Consider the first generation of Italian-American baseball stars:
| Name | Birthplace | Minor League | Years in Majors |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tony Lazzeri | San Francisco | Pacific Coast League | 1926-1939 |
| Ernie Lombardi | Oakland | Pacific Coast League | 1931-1947 |
| Dolph Camilli | San Francisco | Pacific Coast League | 1933-1947 |
| Joe DiMaggio | Martinez, CA | Pacific Coast League | 1936-1951 |
Joe, of course, had two brothers who also played in the Majors: Vince, also born in Martinez, and Dom, born after the family moved to San Francisco. All played in the PCL.
The oddity is that, when the majority of Italian-Americans lived on the East Coast, the early ballplayers were all Bay Area boys. My wild-ass guess is that the Californians were more assimilated, and so played baseball rather than traditional Italian sports.
Obligatory anecdote about Papa DiMaggio’s gradual realization that baseball can be a lucrative career:
1928: “Vince, why are you always out playing this baseball, when you should be helping me with the boat?”
1930: “Joe, why are you always out playing baseball, when you should be doing your schoolwork?”
1933: “Dom, why are you always reading books, when you should be outside playing ball?”
Interesting. I suspect there’s a fair amount of truth to your theory- presumably Italian (and other European?) immigrants on the West Coast were less concentrated and fewer than Italian immigrants on the East Coast. As a result, on the East Coast, first generation Italian immigrants largely wound up in neighborhoods and towns that were populated by other Italians and European immigrants. Combined with the fact that baseball was basically unheard of outside the US at the time, the lack of any form of live media, and relatively little non-English language media, it’s quite likely that the child of a European immigrant on the East Coast, densely populated as it was by comparison, would have had little opportunity to come into contact with baseball.
One thing that struck me particularly hard this morning while driving through a small town near my house to pick up my Xmas goose was that the same towns and neighborhoods that were built by European immigrants are still basically immigrant towns – a rapidly diminishing cluster of third and fourth generation children of the original immigrants (many of whom operate Old World oriented businesses that have been around forever) who are being replaced with new immigrants from Central America, the Philippines, and India. No politics.
There’s a great line from the TV series Wiseguy, where Vinny is reflecting on the changes in his neighborhood in Brooklyn. I can’t find it online, but it goes something like:
“Chun Lee’s laundry? That used to be Mr. DiMarco’s butcher shop. And the Lasagne House where the old paisanos used to hang out, now it’s a chop suey joint. That’s not right. Hell, but it’s not wrong either. They’re just trying to make it through the day, same as everybody else.”
Pretty much. I should mention that I thought the transition this particular town is going through is pretty cool on the whole. Even if it does mean that the butcher shop I was going to won’t be around any longer than the current proprietor lives, if it lasts that long. But again, no politics.
IIRC (not from personal experience, obviously) San Francisco began celebrating rather than shunning its Italian-American population at least half a generation before East Coast cities did. Maybe that’s because SF is a younger city, with a less entrenched social elite, than places like New York and Boston and Philly. Seems like it to take the Chinese a little longer to gain entrée.
FTR this topic doesn’t feel like politics to me. It feels like history.