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 19^th-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.