Baseball fans continue to pay their respects to Lawrence Peter Berra, aka “Yogi,” the legendary Yankees catcher, big league manager and coach, and homespun philosopher, who died Tuesday at age 90. “What I really liked about him is that he was such a stand-up guy,” one mourner standing outside the Yogi Berra Museum and Learning Center in Little Falls, N.J. told the Wall Street Journal. “What a great, decent man that everybody loved.”
Yogi’s decency, the fundamental goodness of the man, is the thread that runs through virtually all of the obituaries and testimonies. From his World War II service in the Navy to his refusal to return to Yankee Stadium after George Steinbrenner fired him in 1985, what comes through is a certain solidity of character, like a peasant in a 19th-century Russian novel who can always be counted on to do the right thing—and can always be counted on to be surprised and hurt when the nobility, like Steinbrenner, doesn’t. It’s often forgotten that Yogi was there that night in the Copacabana when some of the Yanks—including Mickey Mantle, Whitey Ford, Hank Bauer and of course Billy Martin—took their wives to hear Sammy Davis, Jr. and got in a brawl with a bowling team. As far as I know, there’s no record of Yogi’s actions that May evening in 1957, but I’d bet he dropped one of those foul-mouthed louts. It would’ve been the right thing to do: You don’t speak that way in front of ladies, and definitely not Mrs. Yogi Berra.
Catchers are indeed baseball’s peasants. The work is backbreaking and ruins your knees, you spend much of your working day sprawled in the dirt, or cajoling the best out of some rookie southpaw like the dumb but useful and supremely beautiful beast he might someday become. Berra caught for 18 years during which he won 10 World Series rings, made 14 Series appearances, was named to 15 All-Star games, and won the MVP award three times. Berra had a career batting average of .285, and finished with 358 home runs and 1,430 RBIs. As a manager, he took the Yankees and the Mets to the World Series, and even after retiring as a coach continued to show up to Yankees’ spring training well into his 80s (Steinbrenner apologized in 1999 and Berra was happy to return to the Yankees family). “He’s a walking encyclopedia of the game,” said Ron Guidry, a former Yankees ace who at 65 followed Yogi by a generation, and later became a close friend of Berra’s and his unofficial chauffeur during spring training. “He was one of the greatest ballplayers. He played against the greatest ballplayers.”
“There’s never been a career like it, before or since,” writes Jason Gay for the Wall Street Journal. Gay explains that he once emailed Bill James to ask where the father of Sabermetrics ranked Berra. “I certainly think that Yogi was the greatest catcher who ever lived,” James wrote to Gay. “I have no doubt of this, honestly.”
Gay also relates the one time he met Berra, when they went to see the film Moneyball in 2011. “I recall two things vividly about the screening,” Gay writes. First was that “Berra was friends with Art Howe, the manager of the Oakland A’s in the time Moneyball is set, and while he thought Philip Seymour Hoffman was a good actor, Yogi felt he looked nothing like Art Howe. The other thing—and this I didn’t know was coming—was that there’s a key scene in the movie in which the A’s reel off a record 20 game winning streak. And in the moment, they show real-life footage of the last American League team that had won 19 games—the 1947 New York Yankees, for whom Yogi played his first full season in the major leagues. ‘I’d almost forgotten,’ Yogi said afterward. ‘You get old, you know? But we did win 19 in a row.’”
It’s a really lovely obituary, as is Bruce Weber’s at the New York Times, but then Yogi always brought out the best in sportswriters. It’s not clear that he would be as famous for his Yogi-isms (“It’s like déjà vu all over again”; “Baseball is 90% mental and the other half is physical”; etc.) had he not played in New York. Before the 1962 newspaper strike, the country’s largest metropolitan area had nearly a dozen different daily papers, with baseball beat writers constantly needing to fill their sections with lively copy, and Yogi obliged. Who knows for sure whether his witticisims were intentional or not? Maybe Yogi himself wasn’t even sure. It doesn’t matter.
Berra’s one-liners are often compared to Mark Twain’s, but there’s something forced with the latter’s. Twain’s often outside his language, or above it, using it to point to something or someone else he’s often disdainful of. Yogi’s solid, a stand-up guy. He inhabits his language. What the beat writers caught was someone speaking the way human beings often do—turning syntax, or grammar, or even logic upside down, or ignoring it altogether, and still making perfect sense. And some of the times even capturing something funny or elegant or brilliant. The greatest catcher who ever lived just a really high lifetime average here, too.
