Join Tom Shieber, Senior Curator at the National Baseball Hall of Fame, and UWM Professor Emeritus Lawrence Baldassaro, author of Beyond DiMaggio and Baseball Italian Style, for a virtual conversation via Zoom hosted by Boswell Book Company about his major new baseball biography on Thursday, April 15 at 7:00 p.m.

Before there was Joe DiMaggio, there was Tony Lazzeri, the first major baseball star of Italian descent. Lazzeri paved the way for DiMaggio and so many other Italian American fans and players by forging his own Hall of Fame career as a key member of the Yankees’ legendary Murderers’ Row lineup between 1926 and 1937. An unwitting pioneer who played his entire career while afflicted with epilepsy, Lazzeri was the first player to hit sixty home runs in organized baseball and the first Italian player with enough star power to attract a whole new generation of fans to the ballpark.

Register for this event here!

Lawrence Baldassaro is a professor emeritus of Italian at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. He is the author of Beyond DiMaggio: Italian Americans in Baseball (Nebraska, 2011), Baseball Italian Style: Great Stories Told by Italian American Major Leaguers from Crosetti to Piazza and The Ted Williams Reader. His new book, Tony Lazzeri: Yankees Legend and Baseball Pioneer (Nebraska, 2021), was published this month. Tom Shieber is Senior Curator at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. He has served as lead curator for exhibits at the Cooperstown museum, including “Moe Berg: Big League Spy,” “One for the Books: Baseball Records and the Stories behind Them,” and “Babe Ruth: His Life and Legend.” Shieber served the Society for American Baseball Research board of directors and founded and chaired SABR’s Pictorial History Committee.