A forgott Italian professor’s book remembers one Before Joe DiMaggio ever donned a Yankees uniform, Tony Lazzeri was swinging for the fences. A Hall of Famer and a gifted athlete, Lazzeri wore five World Series rings by the end of his career.
Baseball (2011). It was during his research for that book that he learned about Lazzeri’s achievements. Not only was Lazzeri an amazing player, Baldassaro found, but he was working against a medical handicap.
You’ve probably never heard of him. You might have heard of his teammates, though – baseball legends Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig.
“He was afflicted with epilepsy. Every day, he lived with the uncertainty of whether he might have a seizure,” Baldassaro explained.
Lawrence Baldassaro wasn’t familiar with Lazzeri either. “I knew he was in the Hall of Fame, and I knew he played for the Yankees, but I never had researched him in depth,” Baldassaro admitted. “When I realized what a major figure he was in his own time and what he accomplished, I thought, his story has to be told. This Lawrence Baldassaro is too important a figure not to have his achievements chronicled and put into historical perspective.”
Epilepsy may have contributed to his death; Lazzeri passed away at age 42 after a fall that may have been the result of a seizure. Whatever the cause, Lazzeri’s early death made Baldassaro’s writing process challenging. As he was researching, Baldassaro reached out to Lazzeri’s relatives and descendants, but there was no one left alive who actually knew Lazzeri himself.
So, Baldassaro did just that. His new book, Tony Lazzeri: Yankees Legend and Baseball Pioneer, was released in April by the University of Nebraska Press. The launch was hosted by Boswell Books, and featured a panel moderated by Tom Scheiber, the senior curator at the Baseball Hall of Fame. The writing challenge Baldassaro is an emeritus professor of Italian and the former director of the Honors College at UWM. He retired in 2008 after 36 years of service, and he still connects with the university as an instructor in the School of Continuing Education and as a donor who supports the Honors College. He’s also a baseball fan and loves Italian American history. He’s authored several books on the subject, including Beyond DiMaggio: Italian Americans in 4 • IN FOCUS • May, 2021
But they had the next best thing. “Lazzeri’s immigrant father, Agostino, kept scrapbooks of Lazzeri’s career starting from his first years in the minor leagues. (Lazzeri’s) grandson in Oregon invited me to go there and look through these scrapbooks,” Baldassaro said. He also relied on newspaper clippings from the era. He had to take them with a grain of salt – journalists of the time routinely embellished their stories, and Lazzeri was notoriously reluctant to grant interviews – but the papers revealed the ballplayer’s storied career. A forgotten legend Lazzeri was born on Dec. 6, 1903 to Italian immigrants living in San Francisco. At 18, he was signed to the Pacific Coast League, just a step beneath the majors, where he began setting records. In his final year with the Salt Lake City Bees, Lazzeri marked 222 RBIs and 60 homeruns, a feat that had never before been accomplished in the minor or major leagues, until Babe Ruth hit 60 in 1927.
