennial year of 1969. His brothers Vince (1912–1986) and Dom (1917–2009) also were major league center fielders. DiMaggio is widely known for his marriage and lifelong devotion to Marilyn Monroe.

Joseph Paul DiMaggio was born on November 25, 1914, in Martinez, California, the sixth of seven children born to Italian immigrants Giuseppe (1872–1949) and Rosalia (née Lucido; 1878–1951) DiMaggio, from Isola delle Femmine, Sicily. He was named Paolo after his father Giuseppe’s favorite saint, Saint Paul.

Giuseppe was a fisherman, as were generations of DiMaggios before him. According to statements from Joe’s brother Tom to biographer Maury Allen, Rosalia’s father wrote to her with the advice that Giuseppe could earn a better living in California than in their native Isola delle Femmine, a northwestern Sicilian village in the province of Palermo.

After being processed on Ellis Island, Giuseppe worked his way across America, eventually settling near Rosalia’s father in Pittsburg, California, on the east side of the San Francisco Bay Area. After four years, he earned enough money to send to Italy for Rosalia and their daughter, who was born after he had left for the United States.

DiMaggio was playing semi-pro ball when older brother Vince, playing for the San Francisco Seals of the Pacific Coast League (PCL), talked his manager into letting DiMaggio fill in at shortstop. Joe DiMaggio made his professional debut on October 1, 1932. From May 27 to July 25, 1933, he hit safely in 61 consecutive games, a PCL-record, and second-longest in all of Minor League Baseball history.

DiMaggio made his major league debut on May 3, 1936, batting ahead of Lou Gehrig in the lineup. The Yankees had not been to the World Series since 1932, but they won the next four Fall Classics.

In 1939 DiMaggio was nicknamed the “Yankee Clipper” by Yankee’s stadium announcer Arch McDonald, when he likened DiMaggio’s speed and range in the outfield to the then-new Pan American airliner.

In the September 1949 issue of SPORT, Hank Greenberg said that DiMaggio covered so much ground in center field that the only way to get a hit against the Yankees was “to hit ’em where Joe wasn’t.” DiMaggio also stole home five times in his career.

DiMaggio holds the record for most seasons with more home runs than strikeouts (minimum 20 home runs), a feat he accomplished seven times, and five times consecutively from 1937 to 1941. DiMaggio could have possibly exceeded 500 home runs and 2,000 RBIs had he not served in the military during World War II, causing him to miss the 1943, 1944, and 1945 seasons.

DiMaggio might have had better power-hitting statistics had his home park not been Yankee Stadium. As “The House That Ruth Built”, its nearby right field favored the Babe’s left-handed power. For right-handed hitters, its deep left and center fields made home runs almost impossible. Mickey Mantle recalled that he and Whitey Ford witnessed many DiMaggio blasts that would have been home runs anywhere other than Yankee Stadium (Ruth himself fell victim to that problem, as he also hit many long flyouts to center). Bill James calculated that DiMaggio lost more home runs due to his home park than any other player in history. Left-center field went as far back as 457 ft [139 m], where left-center rarely reaches 380 ft [116 m] in today’s ballparks. Al Gionfriddo’s famous catch in the 1947 World Series, which was close to the 415-foot mark [126 m] in left-center, would have been a home run in the Yankees’ current ballpark. DiMaggio hit 148 home runs in 3,360 at-bats at home versus 213 home runs in 3,461 at-bats on the road. His slugging percentage at home was .546, and on the road, it was .610.

For example, Joe DiMaggio was acutely handicapped by playing at Yankee Stadium. Every time he batted in his home field during his entire career, he did so knowing that it was physically impossible for him to hit a home run to the half of the field directly in front of him. If you look at a baseball field from foul line to foul line, it has a 90-degree radius. From the power alley in left-center field (430 in Joe’s time) to the fence in deep right center field (407 ft), it is 45-degrees. And Joe DiMaggio never hit a single home run over the fences at Yankee Stadium in that 45-degree graveyard. It was just too far. Joe was plenty strong; he routinely hit balls in the 425-foot range. But that just wasn’t good enough in cavernous Yankee Stadium. Like Ruth, he benefited from a few easy homers each season due to the short foul line distances. But he lost many more than he gained by constantly hitting long fly outs toward center field. Whereas most sluggers perform better on their home fields, DiMaggio hit only 41 percent of his career home runs in the Bronx. He hit 148 homers at Yankee Stadium. If he had hit the same exact pattern of batted balls with a typical modern stadium as his home, he would have belted about 225 homers during his home field career.

