Farewell to Yogi Berra: A Hall of Fame character (and player)

My baseball autographed by Yogi Berra

You can think of a few baseball players and athletes who were as great as Yogi Berra at their sports. But I can’t think of another athlete nearly as great as Yogi who was known more for his character and humor than for his play on the field.

RIP, Yogi. I never saw you play, but admired you from the first things I learned about you as a young Yankee fan.

I love this opening of Mike Stewart’s Associated Press obituary:

The lovable legend of Yogi Berra, that ain’t ever gonna be over.

The Hall of Fame catcher renowned as much for his dizzying malapropisms as his unmatched 10 World Series championships with the New York Yankees, died Tuesday. He was 90.

Berra, who filled baseball’s record book as well as “Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations,” died of natural causes at his home in New Jersey, according to Dave Kaplan, the director of the Yogi Berra Museum.

And this ending to the obit is classic Yogi, too:

His wife once asked Berra where he wanted to be buried, in St. Louis, New York or Montclair.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Why don’t you surprise me?”

Yogi was already in the twilight of his career when I started following the Yankees in 1960. Elston Howard had taken over the primary catching duties for the Yankees and Yogi was a backup catcher (63 games that year) who also played right (17 games) and left field (20 games) and pinch-hit (32 games).

From 1949 to 1956, Berra was exclusively a catcher, squatting behind the plate 140 or more games four of those years and winning three MVP awards. But when his catching skills and durability began declining, and Howard was clearly the better catcher, Yogi stuck around the Yankees as a role player for four more seasons before becoming the manager in 1964. It was an extraordinarily graceful twilight to his career.

One of the first pieces of baseball trivia that I remembered came from the 1961 season — not from the record home run chase of Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle, but from the homers hit by the Yankees’ three catchers. Howard (28), Berra (22) and third-string catcher Johnny Blanchard each hit over 20 homers that year, still (I think) the only time three catchers have done that. Berra hit most of his homers as an outfielder, but that was still a fun bit of Yankee trivia that has stayed with me now 50-plus years.

As a boy, I was a bigger fan of other Yankees — Mantle, Maris, Bobby Richardson, Whitey Ford and Howard. But Yogi’s charm captured my fancy early and grew as the decades passed and he became and remained baseball’s classiest aging character.

Championship career

I’ll get back to Yogi’s wit and his post-retirement class. But first I want to give credit to baseball’s all-time championship player. As I noted earlier this week, Yogi usually loses the arguments about who was the best catcher ever. Johnny Bench usually wins that argument, and I might concede it without a fight.

But there’s no argument that he was the all-time champion in baseball history. Yogi played on Yankee World Series champions 10 times: 1947, ’49-’53, ’56, ’58, ’61-’62. And he played on four more teams that lost World Series, three times in seven games. He won Most Valuable Player awards in 1951, ’54 and ’55. No catcher has ever won more (Bench won two and Dodger Roy Campanella matched Yogi with three in the same time period).

Yogi’s career stats are among the best ever for any catcher: 358 homers, 1,430 RBI, a .285 batting average, 15 straight All-Star selections. But his World Series achievements are most amazing:

• 75 games played, a record.
• 259 at-bats, a record.
• 71 hits, a record.
• 49 singles, a record.
• 10 doubles, tied with Frankie Frisch for the record.
• 41 runs scored, just one behind Mantle’s record.
• 117 total bases, second behind Mantles record of 123.
• 12 homers, third behind Mantle (18) and Babe Ruth (15).
• 39 RBI, one behind Mantle’s record.
• 32 walks, third behind Mantle (43) and Ruth (33).
• His 10 RBI in 1956 rank third for a single World Series, behind Richardson (12) and Mantle (11).

Also in 1956, Yogi caught Don Larsen’s perfect game, still the only World Series no-hitter. That was one of three no-hitters Yogi caught, the other two by Allie Reynolds in 1951. (More on the no-hitters later in my series on Yankee starting pitchers, which pauses today for this post on Yogi.)

Yogi may not get enough credit for his handling of pitchers. Ford was the only Hall of Fame pitcher he caught, but Berra’s handling of their pretty-good pitchers resulted in a dynasty that remains unmatched. He called most of the pitches for 20-win seasons by Vic Raschi (3 years in a row), Eddie Lopat, Reynolds, Bob Grim and Bob Turley, plus the best seasons of several other pitchers who never reached the 20-win level.

Managing career

Yogi was only a manager for five full seasons and parts of two others, always in New York. But he’s still one of only a few managers to lead teams from both leagues to the World Series. He replaced Ralph Houk (his former backup catcher) as Yankee manager in 1964 and led the Yankees to their fifth straight World Series. They lost a seven-game classic to the St. Louis Cardinals.

After that year, Yogi went to the Mets as a player-coach (under his old Yankee manager, Casey Stengel), playing his last four games in 1965 but moving mostly into coaching. (He played enough, though, to win the catcher spot on my all-time team of players for both the Yankees and Mets.) He won his 11th ring as a Mets coach in 1969 under his old Dodger rival, Gil Hodges.

