Hello everybody and welcome back to a blog about a baseball player. I feel like I’ve been able to do one seemingly every year,  which I’m not complaining about. This time it’s about Joe DiMaggio, as I answer our class’ driving question “What makes an event significant?”

If you don’t know who Joe DiMaggio was, he played Major League Baseball (MLB) from 1936-1951. He was an outfielder known for great defence and great contact at the plate. He played for the New York Yankees over his entire career. He holds the MLB record for longest hit streak at 56, which he set in 1941. He was a 3 time American League MVP winner in 1939, 1941, and 1947. Joe was also a member of the US Air Force from 1943-1945 during World War II.

So this project came from our unit about significance, which was named “We Didn’t Start the Fire” as inspired by the song from Billy Joel. The task was to take someone or something from the lyrics of this song and make a presentation about why it is significant. If you don’t know the song, the lyrics are basically a list of different things or people that Billy Joel deemed to be important or significant from his lifetime. Once we had our topic, we had to make a presentation no more than 5 minutes in length describing their significance. Accompanying this presentation would be an artifact in any form that also portrayed the significance of our chosen topic. Here’s the song if you still don’t know what I’m talking about:

As a big baseball fan and student of the game, I was immediately drawn to 4 different topics in the song. Those being Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle, California Baseball, and Brooklyn’s Got a Winning Team. I was originally interested in the idea of California baseball because I thought it would be interesting to talk about the move out west in sports, and how this changed baseball and other leagues. I also kind of wanted to talk about how the LA Dodgers and San Francisco Giants should really be the other way round based off of team names (Dodgers comes from dodging street cars, Giants come from a big city). After more thought however, I decided upon Joe DiMaggio. I felt he had an easier history to explain to people who don’t know baseball as well as I do. It also gave me a good reason to talk about the physics of hitting a baseball since it was something he was so good at.

Having select Joe as my topic, the next step was to define my driving question. Given that some of the other options within the song are heavyweight topics such as “children of thalidomide”, “H-bomb”, “birth control”, “vaccines” and many significant 20th century politicians, I knew I faced a battle to defend why Joe DiMaggio should be considered on par. I also knew I would need to try and reign in my overriding passion and geekiness about baseball, in order to communicate in my presentation why Joe DiMaggio mattered. This meant that I needed to focus my research to avoid getting off topic and too far down a baseball rabbit-hole. After a few revisions my driving question was “How did Joe DiMaggio and the sport of baseball connect Americans during WWII and the post war period.”

Joe DiMaggio at the Batting Cages during Spring Training

So what was it that made Joe DiMaggio so significant? Well, he was a true heart-and-soul player that earned respect from everyone around America despite being a New York Yankee (a somewhat hated team by other fan bases). Going into the 1943 MLB season he didn’t have a contract and he was holding out to try and get the sum of money he deserved. Eventually the Yankees offered him a contract that would total $43,750 over the course of the season. That approximates to about $650,000 today. However, instead of taking that and having a normal dominant year of baseball, he decided to turn down the contract and join the US Army. His intentions were to be like everyone else and receive no special treatment. He wanted to go to the fronts and fight for his country side by side with other Americans. However the United States didn’t see it like that. During his time with the Air Force, he spent most of his time playing baseball. He played for the baseball of each branch he represented which ended up being the Santa Ana Baseball team, the 7th Air Force Division Baseball team, and of course the Armed Forces all-stars who were managed by Babe Ruth.

7th Army Air Force Baseball Team. DiMaggio front row, 6th from the left

The time DiMaggio spent as a soldier and an American patriot really boosted his popularity around the country. He was seen as a great ball player and an American hero. He was never drafted yet he denied his contract to serve his country. His service during the war showed a high level of patriotism and solidified the connection between American patriotism and baseball. In fact, it was during WWII that MLB began playing the national anthem prior to every game, a tradition that continues to this other. Another more recent example is the role of baseball in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. The entire country was in a huge state of shock and mourning and all sports were shut down temporarily. The first league to resume games was the MLB, with the US President George Bush coming to Yankee Stadium to throw out the ceremonial first pitch. At this time, all teams began playing the song God Bless America during the seventh inning stretch in a display of American patriotism.

Now for the other thing that made Joe DiMaggio so famous and well known to this day. That would be his record hit streak. For those of you who don’t play or have never played baseball, it can be hard to put into perspective how ridiculous his streak is. DiMaggio hit safely in 56 consecutive games. Now I’m not going to describe too much of why it is so hard to do such a thing here, as I’ll just let you watch my video. This was of course my artifact for the presentation.

As you can see in my video, I took a few friends of mine down to the local batting cage to see what sort of speeds they could hit. I set the mound to be 37 feet away from the plate, I did this so that I didn’t have to throw as hard, and also because of space constraints. Before filming I practiced with a radar gun to figure out what kind of speeds I would need to be throwing. Once a batter was in the cage, I felt it was too dangerous to have someone behind him with the radar gun, so I used math to figure out the speeds of each pitch. Since my Go Pro was recording at 60fps I could use that to figure out how much time had passed from when the ball left my hand to when it either reached the plate or was hit. It took a long time to go through every single pitch and plug the times into my calculator but it was worth it to see a couple of my friends hit some of the higher speed pitches.

I chose the option of doing a video instead of a podcast or other alternatives, because I felt it was the strongest way I’d be able to communicate my points. Slowing down a baseball pitch and looking at the amount of time you have to do certain things, is something you can only really do by seeing it. If I had just been talking at hadn’t shown you where the ball was at each stoppage, it wouldn’t seem nearly as impressive. On reflection my video probably ended up being a little too focused on the hitting science and didn’t include enough about Joe DiMaggio himself. In my presentation I feel I did a reasonable job of communicating his significance beyond the baseball field, however if you just watch the video that point is lost.

This was an interesting unit for me to reflect on my learning style. I was extremely excited by the kick-off of this project as I always do my best work when the topic is in my wheelhouse (yep – that’s a baseball term). This gave me an opportunity to do lots of research into a vastly famous MLB player, study the science of hitting and have some practical fun filming the video. I also feel I learned a lot about what significance actually is, and why it’s different from importance. Lastly I learned a lot about how America chooses who to remember, whether it be through significance or something else. History can take on many points of view as it’s a story. Yet the way sports and specifically baseball is remembered is typically through stats. While this provides solid proof of someones ability it doesn’t capture the story of who they are or what they meant to the game. There are only a few players whose stories endure as a part of their legacy. I’ve always found the extreme amount of statistics in baseball to be super interesting, but I’m glad this project enabled me to research more about my favourite sport’s history and the story of one of it’s most significant players.