 I tend to rise early, yet I'm not really a morning person. My first act is to brew a pot of coffee. As it brews, I use the time to contemplate. For years now, every morning, staring at my coffee pot, I've contemplated one thing. Why do I have a drip coffee maker when my parents had only a percolator, a vastly inferior way to make coffee? This started me on a quest for an answer. After much work, I now have the answer. Baseball. I will explain, but first a bit of history about coffee making. Today's machines are automatic drip coffee makers. This is the best way to make coffee, but until now it's been too demanding to do well. You start with water that is exactly 12 degrees below boiling, then pour it slowly over ground coffee beans encased in a filter. Usually the filter was cloth which contaminated the coffee and less cleaned every day. This was too much for most people, so home coffee making was dominated by the percolator. The percolator had the virtue of being automatic, but the negative was terrible coffee, often described by coffee lovers as sludge. We all love hearing the perk of a percolator, but it's actually a bad thing. The perk comes from the boiling water which is too hot for making good coffee. Each time the water perks through the grounds, the coffee becomes more bitter. A taste so bitter that the percolator drove coffee sales to an all-time low by the mid-1960s. In that decade, the Bun Company of Springfield, Illinois perfected an automatic drip coffee maker for restaurants. They replaced the cloth filter with a disposable paper one, and they perfected a way to boil the water and cool it slightly before dripping it slowly through the coffee beans. This restaurant model made five pots at once, but it opened the door to making a home version. In 1972, Vincent Morata of Cleveland, Ohio designed the Mr. Coffee Machine, the first home drip coffee maker. The key to its success was baseball. Morata felt he needed a big name to turn generations of percolator users onto drip coffee makers. Morata, who'd played with the St. Louis Cardinals, turned to his hero, Joe DiMaggio, the pride of the Yankees. Now, at this time, DiMaggio wasn't just an ordinary sports figure. He was a legend with a bit of mystery due to his brief marriage with Marilyn Monroe. Morata somehow got DiMaggio's unlisted phone number in San Francisco and called one Saturday morning. DiMaggio answered. After Morata pitched his ad campaign, DiMaggio told him he'd just won a Mr. Coffee Machine in a golf tournament and said his sister is making coffee with it right now. Yet the ex-baseball star wasn't interested in being in a commercial, saying, I don't do that kind of work. The next day, Morata and his wife flew to San Francisco, where Morata called DiMaggio again and invited him to lunch. DiMaggio agreed. During lunch, Joe DiMaggio's expression barely changed. Yet when they shook hands after the meal, he agreed to make the commercials. And these commercials, with the integrity of Joe DiMaggio behind them, put Mr. Coffee on the map and coffee makers into nearly every American home.