CHAPTER 2

Number 8

MOST FANS KNOW the outline of Dad’s life, which he would fill in for us from time to time. He was born Lorenzo Pietro Berra, though around Dago Hill in St. Louis the children of immigrants, as first-generation Americans, anglicized their names. Lorenzo Pietro Berra morphed into Lawrence Peter Berra—which, never legally changed, was on his contracts—and, to most who grew up with him, Larry, though his parents took to calling him “Lawdie” in their thick accents, unable to pronounce Larry. His driver’s license read Lawrence Peter Berra—so, no, Yogi was never a legal or official name. Funny, though, how much pride those kids had when they spoke of Dago Hill. That was their pride and joy, their families, their friends. That was what tight-knit means.

His dad, Grandpa Pietro, came from Malvaglio, close to Milan, and Dad used to tell us how tough Pietro was. He had to be because the family had nothing. Pietro had come over in 1909 on the long boat ride from Italy, leaving his wife, Paolina, there until he could get settled, which he did in St. Louis, working in a brickyard. Dad used to tell me Grandpa had hands like a strop. He used to pick the bricks up in the brickyard bare-handed, and his forearms, hands, and fingers felt like an elephant’s hide. If you ever crossed Pietro, he would whack you with the back of his hand, and it would feel like a sock filled with thumbtacks.

Pietro sent for Paolina in 1912, along with Uncle Tony and Uncle Mike, who joined them on the Hill and lived in a cramped house on Elizabeth Avenue. The family expanded again when a third son, John, was born in 1922 and then, on May 12, 1925, Lorenzo Pietro (and thereafter, a daughter, Josephine). All of them were sent to St. Mary’s Catholic school, even though they were dirt poor, Pietro having saved his pennies from working the brickyards to make sure God would be their teacher.

Dad had one pair of shoes and a couple pairs of pants. He once told me the best clothes he ever wore was when he enlisted in the service and they gave him his GI-issue fatigues at boot camp. The clothes he wore on D-Day were better than anything he had back home. That’s why he was obsessed with what was his. When we were kids, we had to take care of our stuff because he taught us that. He would say, “You’re lucky to have it.” That “it” could be just about anything.

When they played ball back then, they had to use balled-up string and broomsticks as bats. They had little but pride and fire. When they would play teams of rich kids in nice uniforms, they’d go out and kick their butts. It’s no surprise that his favorite player was Joe Medwick, “Ducky Joe” of yore, during the hometown Cardinals’ brawling “Gashouse Gang” era. Built as he was, like a pit bull had mated with a fireplug, and with his blend of talents, Dad excelled in all sports. In fact, he could have been a soccer player if he wanted. He could move, like another of those Gashouse Gang greats, Frankie “The Fordham Flash” Frisch. As a teenager, Dad played on a soccer team from which four of his teammates were chosen to play on the 1940 US team that beat England in the World Cup. He was that good.

But baseball was his ticket, and the subject of clashes between Pietro and Lawdie. Pietro even had a priest try to talk him out of playing sports. No son of his, no first-generation American son of his, was going to waste his life playing kids’ games. Even the strictest fathers will play catch with their sons; it’s a ritual of father-son bonding. But I doubt Pietro ever even picked up a ball, much less played catch with any of his sons.

LARRY: There obviously was a lot of Pietro in Dad. Even though Dad made his living in baseball, proved to Pietro how good being an athlete could be, he didn’t play catch with us in the backyard more than a few times. It just wasn’t what a father did. Maybe he thought it would reduce him in our eyes as a disciplinarian. Baseball was his job; he didn’t bring it home, where he was a dad, not a Yankee.

Dad had to defy Pietro, had to sneak out and play, but always had to be home on time to work. Pietro got jobs for him, such as working in a coal yard and driving a Pepsi-Cola truck when he turned sixteen. He made around $25 a week, good money. Which all went to Pietro.

LARRY: It’s funny how things repeat. At sixteen, I took a job unloading freight cars for some extra money. That was the kind of thing Dad did back on the Hill when he was that age. Again, apples and tree.

But the jobs went to waste because Dad would sneak away early to play ball, getting himself fired. But what could Pietro do? He had been able to tell Uncle Tony—who they called Lefty and who Dad said was a better ballplayer than he was, a big power hitter—to stop playing and go to work. But now Uncle Tony and Uncle Mike were urging Pietro to ease up. As Yogi once recalled, “My dad was an immigrant who wanted me to get a paycheck. But my older brothers pleaded for me: ‘Pop, we’re all working. Give him a chance to play.’”

Already, big-league scouts were watching him at his American Legion games. He was easy to spot then. While small, he played ferociously, taking gambles on the base paths, pounding his fist into his mitt, taking charge. In one of the few pictures of him back then, he’s crossing the plate on a steal of home, coming in standing having so fooled the other team that the pitcher never even threw home—and his own teammate in the batter’s box had to corkscrew out of the way of the Yogi freight train. As he scores, his hat having blown off, his mane of long, wavy black hair flies in the wind.

He was that bold. But he also had that inner calm. Thus, his nickname. He didn’t get it from Joe Garagiola—whose real name was Giovanni Garagiola—who lived across the street from him, a street now called Hall of Fame Place. Not that Joe achieved that status, but he got a lot of mileage as one of Dad’s best friends and teammates. Both were catchers, and both smart enough to train themselves to be left-handed hitters, allowing a better look at right-handed pitchers, who are far more prevalent. (Another who trained himself to do that was Roger Maris.)

