Larry Berra became “Yogi“, according to the biography on his official website, when another boyhood friend, Bobby Hofman, thought he bore a resemblance to a Hindu character in a movie they attended on The Hill. Maybe I read too much into it, but Rizzuto seemed to be taking a noble stand on behalf of his old teammate, particularly since he was still employed as an announcer for the Yankees. The adjoining Yogi Berra Museum opened in 1998.
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On his approach to at-bats: “You can’t think and hit at the same time”.
Coincidentally, when I began delivering the “round file” reports, the Yankees went on a winning spree, winning the pennant and then the World Series.
Still, Berra worked hard and eventually became a starter for the Pirates.
Their lives ran parallel courses.
You wouldn’t ever have known Lawrence Peter, despite his remarkable life as a soldier, husband and citizen. “I was awful”, shared Berra in a 2003 CNN interview. He said that if you miss work they give you cash which is just as good as money. Berra’s legacy is similar, yet oddly more contemporary thanks to the many Yogi-isms, paradoxes so brilliant in their simplicity. Branch Rickey, the general manager of the organization at the time, supplied Berra $250, believing that the 5-foot-7, bow-legged teen, who dropped out of college after eighth grade, had restricted upside.
If we weren’t poor, we were at least clinging to the lower rungs of the middle class, but I never knew it. Dad worked. I had great anticipation and was delighted when it happened.
-“If you don’t know where you are going, you might end up someplace else”.
With the passing of baseball legend Yogi Berra last week, just about everybody dusted off a story about the beloved Yankees catcher and longtime Montclair resident.
San Francisco Giants pitching coach Dave Righetti is shown in the dugout before a baseball game against the Chicago Cubs in San Francisco, Wednesday, July 2, 2008. Berra returned to the Yankees as a coach in 1976, was promoted to manager in 1984, and was sacked at the beginning of the 1985 season. As New Yorkers swarmed him, I circled in red the observation in my reporter’s notebook that “fans are drowning a beaming Yogi”. “I’m very happy”, he said. And he wasn’t afraid to tell anyone in his subtle way that a solid family, a roof over one’s head and a stable lifestyle were far more important than any win or loss on a baseball field. Sixty nine years later, to the day, he made his debut in Heaven. The famous moment was captured in photographs published in newspapers around the world. I finally ended my half-hunched Groucho pursuit and just pitched a question at him. Oh, and he also once held the record for the most times reaching base on catcher’s interference in a single season (seven times in 1983), which was broken by former Yankee Roberto Kelly in 1992.
Their final conversation was early this baseball season, when Garagiola asked him, “So what group are you managing this year?” a reference to Berra following a brilliant playing career with a managerial one that saw him bounce from the Yankees to the Mets back to the Yankees. “Perhaps the greatest possible testimonial to his ability will be the struggle which the Yankees owners face in trying to find a man to take his place”.
“Grandpa wanted to spend her birthday with her”, Lindsay Berra said. He was suspended by Major League Baseball, but like the other players, agreed to a deal that left him subject to a hefty fine and increased drug testing.
He won three most valuable player awards. Luckily for him, he cut another deal to enter a three-year pre-trial intervention program. The group played baseball for a YMCA league and Berra was constantly the initially one particular drafted for a group.
Yogi Berra: family-man, Hall-of-Famer, sometime-inadvertent contributor to the vernacular.
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A few minutes later, on the other side of the indoor diamond, Chuck Tanner shook my hand and called me “Young Man”.
