Yogi Berra, one of baseball’s greatest catchers and characters, who as a
player was a mainstay of 10 Yankees championship teams and as a manager
led both the Yankees and the Mets to the World Series — but who may be
more widely known as an ungainly but lovable cultural figure, inspiring a
cartoon character and issuing a seemingly limitless supply of
unwittingly witty epigrams known as
Yogi-isms — died on Tuesday. He was 90.
The Yankees and the Yogi Berra Museum and Learning Center in Little
Falls, N.J., announced his death. Before moving to an assisted living
facility in nearby West Caldwell, in 2012, Berra had lived for many
years in neighboring Montclair.
In 1949, early in Berra’s Yankees career, his manager assessed him this
way in an interview in The Sporting News: “Mr. Berra,” Casey Stengel
said, “is a very strange fellow of very remarkable abilities.”
And so he was, and so he proved to be. Universally known simply as Yogi,
probably the second most recognizable nickname in sports — even Yogi
was not the Babe — Berra was not exactly an unlikely hero, but he was
often portrayed as one: an All-Star for 15 consecutive seasons whose
skills were routinely underestimated; a well-built, appealingly
open-faced man whose physical appearance was often belittled; and a
prolific winner, not to mention a successful leader, whose intellect was
a target of humor if not outright derision.
That
he triumphed on the diamond again and again in spite of his perceived
shortcomings was certainly a source of his popularity. So was the
delight with which his famous, if not always documentable,
pronouncements — somehow both nonsensical and sagacious — were received.
“You can observe a lot just by watching,” he is reputed to have declared once, describing his strategy as a manager.
“If
you can’t imitate him,” he advised a young player who was mimicking the
batting stance of the great slugger Frank Robinson, “don’t copy him.”
“When
you come to a fork in the road, take it,” he said, giving directions to
his house. Either path, it turned out, got you there.
“Nobody goes there anymore,” he said of a popular restaurant. “It’s too crowded.”
Whether
Berra actually uttered the many things attributed to him, or was the
first to say them, or phrased them precisely the way they were reported,
has long been a matter of speculation. Berra himself published a book
in 1998 called “The Yogi Book: I Really Didn’t Say Everything I Said!”
But the Yogi-isms testified to a character — goofy and philosophical,
flighty and down to earth — that came to define the man.
Berra’s Yogi-ness was
exploited in advertisements
for myriad products, among them Puss ’n Boots cat food and Miller Lite
beer but perhaps most famously Yoo-Hoo chocolate drink. Asked if Yoo-Hoo
was hyphenated, he is said to have replied, “No, ma’am, it isn’t even
carbonated.”
If
not exactly a Yogi-ism, it was the kind of response that might have
come from Berra’s ursine namesake, the affable animated character Yogi
Bear, who made his debut in 1958.
An Impressive Résumé
The
character Yogi Berra may even have overshadowed the Hall of Fame
ballplayer Yogi Berra, obscuring what a remarkable athlete he was. A
notorious bad-ball hitter — he swung at a lot of pitches that were not
strikes but mashed them anyway — he was fearsome in the clutch and the
most durable and consistently productive Yankee during the period of the
team’s most relentless success.
In
addition, as a catcher, he played the most grueling position on the
field. (For a respite from the chores and challenges of crouching behind
the plate, Berra, who played before the
designated hitter rule took effect in the American League in 1973, occasionally played the outfield.)
Stengel,
a Hall of Fame manager whose shrewdness and talent were also often
underestimated, recognized Berra’s gifts.
He referred to Berra, even as a
young player, as his assistant manager and compared him favorably to
star catchers of previous eras like Mickey Cochrane, Gabby Hartnett and
Bill Dickey. “You could look it up” was Stengel’s catchphrase, and
indeed the record book declares that Berra was among the greatest
catchers in the history of the game — some say the greatest of all.
Berra’s
career batting average, .285, was not as high as that of his Yankees
predecessor, Dickey (.313), but Berra hit more home runs (358 in all)
and drove in more runs (1,430). Praised by pitchers for his astute
pitch-calling, Berra led the American League in assists five times and
from 1957 through 1959 went 148 consecutive games behind the plate
without making an error, a major league record at the time.
He was not a defensive wizard from the start, though. Dickey, Berra explained, “learned me all his experience.”
On
defense, he certainly surpassed Mike Piazza, the best-hitting catcher
of recent vintage, and maybe ever. On offense, Berra and Johnny Bench,
whose Cincinnati Reds teams of the 1970s were known as the Big Red
Machine, were comparable, except that Bench struck out three times as
often. Berra whiffed a mere 414 times in more than 8,300 plate
appearances over 19 seasons — an astonishingly small ratio for a power
hitter.
