Joe DiMaggio and the Last Magic Number in Sports
Nearly 75 baseball seasons ago, on a May afternoon at Yankee Stadium, Joe DiMaggio lined a hard single to left field. It was the quiet beginning to the most resonant baseball achievement of all time. Starting that day, the vaunted Yankee center fielder kept on hitting—at least one hit in game after game after game, 56 straight.
Kostya Kennedy of Sports Illustrated returns to the Club to talk about 56: Joe DiMaggio and the Last Magic Number in Sports, his acclaimed book on the baseball great and America in 1941. In this crisp, evocative narrative, Joe DiMaggio emerges in a previously unseen light, a 26-year-old on the cusp of becoming an icon.
Alongside the story of DiMaggio’s dramatic quest, Kennedy examines the peculiar nature of hitting streaks and with an incisive, modern-day perspective, gets inside the number itself as its sheer improbability heightens both the math and the magic of 56 games in a row.
Kostya earned an M.S. from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, from which he received a Pulitzer Fellowship. He has taught in the graduate program at Columbia and is currently a Visiting Professor at N.Y.U.’s Tisch Institute for Sports Management, Media and Business.
Host: Patricia Tobin
Registration: 6:00PM
Wine Reception: 6:30PM
Lecture: 7:00PM
Cost: Free for members, $15 for guests
Fees for this event will be billed to the member’s account.
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