Joe for many years got the credit for coining the nickname everyone knew Dad by, explaining that it was because he “walked like a yogi.” But history has settled on Jack Maguire, who was on the same American Legion team with them, representing Fred W. Stockholm Post 245, as the man who hung the alter ego on him, even though the stories shifted through the years. One was that Jack, who later played ninety-four big-league games with three teams, saw him sitting cross-legged, staring into space deep in thought. Jack told Dad, “You look like a yogi.” Another was that Jack and Dad had gone to a movie in which there was some sort of yogi character, and when they came out, Jack hung the name on him. Dad, however, made it a real guessing game, saying years later that it was another Legion teammate, Bobby Hoffman, who did it.

Whoever it was, he did more than create a nickname; he created an American icon.

Joe, with his moon face and joking manner, got a lot of attention, but Dad was the boss, the strong, silent leader. He decided what games they were going to play. Being that these games were in St. Louis, the best players came under the eye of Branch Rickey, the Cardinals’ genius general manager who’d pioneered the baseball farm system and built the Gashouse Gang. Dad was his kind of player. But Rickey was about to leave the Cardinals to become the president and GM of the Brooklyn Dodgers. Wanting to save Dad for them, he played a shell game, signing Joe in ’42 to a five-hundred-dollar contract so he could shield Dad and sign him the next year.

Had that happened, it might have meant Yogi Berra and not Roy Campanella would have been behind the plate for the Brooklyn Dodgers all those years. We can only guess how history would have been changed. But it didn’t go down like that because the Yankees were too sharp. They saw through Rickey’s ploy and offered to sign Dad, but for less than $500. Dad wasn’t okay with that. He told the Yankees, “Unless you give me what they gave Joe, I’m not signing.” And they did.

The hard part was getting Pietro to agree. Dad could make more driving his truck, and Pietro didn’t want his seventeen-year-old son traveling far from home. Dad’s brothers begged Pietro to let him go. “You didn’t let us go. Let him go,” Uncle Tony told him. Papa Pietro and Mama Paolina gave in, on the condition that Dad had to send money home from his paycheck, which was like $50 a month. So in ’43, off he went to the Yankees’ minor league team, Norfolk, in the Piedmont League, where he promptly got malnutrition from not eating. He was down to around 160 pounds and told Mama Paolina. She sent him money so he could buy some good food.

“Don’t ever tell your father I sent you money,” she wrote him. “You’re supposed to be sending money home.”

Believe it or not, Dad was so guilty about it that he never again failed to send money home—even from a GI’s salary while serving halfway across the globe in World War II. After Pearl Harbor, Dad knew he knew he would be going into the service in 1942 when he turned seventeen. Being a star, much less a wannabe, didn’t keep you from the draft then or, like DiMaggio, Bob Feller, Ralph Kiner, and Ted Williams, enlisting and serving in combat, laying down their bats and mitts for up to four years, interrupting Hall of Fame careers. For Dad, the timing of the war meant he would be in a uniform, and in combat, before he could vote or legally drink a beer, not that the latter age limit stopped him.

He enlisted in the navy and reported to the Little Creek training base in Norfolk, where he volunteered for amphibious duty on a “rocket boat,” a small, four-man landing craft equipped with rocket launchers—twin 50s, they were called, a pair of 50-millimeter guns. Rising to the rank of seaman second class, he would be a gunner’s mate, providing cover for landing forces storming the beaches. That meant he and his crew would have to float in place only fifteen or twenty yards offshore. At least the guys going in could get out of those landing vessels bobbing up and down, which made many vomit into their helmets and load their pants when the bullets began flying over their heads. Dad must have felt imprisoned in a tin can when he saw his first action in North Africa and then on D-Day, in the early stages of the landing on Omaha Beach.

That morning was exciting, he said. Although he recalled that rocket boat crews were, with dark humor, called by sailors “landing craft suicide squads” and LSTs, “large stationary targets.” When they went in, the boat lowered onto the water from the USS Bayfield, it felt like the 4th of July “with all the planes coming over.” Then their captain injected reality—“Keep your head down or you’ll get it blown off.” They had a simple order: shoot at anything that comes beneath the clouds. So they did, sometimes firing blindly. At one point, they shot down an American plane and then fished the pilot out of the water. He smiled when he recalled the pilot being pissed as all hell and telling him, “If you could shoot that well against the enemy, this war would be over by now.” (I’ve cleaned that up quite a bit.)

But Dad must have hit some German targets, too. He was good at whatever he did. He also got hit. He came away with a big scar across his thumb, which was split open by a bullet. But he was almost ashamed to say it was a war injury, since so many other guys got hit worse, much worse, and many didn’t make it. One who didn’t was in Dad’s crew. Many of the guys in those rocket boats felt like sitting ducks and screamed that they wanted to get on the beach. Dad, though, said, “No, I’m staying on the boat.” The one who jumped ship got to the beach. He was shot dead.

Dad also saw action during the operation at Utah Beach and was given a medal for courage by the French government. But, although he would have been given it, he never did apply for the Purple Heart, believing he didn’t deserve it. He always said the army guys had it much worse. The sailors ate well, had clean clothes and a clean bed, but the soldiers never had it easy. Another reason was that he knew Mama Paolina, who was worried sick every day he was away, would crumble into tears if she knew he had been injured in any way. That way, he didn’t have to tell her. Neither did he tell her about the German shell that landed in the rocket boat and would have left pieces of him and his mates in the English Channel had it gone off; bless the Lord, it was a dud, but too close a call for Paolina to have handled it emotionally. So Dad only told Pietro and his brothers.

When he spoke of the war years later, he was visibly shaken, remembering how he was surrounded by men cut down in the water and bodies floating in water red from blood, how he had to get bloated corpses out of the water and back to the battleship. He said that was the worst thing he ever had to do. “Horrible,” he kept saying. As if in a trance. “Just horrible.” Remember, he was only nineteen, a baby. That was why he would have memories of that day longer than almost anyone else who was there, which must have felt like a curse. I’m sure he had nightmares about it, but knowing him, he kept it inside. It’s what real men did.

