Beyond DiMaggio: Italian Americans in Baseball (review)

While too often baseball books that purport to examine some aspect of baseball and culture end up treating the former more than the latter, Lawrence Baldassaro's Beyond DiMaggio: Italian Americans in Baseball avoids this trap. In fact, this book will interest ethnic studies scholars and baseball fans equally, Italian-American or otherwise. Baldassaro not only delivers a comprehensive history of Italian-American baseball players but also achieves his goal of historicizing these men in the rich cultural context of their ethnicity, beginning with Ed Abbaticchio and finishing with managers, front office executives, team owners, and one very famous commissioner. The organization of the book itself reflects the initial obstacles, the various prejudices, the steady progress, eventual assimilation, and ultimate success of Italian Americans in America's National Pastime as it reflects the larger culture.

Although Abbaticchio is often credited as the first Italian-American major leaguer, Baldassaro notes that it is difficult to tell since many Italian Americans, voluntarily or involuntarily, underwent name changes upon arriving as immigrants. Abbaticchio, however, was not the typical immigrant; his father had arrived in the United States in 1875, prior to the largest waves of Italians, and became a successful businessman, first owning a string of barbershops and then a tavern and a hotel. The first-generation son, then, did not enter the game from immigrant privation but with a college degree and experience as a professional athlete with an early pro football team in his native Latrobe. Despite Abbaticchio's middle-class pedigree and respectable play on the field, his Italian surname caused some consternation in baseball. Sportswriters cavalierly misspelled it, and he was quickly dubbed "Abby" or "Batty." Though not maliciously prejudiced, such responses, as Baldassaro notes, indicate that baseball was not ready to grant an Italian full enfranchisement in a game dominated by the then more assimilated Irish and Germans.

Without the class status of Abbaticchio, those Italians following him faced, if not the historically shameful struggle of black and Latin players, an experience in which perceptions of them as less than fully American were always in play. Such was the case with the most recognizable Italian-American player of the 1910s and 1920s: Francesco Pezzolo-or, as most fans knew him, Ping Bodie-a good bat and solid outfielder for the White Sox and Yankees. Pezzolo's transformation to Bodie, as Baldassaro suggests, indicates both a desire to assimilate and a fear of provoking a less than welcoming response. For parents of aspiring players like Pezzolo, baseball initially appeared to be not only a childish pursuit but a threat to remove sons from close-knit Italian families, often gathered in isolated and insular enclaves, fearful of the suspicions and prejudices of established groups that constituted the American mainstream. Though fear quickly subsided when parents saw how lucrative the game could be, Baldassaro effectively conveys why ambivalence might be more pronounced in an ethnic group that by 1920 was subject to restrictive federal immigration laws.

With quotas in place, few sons of Italian immigrants entered the game in the 1920s, though the decade saw the emergence of the game's first star of Italian descent: Tony Lazzeri. Lazzeri's success was twofold, likely inspiring younger Italian Americans to take up the game, while giving all of them a reason to embrace baseball-as is evident in coverage of the Yankee slugger's exploits in Il Progresso, the leading Italian-language newspaper of the time. Lazzeri proved the precursor to the large number of Italian Americans entering the game in the 1930s. Baldassaro counts over fifty, including stars such as the DiMaggio brothers and Ernie Lombardi. While the press, on the one hand, seemed to welcome these players, as they arrived en masse they were often constructed in stereotypes as invading Roman legions, just as Tony Lazzeri had earlier been dubbed "The Walloping Wop" and depicted as drawing strength from ingesting large quantities of spaghetti. Such rhetoric seems outrageous by today's politically correct standards, and...