Sports painting of baseball great Joe DiMaggio of the New York Yankees Portrait
Baseball Art: Joe DiMaggio Painting Portrait
Baseball painting portrait of Joe DiMaggio is 50" x 70" acrylic on unstretched canvas by sports artist John Robertson
As a boy and like so many others I thought Joe DiMaggio was the baseball player to
follow and worship. We did not have a
major league team in Los Angeles
at the time so the Yankees were the team we followed. (What? No TV?
Nope. Not then. This was
1948-1951) Joe was nicknamed "Joltin' Joe" and "The Yankee
Clipper" and was what we all wanted to grow up to be - American Major
League Baseball center fielder for the Yankees.
Dreams. Boyhood dreams.
Kevin Costner about Joe DiMaggio
Even adults thought that Joe DiMaggio was something
special. Kevin Costner, who made that
great baseball movie, “Field of Dreams” said about Joe DiMaggio, “There are
certain people’s names that are reminders of what men can be like. To this day,
when I hear the name Joe DiMaggio, it is so much more than a man’s name. It
reminds me to play whatever game I’m in with more grace and pride and
dignity…He is a man who speaks to us about how to walk through life and how to
receive the admiration only the famous can know…and about how to wear defeat
and disappointment as if it were just a passing storm. Men like Joe DiMaggio
are not just of their own time. They are men for the ages.”
I remember in 1952 collecting Topps Baseball Cards – buying
packs and packs of gum to get that Topps, Joe DiMaggio 1952 card. So I gathered
about one-hundred-and-seventy-five cards before discovering that he retired
before the production of the 1952 cards were printed. (I still have the 1952
Topps cards I collected as a boy. And no
they are not in good condition. Who knew
then. I glued the cards into a paper
scrapbook so on the back of the cards there are these great hunks of Elmer’s
Rubber Cement and bits of paper attached to the cards.)
For me this is where Joe DiMaggio went
I continued to follow the Yankees until the Brooklyn Dodgers
moved to Los Angeles
for the 1958 season and my allegiance changed.
But, to me, baseball was never the same with DiMaggio gone from the
game. I really didn’t have much thought
about DiMaggio being gone or what it might have meant to me until 1967. The was the year one of my favorite movies came
out, “The Graduate” a coming of age
movie about a college graduate entwined in the process of adulthood, the loss
of innocence, manhood, etc. And in the
movie soundtrack is one of the great Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel songs, “Mrs Robinson.” The classic lines in the lyrics:
”Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?
A nation turns its lonely eyes to you, wo wo wo
What’s that you say, Mrs. Robinson
‘Joltin Joe’ has left and gone away, hey hey hey
Hey hey hey”
At that time I kicked and fought not to be an adult. I had dropped out of high school - did my
stint in the Navy, tried college a
number of times and struggled to find
direction. Somehow the movie helped. I was not alone but “Joltin Joe’ (had) left
and gone away.”
Joe" DiMaggio November 25, 1914 – March 8, 1999) played
his entire 13-year career for the New York Yankees. He is perhaps best known
for his 56-game hitting streak (May 15 – July 16, 1941), a record that still
stands. DiMaggio was a three-time MVP
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. At the time of his
retirement, he ranked fifth in career home runs (361) and sixth in career
slugging percentage (.579). 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
the baseball centennial year of 1969. ---- From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Quotes about Joe DiMaggio
This is what a couple of other great baseball players said
of Joe DiMaggio:
(Joe) DiMaggio was the greatest all-around player I ever
saw. His career cannot be summed up in numbers and awards. It might sound
corny, but he had a profound and lasting impact on the country." - Ted
Williams
"Heroes are people who are all good with no bad in
them. That's the way I always saw Joe DiMaggio. He was beyond question one of
the greatest players of the century." - Mickey Mantle