Surviving was the reward, as was returning to baseball, but before he came home he had an opportunity to visit the old country. He was involved in another landing, in Italy, and when it was over, he was given a furlough. Like Michael in The Godfather, he and a buddy traveled through liberated Italy and Sicily. In 1946, he was back home, in his blue uniform and seaman’s cap, smothered with hugs and kisses by a family that rarely showed that kind of emotion. He was home in time to play ball again in ’46, the Yankees sending him to their Triple-A team in the International League, the Newark Bears, which also had future Yankee greats Vic Raschi, Joe Collins, and Dr. Bobby Brown. Not missing a beat, he hit .314 with fifteen homers and was called up in September, even after missing more than two years, still a kid, just twenty-one. It was, in baseball lingo, a cup of coffee, but he hit .364 and his first two homers, cementing that he’d be with the big club permanently in ’47.

This happened as the Yankees were rising again to the top of the pack led by the aging, and to many, ageless, DiMaggio. In Dad’s rookie year, when Bucky Harris took over as the manager, Joltin’ Joe would win the MVP leading the Yankees to their first championship in four years. And Dad would make his presence known. Bill Dickey, the Hall of Famer who had owned the catcher’s position—and the number 8—for sixteen years (missing two of his own with the navy during the war), had briefly been the team’s player-manager in ’46, then retired. Harris began with journeyman Aaron Robinson behind the plate, but went more and more with Dad, who hit .280 with eleven homers. He ended his rookie year with a bang—in game 3 of the World Series, Dad became the first player ever to hit a pinch-hit home run in the Series, off Brooklyn Dodger Ralph Branca, the victim of another dinger, Bobby Thomson’s “Shot Heard ’Round the World,” four years later.

The next year, playing 125 games, he improved to .305, fourteen homers, and ninety-eight RBIs and won the job for good—though his catching skills weren’t honed until Dickey came back as a coach in ’49 and provided him valuable instruction. Dad was always grateful, saying, “I owe everything I did in baseball to Bill Dickey.” He also owed him for that number 8. He’d worn the less eye-catching numbers 38 and 35 his first two seasons before Dickey relinquished the single digit when he retired, saying Dad was probably the only man he would have done it for. Dad also believed he had won his place on the team because Joe D took a liking to him, and vice versa, something Dad was smart enough to know would benefit him.

Dad was still Larry Berra to some sportswriters, but that quickly gave way to Yogi as his background on the Hill was spread by Joe Garagiola and Dad himself. As late as ’53, when Dad came up to bat at Ebbets Field during the World Series, the public address announcer called him “Larry Berra,” perhaps to get his goat, the way Mets fans half a century later would taunt Chipper Jones by serenading him with chants of—coincidentally—“Larry.” By any name, Dad was a fixture. Bucky Harris and Casey Stengel, who arrived in ’49, loved him because he was an amazingly consistent hitter and catcher. “He isn’t much to look at,” Casey observed. “He looks like he’s doing everything wrong, but he can hit.”

Dad was certainly Casey’s pet. Through the years he would call him things like “my man” and even “my assistant manager.” Getting as technical as the Ol’ Perfesser ever did, he once said, “Why has our pitching been so great? Our catcher, that’s why. He looks cumbersome but he’s quick as a cat.” Harris even said he thought Yogi would be the most popular Yankee since Babe Ruth. And he was right.

It seemed they could do no wrong with the new number 8. In ’51, DiMaggio retired, and a rookie named Mickey Mantle moved into center field. Through that magic decade of the ’50s, when the Yankees lost the pennant only twice, the formula never varied. Anyone could be a hero for a day, and the aces changed from Vic Raschi and Allie Reynolds to Whitey Ford and Bob Turley, but Dad and Mickey were carved in stone, holding it all together, getting the big hit, making the big play. Dad seemed to even get a mulligan every now and then.

Famously, in the closing days of ’51, just days after Mom had given birth to Timmy, Reynolds was one out from his second no-hitter of the season and the Yankees clinching the pennant. Ted Williams popped up behind the plate. Dad roamed back—and dropped it. Allie took the blame; he’d gotten too close to Dad and bumped him, knocking him down, but Dad made no excuses, he just muffed it. Allie helped Yogi get up, patted him on the back, and said, “Don’t worry, it’s in the bag.” And on the next pitch, amazingly, Williams popped up again. But this time Dad squeezed it for the momentous final out. It seemed somebody up there loved him. And why not? Everybody down here did.

I never met or heard of a Yankee who didn’t. He played so many games because even the greatest Yankees—Joe, Mickey, Whitey, Billy Martin, Hank Bauer—actually told Casey it wouldn’t be the Yankees without him in the lineup. They believed he was the key to winning and felt a lot less confident without him. Yankee swagger? Its name was Yogi Berra. Little wonder the World Series was his showcase. He never coasted, but when the pressure was on, he turned it up. World Series games are all about pressure. Those National League pitchers had no earthly way to pitch him. When I met Jackie Robinson, he told me, “Your dad was the guy we had to get out. Mickey got a lot of homers, but we felt we could pitch to him. We couldn’t pitch to your dad, because he could hit any goddamn pitch.”

Dad actually felt bad for them. He hit three homers off Don Newcombe in the ’56 World Series, two in game 7, when the Yankees beat the Dodgers 9-0—the final out of which was Jackie Robinson’s final at-bat. As Dad was rounding the bases, he called to Newk, “It ain’t your fault, big guy.” He was trying to make him feel better. But he never would have said what he was thinking—“There’s nothing you could have thrown me that I wouldn’t have hit out.” It was the same way Rocky Marciano must have felt when he fought Joe Louis and knocked him senseless.

