We may know Yogi Berra by his quotes. That’s how I paid tribute to him on Twitter this morning (I woke up inexplicably briefly at like 4:00 this morning before falling back to sleep, explaining how early some of these tweets are):
“I never said most of the things I said.”
— Dan J. Glickman (@DanJGlickman) September 23, 2015
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“You better cut the pizza in four pieces because I’m not hungry enough to eat six.”
— Dan J. Glickman (@DanJGlickman) September 23, 2015
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“You wouldn’t have won if we’d beaten you.”
— Dan J. Glickman (@DanJGlickman) September 23, 2015
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“Little League baseball is a very good thing because it keeps the parents off the streets.”
— Dan J. Glickman (@DanJGlickman) September 23, 2015
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“Little League baseball is a very good thing because it keeps the parents off the streets.”
— Dan J. Glickman (@DanJGlickman) September 23, 2015
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“In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.”
— Dan J. Glickman (@DanJGlickman) September 23, 2015
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“We made too many wrong mistakes.”
— Dan J. Glickman (@DanJGlickman) September 23, 2015
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“Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.”
— Dan J. Glickman (@DanJGlickman) September 23, 2015
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“You can observe a lot by just watching.”
— Dan J. Glickman (@DanJGlickman) September 23, 2015
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“It was impossible to get a conversation going, everybody was talking too much.”
— Dan J. Glickman (@DanJGlickman) September 23, 2015
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“A nickel ain’t worth a dime anymore.”
— Dan J. Glickman (@DanJGlickman) September 23, 2015
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“He hits from both sides of the plate. He’s amphibious.”
— Dan J. Glickman (@DanJGlickman) September 23, 2015
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“Even Napoleon had his Watergate.”
— Dan J. Glickman (@DanJGlickman) September 23, 2015
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“It ain’t the heat, it’s the humility.”
— Dan J. Glickman (@DanJGlickman) September 23, 2015
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“I’m not going to buy my kids an encyclopedia. Let them walk to school like I did.”
— Dan J. Glickman (@DanJGlickman) September 23, 2015
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“You don’t have to swing hard to hit a home run. If you got the timing, it’ll go.”
— Dan J. Glickman (@DanJGlickman) September 23, 2015
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“If the world were perfect, it wouldn’t be.”
— Dan J. Glickman (@DanJGlickman) September 23, 2015
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“When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”
— Dan J. Glickman (@DanJGlickman) September 23, 2015
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“It ain’t over till it’s over.”
— Dan J. Glickman (@DanJGlickman) September 23, 2015
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“Love is the most important thing in the world, but baseball is pretty good, too.”
— Dan J. Glickman (@DanJGlickman) September 23, 2015
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But then there is what comes after:
– Peter Lawrence “Yogi” Berra. 1925-2015. 18-time All-Star. 13 time WS Champ. 3 time MVP.
— Dan J. Glickman (@DanJGlickman) September 23, 2015
Those final facts are often the ones forgotten. Lost amongst the legend of his “Yogi-isms” is the fact that he was one of the greatest catchers of all time, as well as a an esteemed coach and manager (three of his WS titles came not as a player, but as a coach with the Mets and Yankees, and he was the manager of the 1964 Yankees team and 1973 Mets teams that lost their World Series).
He was a Forrest Gump of Baseball, seemingly involved in countless major events connected to baseball from the end of WWII (where Yogi served as a gunner’s mate on a navy ship, including during the D-Day invasion) until his death. He was the soul of Casey Stengel’s Yankees. Jackie Robinson played against him and had perhaps his signature moment- the steal of home in the World Series- off of him (to the end, Yogi claimed Jackie was out). When Don Larson had his perfect game, it was famously Yogi who leaped into his arm, leading Larson to say “Damn, Yogi, you’re heavy.” When Bill Mazeroski hit his walk-off home run, it was Yogi who watched it fly over the left-field fence. When Roger Maris broke Babe Ruth’s record, Yogi was on deck. The “Miracle Mets’ had Yogi Berra as a coach.
And, perhaps above all, he was a hell of a player. As Tom Verducci pointed out in his article on Yogi, he never struck out more than 40 times in a season. He and Joe DiMaggio are the only players in history to have 350 home runs or more with fewer than 500 strikeouts. He was by most accounts a defensive catcher and pitch-caller of fine quality- at one point he held the record for consecutive games behind the plate without an error. One does not become a All-Star so many times being merely average.
In the end, perhaps Casey Stengel summed up Berra the best (it’s included in Yogi’s obituary), even though it was 1949 when he said it, very early in Yogi’s career:
“Mr. Berra,” Casey Stengel said, “is a very strange fellow of very remarkable abilities.”
The Baseball Continuum 