The grandson of Italian immigrants, Lawrence Baldassaro grew up in Chicopee, Massachusetts, where he played high school, American Legion, and semi-pro baseball. He is a professor emeritus of Italian and former director of the Honors College at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee.

He is the author of Beyond DiMaggio: Italian Americans in Baseball, Baseball Italian Style: Great Stories Told by Italian American Major Leaguers from Crosetti to Piazza, and Tony Lazzeri: Yankees Legend and Baseball Pioneer. The Lazzeri bio earned a 2022 SABR Baseball Research Award for “outstanding research projects that have significantly expanded our knowledge or understanding of baseball.”

He is also the editor of Ted Williams: Reflections on a Splendid Life, The Ted Williams Reader,  and co-editor of The American Game: Baseball and Ethnicity. His work has appeared in numerous publications including NINE, Elysian Fields Quarterly, and Twentieth Century American Sportswriters. He has been a contributing writer for the Milwaukee Brewers magazine since 1990.

Baldassaro has given talks on Italian Americans in baseball at the University of Minnesota Immigration History Research Center, the NINE Spring Training Conference, the International Conference on Baseball at Arizona State University, and the annual meetings of the Society for American Baseball Research and the American Italian Historical Association.  In November 2005, he was an invited speaker at the Hall of Fame’s “Celebration of Italian Americans in Baseball,” and in March 2006, he was invited by Major League Baseball to serve as the interpreter for Team Italy at the inaugural World Baseball Classic.   

In addition to writing about baseball, he has published essays on Italian literature, film and politics in American and Italian journals and served on the Executive Council of the Dante Society of America. In 1991, he directed an oral history of Italian Americans in Milwaukee, WI.