How did he reach that point of greatness? Only God knows that secret. He seemed a classic schlub, an underdog, which made people of all walks and ages identify with and root for him. But he had remarkable physical attributes. You can’t hit like him without having his low center of gravity, his hands, and his rhythm method—hold on, I’ll explain that in a minute.

He looked roly-poly, but he stood five-eight, 190, with not an ounce of fat. As if made in a lab by a scientist with a sense of humor, everything about him was economical, no wasted space or movement. He was in complete control. Built so low to the ground, he was almost never off-balance or off-stride. People thought he used a big, heavy bat, because his short stature made any bat look big. But it was a thirty-five-inch, thirty-five-ounce bat, medium sized, and he swung it like a toothpick. Surprisingly, his hands weren’t that big. They were small, but thick like his father’s. His pinkie was the size of most people’s thumb.

He wielded the bat like a magic wand. And he had God-given instinct and reflexes. He was no singles hitter—he had 358 career homers, 313 (or 305, others say) as a catcher, a record broken first by Johnny Bench (whereupon Dad sent him a telegram reading: “I always thought the record would stand until it was broken”). But, as incredible as it sounds today, he almost never struck out, in one season only twelve times. These days, Aaron Judge or Giancarlo Stanton can do that in three games.

He was, as everyone knows, a bad-ball hitter. But, really, he was just a hitter, period. How natural was he with a bat? There was another reason why he threw right but hit left, besides most pitchers being right-handed. When he was a kid, he played in a ballpark with a very short right field line—just like the old Yankee Stadium. He took one look at the shallow fence out there and said, “I’m just gonna hit lefty.” He adjusted his swing accordingly and, bang, he was a left-handed hitter.

There was no “book” on him; no scouting report ever had the answer to getting him out, especially in the clutch. He could hit a pitch in the dirt or over his head. Pitches you’re not supposed to even swing at, he did, and he punished them. I once asked him, “Dad, how did you hit those bad ones?” He’d say, “Well, they tried to get me out with them. They thought I’d chase them. But I still got the head of the bat on them.” Then, too, he hated taking pitches for strikes, wasting precious chances, especially after being called out on third strikes early in his career. So he swung. It was all matter of fact to him. To everyone else, a mystery.

LARRY: I remember going to the ballpark during the ’50s, and I still have visions of Dad hitting a couple of home runs over the 407 mark in right center at the old Yankee Stadium. He probably would have hit .400 if he was in a smaller ballpark like they play in today. He drove a lot of balls into right center that might have gone out if it was fifty feet shorter like it is now. He made it so simple. They put too much effort into hitting today. When he took batting practice, he took ten swings and that was it. There are guys out there now taking fifty, sixty, seventy BP swings. Dad said, “I only do it for my timing. If I hit a ball out, I don’t care.” As long as he got his timing down, that’s all he cared about.

Dad said the best pitchers he ever faced weren’t Bob Feller or Bob Lemon or Jim Bunning or any other hard thrower. Billy Martin once told me, “You just didn’t throw fast balls to your dad.” You know who Dad had the most home runs off of during his career? Early Wynn, who threw super hard. Hall of Fame hard. The toughest ones for him were junkball guys. Not that anyone ever really got the best of him in the end. Remember, he almost never struck out. That was thanks to those instincts and God-given reflexes I mentioned, but also because he wanted to swing fast and quick, get his wrists in gear. Sometimes, pitchers would just give up and throw right down the pipe. His eyes would get as big as pizza pies when those came in. He also almost never broke a bat. He hit the ball right on the sweet spot every time. Dad only broke like two bats a year—I’d break two in a game. But I was subject to the laws of nature and physics. My old man wasn’t.

LARRY: I found that out when I was catching in high school and in the minors. That’s when I had a much better appreciation for his talent. We’d watch games at the house, and when there’d be a collision at home plate, he would say, “I don’t understand why these catchers stand there and take the beating they do. All they gotta do is step side to side.” He said he could remember only three times where he got bowled over because the guy and the ball got there at the same time.

He was so quick, so nimble. His instincts were perfect. He had a way of springing forward when someone was stealing home, without making contact with the batter, as he did when Jackie Robinson stole home that time. Twice on suicide squeeze plays, he fielded a bunt so quickly he tagged the bunter out then dove headlong back and tagged out the runner—yes, that’s an unassisted double play. For most catchers, that would be impossible. For him, routine. But then, most humans aren’t born to be catchers. He was.

When I played with the Pirates, two of the coaches were Harvey Haddix and Bob Skinner, who played on that 1960 team, and they talked about Dad all the time. Harvey told me about facing him in that incredible World Series. He said, “Dale, I tried to hit him once in the knee, just wanted to back him off a little bit. Son of a bitch. Had he missed it, it would have hit him right in the knee. But he pulled a line drive foul, right over the dugout!”

Harvey was lucky it went foul and got luckier still. Dad hit .318 in that Series, but the ball he hit hardest wasn’t the homer in game 7 that gave the Yankees their short-lived lead, but the bullet he hit off Harvey in the top of the ninth with the Pirates leading 9-8. Mickey was on first, McDougald on third, one out. Harvey, being very careful, fell behind 2-0. He tried to sneak one inside, and Dad sent a rocket that first baseman Rocky Nelson snared on a hop. In one of the most bizarre plays ever, instead of throwing to second to start a game-ending and Series-ending double play, he stepped on first, taking off the force, then looked up and was startled to see Mickey stop dead and dive back into first ahead of his tag as the tying run scored.