Others
— Carlton Fisk, Gary Carter and Ivan Rodriguez among them — also
deserve consideration in a discussion of great catchers, but none was
clearly superior to Berra on offense or defense. Only Roy Campanella, a
contemporary rival who played for the Brooklyn Dodgers and faced Berra
in the World Series six times before his career was ended by a car
accident, equaled Berra’s total of three Most Valuable Player Awards.
And although Berra did not win the award in 1950 — his teammate Phil
Rizzuto did — he gave one of the greatest season-long performances by a
catcher that year, hitting .322, smacking 28 home runs and driving in
124 runs.
Big Moments
Berra’s career was punctuated by storied episodes. In
Game 3 of the 1947 World Series,
against the Dodgers, he hit the first pinch-hit home run in Series
history, and in Game 4 he was behind the plate for what was almost the
first no-hitter and was instead a stunning loss. With two outs in the
ninth inning and two men on base after walks, the Yankees’ starter, Bill
Bevens, gave up a double to Cookie Lavagetto that cleared the bases and
won the game.
In
September 1951, once again on the brink of a no-hitter, this one by
Allie Reynolds against the Boston Red Sox, Berra made one of baseball’s
famous errors. With two outs in the ninth inning, Ted Williams hit a
towering foul ball between home plate and the Yankees’ dugout.
It looked
like the end of the game, which would seal Reynolds’s second no-hitter
of the season and make him the first American League pitcher to
accomplish that feat. But as the ball plummeted, it was caught in a gust
of wind; Berra lunged backward, and it deflected off his glove as he
went sprawling.
Amazingly, on the next pitch, Williams hit an almost identical pop-up, and this time Berra caught it.
In the first game of the
1955 World Series against the Dodgers, the Yankees were ahead, 6-4, in the top of the eighth when the Dodgers’
Jackie Robinson stole home.
The plate umpire, Bill Summers, called him safe, and Berra went
berserk, gesticulating in Summers’s face and creating one of the
enduring images of an on-the-field tantrum. The Yankees won the game
although not the Series — it was the only time Brooklyn got the better
of Berra’s Yankees — but Berra never forgot the moment. More than 50
years later, he signed a photograph of the play for President Obama,
writing, “Dear Mr. President, He was out!”
During the
1956 Series,
again against the Dodgers, Berra was at the center of another indelible
image, this one of sheer joy, when he leapt into the arms of Don
Larsen, who had just struck out Dale Mitchell to end Game 5 and complete
the only perfect game (and only no-hitter) in World Series history.
When reporters gathered at Berra’s locker after the game, he greeted them mischievously. “So,” he said, “what’s new?”
Beyond
the historic moments and individual accomplishments, what most
distinguished Berra’s career was how often he won. From 1946 to 1985, as
a player, coach and manager, Berra appeared in a remarkable 21 World
Series. Playing on powerful Yankees teams with teammates like Rizzuto
and Joe DiMaggio early on and then Whitey Ford and Mickey Mantle, Berra
starred on World Series winners in 1947, ’49, ’50, ’51, ’52, ’53, ’56
and ’58. He was a backup catcher and part-time outfielder on the
championship teams of 1961 and ’62. (He also played on World Series
losers in 1955, ’57, ’60 and ’63.)
All
told, his Yankees teams won the American League pennant 14 out of 17
years. He still holds Series records for games played, plate
appearances, hits and doubles.
No other player has been a champion so often.
Lawrence
Peter Berra was born on May 12, 1925, in the Italian enclave of St.
Louis known as the Hill, which also fostered the baseball career of his
boyhood friend Joe Garagiola. Berra was the fourth of five children. His
father, Pietro, a construction worker and bricklayer, and his mother,
Paulina, were immigrants from Malvaglio, a northern Italian village near
Milan. (As an adult, on a visit to his ancestral home, Berra took in a
performance of “Tosca” at La Scala. “It was pretty good,” he said. “Even
the music was nice.”)
As
a boy, Berra was known as Larry, or Lawdie, as his mother pronounced
it. As recounted in “Yogi Berra: Eternal Yankee,” a 2009 biography by
Allen Barra, one day in his early teens, young Larry and some friends
went to the movies and were watching a travelogue about India when a
Hindu yogi appeared on the screen sitting cross-legged. His posture
struck one of the friends as precisely the way Berra sat on the ground
as he waited his turn at bat. From that day on, he was Yogi Berra.
Success as a Manager
At
the time, Berra had just concluded his career as a Yankees player, and
the team had named him manager, a role in which he continued to find
success, although not with the same regularity he enjoyed as a player
and not without drama and disappointment. Indeed, things began badly.
The Yankees, an aging team in 1964, played listless ball through much of
the summer, and in mid-August they lost four straight games in Chicago
to the first-place White Sox, leading to one of the kookier episodes of
Berra’s career.