After Hodges died in 1972, Berra took over as manager. He led the Mets back to the 1973 World Series, losing (again in seven games) to the Oakland A’s.

He returned to the Yankees as a manager in 1984, and I was looking forward to seeing him at Royals Stadium when I moved to Kansas City in 1985. But George Steinbrenner fired him early in the season with a 6-10 recored, before the Yankees played in Kansas City.

His record as a manager was 484-444, with winning records in five of his seven full or partial seasons.

Yogi the character

Yogi the player would get his due today, but it’s Yogi the character that I (and most baseball fans, I bet) am remembering most fondly today.

My boys learned early that we didn’t leave the ballpark, even in a blowout. Countless times, I quoted Yogi to them: “It ain’t over till it’s over.” It’s truly illustrative of Yogi’s humor. He got misportrayed as mangling the English language and somehow hiding pearls of wisdom in dumb things he said, but I think he was clever and funny and used the language artfully, if not always skillfully. That saying, one of a lifelong string of Yogi quotes, shows: Baseball has no clock. So there’s no point at which you can say the game is over until the final out has been recorded. What better (and more clever) way to say that than “It ain’t over till it’s over“? And my sons, all born a decade or more after Yogi died retired, knew we didn’t leave the ballpark until it was over.

(Like many Yogi-isms, that one might have been apocryphal or exaggerated, but they all stuck, whether he said them or not, and sounded like he could have said them.)

Yogi’s late-in-life friendship with Ron Guidry, his spring-training driver when Berra could no longer drive, was another example of his character and class. Yogi could afford cabs or a professional driver, but instead, he deepened his relationship with a Yankee of a younger generation. What other ballplayer’s relationship with a driver would be worth a whole book? (Don’t worry, I’m not going to start a rant about why Guidry belongs in the Hall of Fame. I think links to earlier rants should suffice.)

My Yogi autographs

A ball signed by lots of Yankees, including “Larry Berra.” The other signatures visible here are Robert “Bob” Cerv and Irv Noren.

I used to have two autographs from Yogi Berra. But only one said “Yogi.” That’s the ball at the top of this post, the faint signature barely still visible. I think Mimi gave that to me for a birthday or Christmas present years ago. The second autograph was on one of two balls Mimi’s Aunt Marie presented to my sons when we visited their home in New Jersey in 1989. We had just been to Cooperstown for the Hall of Fame inductions (Bench was one of the inductees), and the boys were pretty excited and talking lots of baseball. So Mimi’s aunt decided they were the right relatives to receive a couple family treasures she had kept for years in a closet or drawer. She brought us two baseballs, wrapped in cellophane, that her late husband used to take to Yankee Stadium to seek autographs. I was delighted to see so many names of Yankees from the early 1950s. One that especially stood out was “Larry Berra.” Yogi’s given name was Lawrence Peter Berra, and apparently early in his career, before everyone knew him as Yogi, he was signing “Larry.”

Another ball autographed by “Larry” Berra. I didn’t crop it tighter, because one of the autographs below was his longtime backup catcher (and later his manager), Ralph Houk. Also on this section of the ball are autographs by Wilcy Moore, Gil McDougald and Frank Crosetti.

Since we have three sons and only two of these Yankee balls, I kept them on my desk for many years. But I knew they were really gifts to my sons. So a few years ago, I added one of my own baseballs (signed by Maris and other members of the 1968 Cardinals) and wrapped them up as Christmas gifts. The boys drew them still wrapped and two ended up with Yankee autographs and one with a lot of Cardinals.

Update: I used to have three Berra autographs, two of them signed “Larry.” When I texted the boys asking for the “Larry” autograph, Mike texted back that he had it and would send it when he got home from work that night. Well, Tom soon after sent a photo of his ball, with the first “Larry” autograph above. I thought it was a little odd that Mike didn’t know which autographs he had. But when he was sending me autographs from his baseball (I’ll be using some of them in upcoming posts), there was “Larry.” I remember showing people an autograph of “Larry,” but didn’t remember that he was on both of the balls.

Everyone loved Yogi

Perhaps the best measure of Yogi’s enduring appeal to baseball fans was that he was baseball’s most beloved character, but played on baseball’s most hated team. Even more than Derek Jeter and Mariano Rivera, both of whom won grudging respect from Yankee haters, Yogi was the Yankee you had to like.

Headline of the Week (or, perhaps, the Century). pic.twitter.com/BPojNZjNXO (h/t @davidjoachim)

— Don Van Natta Jr. (@DVNJr) September 25, 2015

Other reading about Yogi Berra

SABR bio by Davie Williams

New York Times obituary

ESPN obit

The Yogi Book

Driving Mr. Yogi

Source note: Unless otherwise noted, all statistics cited here come from Baseball-Reference.com.

Yankee starting pitchers

This post interrupted my series on Yankee starting pitchers. It will resume tomorrow (probably). The first two installments:

Yankees are among the best almost everywhere but starting pitcher

Yankee starting pitchers in the Hall of Fame

Next: Yankee 300-game winners (who mostly pitched for other teams)