Now, about that rhythm method. What I mean by that is the way his body meshed. You’ve heard the old song “It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing”? That applied to Dad. And not just his swing. He was like a stubby ballet dancer, a Nijinsky on spikes. He’d take those little steps on the field, like he was walking on eggshells. That way, he could instantly break full stride into a mad dash. Even when he took his practice swings in the batter’s box, he had the rhythm—that ol’ swing. It was like a metronome, never varying. For most players, those mimed swings are just a ritual to bide time. Some guys made a show of it, like Rocky Colavito, who would menacingly point the bat at the pitcher. Mickey had that halfway version of his normal, powerful swing, his big back and shoulders seeming to swallow up the bat. Dad took his practice cuts with an underhand motion like a pendulum, or rocking a baby in a cradle, with a little upward spike at the end.

That was to get his timing into a groove before unleashing his real swing. His anatomy worked that way, everything working together. As Early Wynn, the great Hall of Fame pitcher who played for twenty-three years, once said, “Berra moves right with you.” Behind the plate, when he would return the ball to the pitcher, he would bring his arm way back and throw in a smooth motion. Larry’s right about how he fielded a bunt. He’d pounce like a cat, throw to first while seemingly doing a pirouette, his arms rising after he threw the way a ballerina’s arms rise up.

Even years later, when we played golf, he still had that rhythm, just walking the course. Few knew his coordination was working this way. It was just Yogi’s way. Just as his famous habit of chatting with opposing batters when they stepped in the box. Many people thought he did this intentionally, to disturb their concentration. Not so. No one ever played more relaxed and more intense at the same time. As I said, the Yogi-ism that goes “You can’t hit and think at the same time” is true, but there’s another one he could have had—“You can catch and schmooze at the same time.” At least he could. If he distracted guys, it was unintended, but perhaps paid a dividend here and there. Even Larry Doby, one of his best friends in the game and a neighbor of ours in Montclair, became more irritated with each at-bat. In his fourth plate appearance of the game, Yogi asked him how his family was. Doby had had enough.

“Please tell him to shut up,” he pleaded with the ump. “He already asked me how my family was—back in the first inning.”

But Dad carried on game-long conversations with the home-plate umps, too. Lonely guys that they are, they appreciated the attention. If guys did get distracted, it was only because he would draw them into making small talk. Hank Aaron ended one such conversation with a line that seemed to turn the tables on Dad with what sounded just like a Yogi-ism. That was in the 1958 World Series against the Milwaukee Braves. Hank was an unorthodox hitter, the way he held his bat.

“Hit with the label up on the bat,” Dad said, offering some helpful advice.

“Yogi,” said Hank, “I came up here to hit, not to read.”

Some thought Dad playing left might be a risk, since he looked nothing like an outfielder, and a catcher’s throws are geared to go ninety feet, not from the warning track to home plate. But he was such a tremendous athlete, could play anywhere, and proved it—even if Mazeroski’s drive refused to come down to him. He had played right field early in his career, and a few more games there later on, and even a game at third base in ’54 and first base in ’58. The most errors he made in the outfield in a season was two—as a catcher, it was one hundred errors in 1,699 games, a percentage of .989. In ’58, in eighty-eight games behind the plate, he made exactly zero errors. When one of the greatest catchers to ever play can simply walk out to left field—in that left field, in Yankee Stadium, which was as big as the Ponderosa and bathed in those treacherous afternoon shadows that got late early—and play flawlessly, you’re not talking about a normal player. To Dad, in fact, it was a piece of cake.

“It was like a day off playing out there,” he told me.

He wasn’t normal, in any way. He was different from old-school guys like Billy Martin and Hank Bauer, whom he loved because Hank was the toughest guy ever, a crew-cut, gravel-voiced ex-Marine with a face like a clenched fist. Dad could take care of himself. He had a temper, usually when umpires would make terrible calls. Remember the second game of the ’73 World Series, Mets against the Oakland A’s? In the ninth inning, Bud Harrelson was called out at home plate when he obviously dodged the tag. That would have given the Mets the lead, and Dad was so enraged he bolted from the dugout and charged the ump, Augie Donatelli, who made the call while lying flat on the ground. Dad must have said a few choice words, not Yogi-isms, and was ejected but kept asking, “Where’d he tag him?” Augie patted him on the butt and said, “Right here, on the ass.” And he hadn’t even bought Dad lunch first.

Of course, his most famous temper outburst was when Jackie famously stole home in game 1 of the 1955 World Series, the only Series the Yankees lost to the Bums. Both times, I knew why he went ballistic—the calls were wrong. Jackie was out, don’t even argue with me. And no one could ever argue it with Dad, who was never surer about anything in his life except falling for Mom. Not many remember this, but there was a near-identical play in the ’51 World Series when the New York Giants’ Monte Irvin stole home. It was close, very close, but Dad never argued. As he always told me, if you get beat, accept it and move ahead. But Jackie, he would say to his dying day, was out.

When ump Bill Summers signaled safe, Dad spun around and got in Summers’s face. Ripping off his mask, fire in his eyes, he brushed up against the ump and, slamming the mask against his knee pad, spat, “No! No!”—among other things—following Summers backward as he tried to escape the verbal fusillade. Yet, amazingly, that time he wasn’t ejected. As a player, not a manager, you have to stay in the game. And he actually held back on Summers, knowing what he could get away with. (Just for the record, Dad hit .417 in that Series and was robbed of another hit by Sandy Amorós’s game 7 catch on Dad’s drive into the left field corner.) In fact, though there are no official records in this category, I don’t think Dad was ever thrown out of a game, at least as a player. As Casey would say, “You could look it up.”