DiMaggio’s most famous achievement is his MLB record-breaking 56-game hitting streak in 1941. The streak began on May 15, a couple of weeks before the death of Lou Gehrig—who had been DiMaggio’s teammate from 1936 to 1939—when DiMaggio went one-for-four against Chicago White Sox pitcher Eddie Smith. Major newspapers began to write about DiMaggio’s streak early on, but as he approached George Sisler’s modern era record of 41 games, it became a national phenomenon. Initially, DiMaggio showed little interest in breaking Sisler’s record, saying “I’m not thinking a whole lot about it… I’ll either break it or I won’t.” As he approached Sisler’s record, DiMaggio showed more interest, saying, “At the start I didn’t think much about it… but naturally I’d like to get the record since I am this close.” On June 29, 1941, DiMaggio doubled in the first game of a doubleheader against the Washington Senators at Griffith Stadium to tie Sisler’s record and then singled in the nightcap to extend his streak to 42.

A Yankee Stadium crowd of 52,832 fans watched DiMaggio tie the all-time hitting streak record (44 games, Wee Willie Keeler in 1897) on July 1. The next day against the Boston Red Sox, he homered into Yankee Stadium’s left field stands to extend his streak to 45, setting a new record. On July 17 at Cleveland’s Municipal Stadium, DiMaggio’s streak was finally snapped at 56 games, thanks in part to two backhand stops by Indians third baseman Ken Keltner. The day after the streak ended, DiMaggio started another streak that lasted 16 games. The distinction of hitting safely in 72 of 73 games is worthy of mention. The closest anyone has come to equaling DiMaggio is Pete Rose, who hit safely in 44 straight games in 1978.

Some consider DiMaggio’s streak a uniquely outstanding and unbreakable record and a statistical near-impossibility. Nobel Prize-winning physicist and sabermetrician Edward Mills Purcell calculated that, to have the likelihood of a hitting streak of 50 games occurring in the history of baseball up to the late 1980s be greater than 50%, fifty-two .350 lifetime hitters would have to have existed instead of the actual three (Ty Cobb, Rogers Hornsby, and Shoeless Joe Jackson). His Harvard colleague Stephen Jay Gould, citing Purcell’s work, called DiMaggio’s 56-game achievement “the most extraordinary thing that ever happened in American sports”.

DiMaggio enlisted in the United States Army Air Forces on February 17, 1943, rising to the rank of sergeant.

Giuseppe and Rosalia DiMaggio, both from Isola delle Femmine, were among the thousands of German, Japanese, and Italian immigrants classified as “enemy aliens” by the government after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Each was required to carry photo ID booklets at all times and were not allowed to travel outside a five-mile radius from their home without a permit. Giuseppe was barred from San Francisco Bay, where he had fished for decades, and his boat was seized. Rosalia became an American citizen in 1945, followed by Giuseppe in 1946.

At his death, The New York Times called DiMaggio’s 1941 56-game hitting streak “perhaps the most enduring record in sports.”

In an article in 1976 in Esquire magazine, sportswriter Harry Stein published an “All Time All-Star Argument Starter,” consisting of five ethnic baseball teams. Joe DiMaggio was the center fielder on Stein’s Italian team.

On September 17, 1992, the doors were opened at Joe DiMaggio Children’s Hospital at Memorial Regional Hospital in Hollywood, Florida, for which he raised over $4 million.

The New York City West Side Highway was officially renamed The Joe DiMaggio Highway in his honor. The Yankees wore DiMaggio’s number 5 on the left sleeves of their uniforms for the 1999 season. He is ranked No. 11 on The Sporting News’ list of the 100 Greatest Baseball Players, and he was elected by fans to the Major League Baseball All-Century Team. In addition to his number 5 being retired by the New York Yankees, DiMaggio’s number was also retired by the Florida Marlins, who retired it in honor of their first team president, Carl Barger, who died five months before the team took the field for the first time in 1993. DiMaggio had been his favorite player. Joe DiMaggio’s number 5 was retired by the New York Yankees in 1952.

Joe’s cultural impact extended far beyond baseball, as witnessed by several works:

• “Joltin’ Joe Dimaggio” by Les Brown And His Orchestra
• “Mrs. Robinson” by Simon and Garfunkel (3:02)
• “The Old Man and the Sea” by Ernst Hemingway: Cliff notes discussion on Dimaggio’s meaning in the story.
• “We Didn’t Start the Fire” by Billy Joel (0:32)