Joe DiMaggio’s fifty-six-game hitting streak remains the most unbreakable record in American sports, and the pursuit of perfection that produced it consumed everything else in his life. He was graceful on the field and miserable off it — a private, controlling man whose marriage to Marilyn Monroe became a public catastrophe and whose obsession with dignity made him one of the loneliest figures in baseball history.

This episode traces DiMaggio from his San Francisco fisherman’s family through the Yankee dynasty, the hitting streak, the Monroe marriage, and the decades of reclusive silence that followed retirement.

• DiMaggio’s Italian immigrant family and the San Francisco sandlots that produced a natural hitter
• The fifty-six-game hitting streak and why it will almost certainly never be broken
• The marriage to Marilyn Monroe, the jealousy, the divorce, and the roses he sent to her grave for decades
• The reclusive post-retirement years and DiMaggio’s obsessive control of his own legacy