And I learned from that, too. I never argued with umpires. There wasn’t an umpire who didn’t like me. Every one of them I was friends with and respected. I knew how to talk to them if I thought they missed a call or called a bad strike. Umpires are a lot nicer to you if you say, “That one was close,” not “Bullshit, you missed it.” They get so much heat, they hate that. They’d get all huffy and say, “No, I didn’t! I didn’t miss shit!” and then hold it against you. If I told Harry Wendelstedt, a great ump, without any rancor, “Jeez, I thought that one was outside, Harry,” he would say, very nicely, “No, that one was good, Dale,” and maybe you’d get the next one, and he’d wink at you and say, “Don’t take that one the next time, Dale.” That’s one of those inside-baseball things Dad perfected. All the writers also loved me. I was very respectful, as was Dad.

If you do look it up, you will find that a Yogi Berra was ejected from a game—Master Yogi Berra, a black Labrador Retriever that the minor league Greensboro Grasshoppers had fetch foul balls and bats in his clenched jaws. It seems that during a game in 2009, Master Yogi did what came naturally and relieved himself on the field, and he was run by the ump. The team’s owner, taking exception, explained that Master Yogi “clearly couldn’t control himself out there.” That alone can tell you the difference between the canine and the man. The human Yogi always controlled himself.

Not that Dad didn’t want to be thrown out, at least once. I don’t know exactly when it was, but Dad told me that during spring training Casey invited Dad to go out drinking with him, which is what players basically do during spring training because there’s nothing else to do. They wound up staying up all night, and Dad crawled back to his room—obviously, there was no curfew for guys like Dad, Mickey, and Whitey. Well, the next day they had a game, and in St. Petersburg, where they had spring training, it was brutal, a hundred degrees in the shade. The last thing Dad wanted to do was catch in that heat, with no sleep and, let’s say, recovering from the night out. So, he tried like hell to get thrown out. He argued every call, threw in all the curses he knew, but the ump wouldn’t oblige.

“Yogi,” he said, “you can call me everything under the sun. If I gotta be out here, so do you.”

The World Series was his playpen. That was when he rose to eminence. Even now, more than a half-century since he retired, he still owns the record for Series games (seventy-five), at-bats (295), hits (seventy-one), and doubles (ten, tied with his childhood hero Frank Frisch), and he is second in walks behind Mickey, third in homers behind Mickey and Babe Ruth, second to Mickey in RBIs (forty to thirty-nine) and runs (forty-two to forty-one). Getting shiny rings for winning those rounds became monotonous, and Dad was unimpressed with glitz and gaudiness, anyway. After winning five rings in a row (and MVP trophies in ’51, ’54, and ’55), he had so much hardware he didn’t know what to do with it—and there’d be a lot more to come. In those days, they also gave you a ring for losing the Series, as a pennant winner. So, he wanted to get something for Mom. He requested that the people who made the rings make a pendant for her. He did that three times.

But he never kept the tons of memorabilia collectors would later go crazy about. He just didn’t care about preserving a bunch of old bats and balls and gave most of them away. Late in his life, he had no conception of what his marketing value was; he would give away signed balls, or take a paltry amount to sign a thousand balls, leaving promoters to make twice that. That was when my brothers and I stepped in and formed a company to make sure he wasn’t going to be ripped off. Since 1994, anyone who wanted to use his image or pay him for signing balls—as opposed to the balls he signed from fans, which he always did without regard for money—has had to go through us. I’ll get more into that later.

No, he wasn’t a saint, just a man who wanted to be a good Catholic but never tried to be something he wasn’t. But he was a new breed of ballplayer who had no interest hiding behind racism the way owners did for so long, pretending that integration would somehow harm the game. It’s appropriate that he came up for good in 1947, the year Jackie Robinson came to the Brooklyn Dodgers. He would have never thought of himself as a hero or a crusader for justice. But he had fought with African Americans in war, played exhibitions against the best Negro League ballplayers like Jackie and Satchel Paige. It took the Yankees until ’55 to sign their first black player, Elston Howard, a catcher, which some may have seen as competition for Yogi. But not Yogi.

In fact, Dad and Ellie became the closest of friends. Dad did all he could to work with Ellie on his catching skills, not thinking for a second that it might cost him games behind the plate. Every morning when the Yankees were on the road, they would get up early, meet each other at around seven a.m., have breakfast, and then take a long walk, talking about baseball and whatever else was on their minds. Other times they’d do some shopping, just amble down the main street of the town and stop into the stores along the way. That must have turned some heads, the two of them like Mutt and Jeff, black and white, just walking down the street.

Dad was absolutely colorblind. He didn’t even think of race, didn’t let it cloud his mind. When Casey had to get Ellie behind the plate, Yogi, the three-time MVP, the best catcher in history, never objected going to play left field or platooning with Ellie at catcher. Ellie would even learn to play left field, so he could stay in the lineup when Dad put on his mitt—and it was Ellie who turned around the 1958 World Series when he made a diving catch of Red Schoendienst’s line drive to save game 5, allowing the Yankees to win the last three games. And you know what? If that had been Dad out there, I think he would have made the same kind of catch. Those guys did that when championships were on the line.

Ellie’s wife, Arlene, was beautiful and eloquent. They would come over to the house and when Dad was hanging with Ellie, Arlene would enjoy talking with Mom. Arlene always said Dad was special, that he made their transition to the big leagues a lot easier. Dad was also very close with Roy Campanella, his crosstown rival during those World Series against the Brooklyn Dodgers. When Campy had his near-fatal car crash that left him a paraplegic, Dad was devastated.

Of course, Dad was also involved in the infamous incident at the Copacabana night club in 1957 when he, Mickey, Whitey, Hank, Billy, and their wives celebrated Billy’s birthday at the famed night spot and wound up in a five-alarm brawl with some drunk in the audience—after which the Yankee GM George Weiss traded Billy, claiming he was a bad influence on Mickey the golden boy, which wasn’t exactly true. Mickey was a bad influence on Mickey. The brawl started when the guy heckled Sammy Davis Jr., who was the headliner, with racial insults. Dad, who loved Sammy, was more a lover than a fighter, but crude racism would make him go to war again, though Hank was the one who punched the guy in the face (and was sued by the guy, in vain). What’s not generally known was that the Yankee party had gone to Danny’s Hideaway bar first and were also loaded when they got to the Copa. The team kept that part quiet.