On
the team bus to O’Hare Airport, the reserve infielder Phil Linz began
playing “Mary Had a Little Lamb” on the harmonica. Berra, in a foul mood
over the losing streak, told him to knock it off, but Linz did not. (In
another version of the story, Linz asked Mickey Mantle what Berra had
said, and Mantle responded, “He said, ‘Play it louder.’ ”) Suddenly the
harmonica went flying, having been either knocked out of Linz’s hands by
Berra or thrown at Berra by Linz. (Players on the bus had different
recollections.)
News
reports of the incident made it sound as if Berra had lost control of
the team, and although the Yankees caught and passed the White Sox in
September, winning the pennant, Ralph Houk, the general manager, fired
Berra after the team lost a seven-game World Series to St. Louis. In a
bizarre move, Houk replaced him with the Cardinals’ manager, Johnny
Keane.
Keane’s Yankees finished sixth in 1965.
Berra,
meanwhile, moved across town, taking a job as a coach for the famously
awful Mets under Stengel, who was finishing his career in Flushing. The
team continued its mythic floundering until 1969, when the so-called
Miracle Mets, with Gil Hodges as manager — and Berra coaching first base
— won the World Series.
After
Hodges died, before the start of the 1972 season, Berra replaced him.
That summer, Berra was inducted into the Hall of Fame.
The
Mets team he inherited, however, faltered, finishing third, and for
most of the 1973 season they were worse. In mid-August, the Mets were
well under .500 and in sixth place when Berra supposedly uttered perhaps
the most famous Yogi-ism of all.
“It
ain’t over till it’s over,” he said (or words to that effect), and lo
and behold, the Mets got hot, squeaking by the Cardinals to win the
National League’s Eastern Division title.
They
then beat the Reds in the League Championship Series before losing to
the Oakland Athletics in the World Series. Berra was rewarded for the
resurgence with a three-year contract, but the Mets were dreadful in
1974, finishing fifth, and the next year, on Aug. 6, with the team in
third place and having lost five straight games, Berra was fired.
Once again he switched leagues and city boroughs, returning to the Bronx as a Yankees coach, and in 1984 the owner,
George Steinbrenner,
named him to replace the volatile Billy Martin as manager. The team
finished third that year, but during spring training in 1985,
Steinbrenner promised him that he would finish the season as Yankees
manager no matter what.
After
just 16 games, however, the Yankees were 6-10, and the impatient and
imperious Steinbrenner fired Berra anyway, bringing back Martin. Perhaps
worse than breaking his word, Steinbrenner sent an underling to deliver
the bad news.
The
firing, which had an added sting because Berra’s son Dale had recently
joined the Yankees, provoked one of baseball’s legendary feuds, and for
14 years Berra refused to set foot in Yankee Stadium, a period during
which he coached four seasons for the Houston Astros.
In
the meantime private donors helped establish the Yogi Berra Museum and
Learning Center on the
New Jersey campus of Montclair State University,
which awarded Berra an honorary doctorate of humanities in 1996. A minor
league ballpark, Yogi Berra Stadium, opened there in 1998.
The
museum, a tribute to Berra with exhibits on his career, runs programs
for children dealing with baseball history. In January 1999,
Steinbrenner, who died in 2010, went there to make amends.
“I know I made a mistake by not letting you go personally,” he told Berra. “It’s the worst mistake I ever made in baseball.”
Berra
chose not to quibble with the semi-apology. To welcome him back into
the Yankees fold, the team held a Yogi Berra Day on July 18, 1999. Also
invited was Larsen, who threw out the ceremonial first pitch, which
Berra caught.
Incredibly, in the game that day, David Cone of the Yankees pitched a perfect game.
It
was, as Berra may or may not have said in another context, “déjà vu all
over again,” a fittingly climactic episode for a wondrous baseball
life.
Correction: September 23, 2015
An earlier version of this obituary referred incorrectly to the
Yankees’ finish in 1965, the year Johnny Keane replaced Berra as
manager. The team finished sixth (in what was then a 10-team league),
not last. The Yankees finished last in 1966.
Correction: September 23, 2015
An earlier version of this obituary contained an incomplete list of
survivors. In addition to his three sons, Berra is survived by 11
grandchildren and a great-grandson.
Correction: September 25, 2015
A picture on Thursday with the continuation of an obituary about
Yogi Berra, the Hall of Fame Yankees catcher, was published in error.
It showed Jackie Robinson of the Brooklyn Dodgers being called out at
home after a tag by New York Giants catcher Ray Katt on a failed squeeze
bunt attempt by Clem Labine on May 13, 1956. It did not show Robinson’s
famous steal of home against Berra and the Yankees in Game 1 of the
1955 World Series.
Read more on the death of baseball legend Yogi Berra at the following link:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/24/sports/baseball/yogi-berra-dies-at-90-yankees-baseball-catcher.html?_r=0
Check out more on Yogi's great career and passing right here!
