Diaries echo DiMaggio's shyness

NEW YORK -- The diary entry is obscure. It befits the famously guarded personality of Joltin' Joe DiMaggio, and bears only tantalizing hints about his life as a baseball hero and husband of Marilyn Monroe.

April 28, 1989: "Up at 5 a.m. ... Book people felt me out with questions pertaining to baseball. Some part of my private life but not too strong on that. Will not reveal anything in a negative way towards Marilyn -- only books that have come out on her might have not been truthful."

The entry is part of a 2,000-page, 29-volume collection of the New York Yankees icon's diaries, meticulously handwritten between 1982 and 1993, which are now being offered for sale in an online auction. The pages, in plastic protective sheets, are contained in thick, black loose-leaf binders that were kept stacked in the closet of DiMaggio's lawyer.

Other diary entries are also clipped and businesslike. DiMaggio was known for keeping his emotions to himself.

"I really liked Joe. I know he was shy. But I got to know him better after we got out of baseball," said Hall of Famer Whitey Ford.

Ford was just 11 when his parents took him to the Yankee Stadium bleacher seats in the 1930s.

In the 1950s, Ford was brought up from the farm league to pitch for the Yankees. He had his first game on July 1, 1950, at Boston's Fenway Park.

"I got on the mound and I looked out at center field and I couldn't get over that this man I idolized was the center fielder," Ford said.

The diaries reflect the demands on the Yankee Clipper and some of the pressures of his 56-game hitting streak.

"If I thought this would be taking place," Joe DiMaggio laments in a diary entry about the public relations frenzy, "I would have stopped the hitting streak at 40."

"Traveling getting to be damn much," he wrote in 1987. Noted another entry: "Plane food should be fed to pigs."

But there was plenty of pomp and circumstance, including a White House dinner hosted by President Reagan for Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

"After dinner, proceeded to another room to hear Van Cliburn play. Mrs. Gorbachev requested a song that Cliburn played and Mrs. Gorbachev sang along," wrote DiMaggio.

"Had to buy a new shirt because neck size down to 15 1/2."

On July 16, 1941, DiMaggio extended his hitting streak to 56 games as the Yankees beat the Cleveland Indians 10-3. The Hall of Fame center fielder, who played for the Yankees from 1936 to 1951, died in 1999.

The bidding on the diaries is to begin at $1.5 million; the auction, by Steiner Sports Marketing, closes July 25.