Dad’s good friend and neighbor Larry Doby was of course the first black player in the American League. When he had played with the Negro League’s Newark Eagles, he moved his wife, Helyn, and their kids to Montclair. Larry, a quiet man like Dad, was from South Carolina, and when Bill Veeck signed him to the Cleveland Indians in 1947, he was only twenty-four. Unlike Jackie or Satchel Paige, who was signed later that season so Larry would feel more comfortable, Larry wasn’t as mature or as prepared for the racism he faced. When he met his teammates for the first time, two of them turned their backs on him. But Dad, playing for the enemy, went out of his way to greet him. As Larry said, “Yogi was one of the first players to talk to me.”

Dad himself was only in his second year in the bigs, paying his own dues. It took courage for him to go against the grain, but to him a man’s skin had nothing to do with what he saw in the man. Larry was smart, a Navy veteran who’d fought in the Pacific. He had character and backbone; he was religious and a great family man. Mom loved Helyn. And Dad and Larry became the closest of friends. I went to Hillside Junior High with Larry’s son, Larry Jr., and played ball with him at Nishuane Park, in the “black section” of town. There was a semi-pro team made up of older black guys, and Larry Jr. and I would work out with them. They thought nothing of a little white kid running around with them. And it didn’t even dawn on me until later on that they were a black team.

In Montclair, that was common. It may have been an upper-income haven, but half of our high school was black. Not once did I hear Dad or Mom make any comment denigrating the folks who lived across the proverbial tracks. For me, all I knew was that at the park I could get into games with Larry Jr. and guys who were great athletes. They played baseball, football, and basketball, and the games were like wars. It was a rush that these guys accepted me, wanted to include me, because I knew I was good if these guys thought so. I wasn’t “Yogi’s boy” or “that white boy.” I was just a kid who could play. You had to be good to play with them. If you weren’t, they’d say, “Get the hell out.” Not because you were white, but because you couldn’t play on their level.

I’m not saying we didn’t have our racial strains and incidents. But it meant something that Larry and Helyn stayed in Montclair rather than move as he bounced around the baseball map, hired again by Veeck in 1978 to manage the Chicago White Sox, a year after Frank Robinson became the first black manager, with the Indians. Dad could relate. For both, home was in Montclair, and it was there they would stay until they took their final breaths.

The numbers don’t lie. The 358 homers, the 1,430 RBIs, the .285 average—that amazing .400-plus average in the late innings. Dad won as many MVPs as Mickey, his three coming over a five-year span, and was the second American Leaguer after Jimmie Foxx to win the award back-to-back. (Mickey and Roger Maris turned the trick later.) Five times he had more homers than strikeouts; those paltry twelve times in 1950 in almost six hundred at-bats. He almost never made an error—not bad when you make 8,723 putouts. You can look over his stats all day and find gems: nine seasons in the American League top ten in homers (and nine in homers-per-at-bats); nine in RBIs; seven times in total bases; six times in runs created; nine times in slugging; eleven times in catcher’s assists; seven times in fewest passed balls.

He played nineteen years, all but a token handful games with the same team. The team. Dad once remarked, “In those days, to be a Yankee, in New York, you were treated like a god.” At least by the fans. If you want a gauge for just how much sports has changed, Dad’s highest salary was $65,000 in 1957 (the equivalent of still only $566,440 in today’s dollars). Agents? In those days, light-years before free agency and a real players’ union, you were on your own, god or not. It really wasn’t about money, though. It was about loyalty and trust. Incredible as it sounds, Dad signed eighteen one-year contracts. He was so confident in having a better year than the year before that he didn’t want to take a two-year deal because he always knew he’d get a raise, or at least make the same. And because he felt the Yankees had been good to him, his last year he took a cut, to just $52,500. Derek Jeter in his eighteenth and final season, as a shell of himself, made $12 million.

Through the dynasty, the Yankees changed players frequently, bringing in great players as pieces of the final puzzle. Great guys, too, whom I got to know later on, like Hank Bauer, Moose Skowron, Country Slaughter, Tony Kubek, Joe Pepitone, and Tom Tresh. (Elmer Valo, anyone?) But the core never changed—Mickey, Whitey, and number 8. They were carved in stone from the late ’40s to the early ’60s. And it was number 8 who kept them hungry. Bobby Richardson, the diminutive but brilliant second baseman who won the MVP of that 1960 World Series in a losing effort, recalls that after the Mazeroski homer, “In the clubhouse, Yogi was not emotional. Mantle was actually crying because he thought we had a much better team and should have won. But Yogi was already saying, ‘We’ll get ’em next year.’ And we did, we won the next two years.”

Dad finally hung them up after the ’63 season that ended when the LA Dodgers swept the Yankees. He was thirty-eight, having played 2,120 regular season and a still-record seventy-five post-season games (all World Series; that was the pre-playoff era). He knew his body had had it after so many years. In the thrilling, seven-game triumph over Willie Mays’s San Francisco Giants in ’62 that came down to one pitch, he played in only two games. In the ’63 Series, he made only one pinch-hit appearance.

What eased the sadness of having to quit was that Ralph Houk, who was moving up from manager to GM, made him manager for 1964, though baseball people said it was a big gamble. Some of those people were his best friends. Whitey, for example, said, “They gotta be kidding.” Mickey’s response was: “Yogi a manager? What will they think of next?” Even Mom had said she thought Dad might become a coach but not a manager, because he wanted people he worked with to like, not fear, him. But it was a challenge, and he never shied away from one. Leave it to Dad to make it so memorable. That summer delivered the classic Yogi story.

