WWW- Though the general public is now fully privy to Tom Cruise’s penchant for bizarre behavior, the late baseball great Joe DiMaggio may have been one of the first to know.

A report this morning suggests that the actor followed Joltin’ Joe all over the place, spooking him and nearly prompting him to call the cops.

In the mid-’90s, when Cruise had already ascended to the top of the Tinseltown heap, he would, according to a source cited by Rush & Molloy, show up unbidden at baseball-signing shows and wait for DiMaggio to appear, and even waited outside a restaurant for him once for three hours. But the famous Yankee – once married to Marilyn Monroe – wasn’t impressed, and instead, according to the source, referred to Cruise as “a short little guy” who scared him a little. “This guy is following me around everywhere I go,” said DiMaggio to R&M’s source. “Next time, I’m going to call the cops.”

Cruise’s reps didn’t respond to the story, and it’s perfectly possible that Tom was trying to get DiMaggio’s story made into a film: The “Mission: Impossible” star and father of Suri has been known to go to great lengths to get projects made, like showing up on a motorcycle in the middle of the night at director JJ Abrams’ house to convince him to direct “M:I-3.”