The team was struggling into August when, on the bus ride to the park in Chicago after four straight losses, bespectacled utility infielder Phil Linz pulled out a harmonica and began tooting it. Dad, up in the front seat, was never a harmonica kind of guy. If Glenn Miller and his band could have been there playing “In the Mood,” or Tony Bennett singing “Rags to Riches,” well, that might have been different. But he told Linz to stuff his mouth organ. Problem was, the bus was noisy, and Linz didn’t hear him. He asked what Dad said. Mickey, being Mickey, said, “Yogi says play louder.”

Linz did, and Dad erupted. He jumped from his seat and slapped the harmonica out of his hands, and would fine Linz $200, big money then. The sportswriters had fun with the whole thing, but it had serious results. The question that hung over the season was whether Dad could pull rank on guys he’d played with, his buddies, guys he’d kept secrets about, like Mickey and his drinking. But the “harmonica incident” turned it all around. In the final weeks, they just kept winning, ninety-nine games in all, and clinched another pennant. That got them into the World Series against the St. Louis Cardinals. Dad could match them in all but one thing—a pitcher who could start three games, as Bob Gibson did, game 7 on two days’ rest. Dad had to go with rookie Mel Stottlemyre, who came up late in the season and was terrific, but Gibson had enough to win.

That series loss was bitter for him, coming as it did in his hometown. I was old enough then to know what his life was about, and I could see by my mom and brothers’ reactions how frustrating and devastating such defeats were. But I remember that when Dad came home the next day from St. Louis, he never said a negative word. It was the usual front—“They got us” and “If you can’t win a game seven, you don’t deserve it”—and then, “What’s for dinner?” He was the last man on the planet to start throwing things around and kicking the furniture. When he used to take me to games, if the Yankees lost, driving home he was always calm and even-tempered.

But maybe it was best for him that he lost and was fired in that weird shuffle, when the Yankees hired Johnny Keane, who had just won the Series managing the Cards. Because it was Keane, not Dad, who fell into a ditch along with the team. Maybe Dad could have prevented that, kept making lemons out of even older lemonade. The Yankee dynasty was on its last legs, and Mickey almost literally on his. Dad was going to ask for a two-year contract to keep managing them, at a time when managers routinely were given single-year deals. He was committed to them. But if the Yankees had any life left in them, it drained when he was canned.

Dad took the firing with his usual calm shrug. “What are you gonna do?” was his mantra. Everyone knew it was unfair, and what hurt Dad was that Houk, whom he had won championships for, had betrayed him. Houk said hiring him was his “biggest mistake.” I wonder if he thought that when the Yankees finished sixth the very next season, with their first losing record since 1925, then when Houk fired Keane and came back to manage again, winning nothing in seven years. As Bobby Richardson says, “I didn’t understand [the firing] at that time and I’m not sure I ever will. I think it was a move that hurt the Yankees over a long period of time.”

Mom couldn’t believe it. She and Dad took calls for days from friends in and out of baseball who were mad as hell and commiserated with him. But she had that calming influence on Dad. She never let him get too low. She said it might be better, that only such a sudden break could have pried him away from the Yankees, and now he could start over fresh with another team, not have to deal with backstabbers like Ralph Houk. “Yogi, you should just enjoy yourself now. You earned it,” she said. As usual, she was right. As if preordained, Casey Stengel—who had been fired after the gut-wrenching 1960 World Series defeat and replaced by the ambitious Houk, his first-base coach—pushed the Mets’ brass to hire Dad as a coach, really more for PR value, reuniting the two malapropism-spouting legends to build an anti-Yankee fan base out in the new Shea Stadium, of which Casey said after a typical loss, “It has fifty-seven bathrooms, and I need one now.” The footnote of that season for Dad was that he took his last big-league at-bats, again, as a PR thing. He played in four late-season games, went two-for-nine, and when he struck out three times on fastballs, he officially retired. Even as a stunt, he had wanted to do well. But after striking out like that, he said, “I didn’t go out there to be embarrassed.”

The laughs and nostalgia were good enough for a respite, getting paid for standing in the first-base coaching box, clapping his hands, slapping Mets on the butt when they reached first base, which was a Mets rally in those last-place days. But after Casey retired at age seventy-five, things got more serious. The Mets were developing fine young players, and Dad would spend a lot of time in spring training with the catchers and giving advice in the batting cage. The future was bright. He was indeed happy, while in the Bronx they were anything but. Mickey, Whitey, Ellie, Roger—they would call Dad all the time, just to talk, because he always kept them sane. Those calls were probably happier for them than having to go out and play. Ellie and Roger got a break when they were traded and got back to the World Series, Roger with the Cards, Ellie with the Red Sox. But Mickey would continue to crumble and retire a broken man with an alcohol problem that would only get worse.

Dad, meanwhile, was enjoying his renewal. Only four years later, the Amazin’ Mets, with Dad in the first-base coaching box, owned the town. When Gil Hodges suddenly died in 1972, Yogi took over as manager—and took them from last place in August to the World Series against the Oakland A’s, one of a handful who took teams from both major leagues to the Series, the bad part being losing in seven games both times. That latter season, of course, gave rise to what may have been Dad’s greatest Yogi-ism—“It ain’t over ’til it’s over.” I was sixteen then, and the times Dad took me to Shea were magical. Nobody squirted water on me, but guys would play catch with me before games. So I was a Met fan. People never believe this but it’s true. From my perspective, Dad was a Met first.

I was coming of age as Dad was hitting his stride again, in a new phase of his career, just as I was about to embark on the first phase of mine.