CHAPTER 3

“Carmen, Let Him Go”

YOU MAY NOT believe this, but never did I brag to my school buddies that my father was Yogi Berra. They knew he was, of course, because of my name and because Montclair was like family to all of us. Everyone seemed to know everyone else. Dad was like an unofficial mayor. He would take us to the movies. We would be waiting in line and the proprietor would see us and come over and ask Dad if he wanted him to sneak us through the side door. Dad would say, “No, we’ll just wait in line like everyone else.” When we would be at the airport waiting for a delayed flight, people would start coming up to him and an airlines guy would say, “Come on, Yogi, let’s go in the back room so you’re not bothered.” He’d say, “No, we’re gonna sit right here like everybody else.” Those are moments when I learned that we’re not special.

That sort of interaction with just plain folks was why he liked to go to church every Sunday without fail. We’d all go dressed in our Sunday best, at least until my brothers and I got older and drifted from the rituals of religion. Dad didn’t say, “You gotta come.” That was one of the personal decisions he let us make for ourselves. Dad himself was a religious man, but he didn’t wear it on his sleeve and never intellectualized it. Neither was Mom overly religious. Dad’s mom, Paolina, was a much more deeply committed Catholic. She read her Bible and could recite the proverbs by heart. She went to church every day. She’d get up in the morning and head for mass. For her, it was all about God. For him, it was partly about being with people.

That was what made him buy a bowling alley with his great friend and ex-teammate Phil Rizzuto. Back in the ’50s, there were bowling alleys all over New Jersey. The alley was the hub of the social scene. And so it was natural that Dad would want to own an alley, which they called the Rizzuto Berra Lanes. I could go there and bowl all day for free; that’s about the only perk he would allow me. You know from Jersey Boys how the Four Seasons got their name, after being thrown out of a bowling alley in Jersey and seeing the sign FOUR SEASONS LOUNGE in the parking lot? Well, Dad’s brother John ran the Rizzuto Berra Lounge, inside the alley, and before they were the Four Seasons the group came in one day for an audition. And Dad was not into rock-and-roll; his thing was swing, big bands. So when they sang, either Dad or John said, “Throw the bums out!” I imagine that Frankie Valli left, walking like a man and swearin’ to God.

LARRY: Funny story. In 1970, when I turned twenty-one, Dad took me into New York to see Liza Minnelli at the Waldorf and then we went to the Copa—for Dad, a return to the scene of the crime. And guess who was headlining there? No, not Sammy Davis Jr., the Four Seasons. They sang “Happy Birthday” to me. That’s what it was like going places with Dad. Everywhere he went in New York and New Jersey, there was some kind of history involving him. He left his mark. It was like “George Washington slept here,” only it was “Yogi ate here.”

Speaking of Uncle John, Dad gave him that job running the lounge because he felt a special responsibility to his family. He was the first in the family to be more than a laborer, and he didn’t send money back only to his mom and dad but also to all his brothers and sisters.

LARRY: Yeah, he brought John in from St. Louis. He said, “You’re coming to work for me. I want you to run the bar.” And it was a real family affair there. Dad loved Phil like a brother—Phil was my godfather. And Phil’s brother Fred worked there, too. They kept it going until Dad and Phil sold the alley to them in ’64. What I remember about that bar was that it was shaped like Yankee Stadium. Dad, Phil, and Uncle John went to great lengths to build it like that. It was like Field of Dreams. Build it and they will come bowl. I did all the time. I thought I was going to be a professional bowler because at thirteen I was averaging two hundred.

Then, in a short span of time, Dad lost his parents, which devastated him, but he made sure all the children were taken care of financially. Nobody would ever be left wanting as long as he was around.

LARRY: It was so sad when Mama and Papa Berra died. Paolina went first, in 1959. I remember distinctly that she had diabetes, and it took her eyesight and both her legs. Dad would go back to St. Louis whenever he could, to take care of her as she was dying. Then, just two years later, Pietro went. I got the phone call and had to tell Dad when he and Mom got home from dinner. I told him, “Grandpa passed away. They said it was his heart.” Dad shook his head sadly and said Pietro just couldn’t live without Paolina; he didn’t die of a heart attack but a broken heart because he loved her so much.

I remember him looking crushed at those funerals. He couldn’t believe he had to bury both of his parents within such a short time. The whole clan was so close. And he kept them close. He would bring all the aunts, uncles, cousins, everybody, to our house. If they ever needed anything, he’d send money. He paid for their homes, medical bills, everything. Because Berra blood ran thicker than money.

Our house was an amazing place to grow up. In 1958, Dad only had to pay $40,000–50,000 for a fifteen-room Tudor manor on a half-acre. People would drive by and, not even knowing it was owned by Yogi Berra, stop to gawk at the place, which naturally accrued in value many times over. Mom and Dad loved it and would only move from it when all us boys were gone. It was his castle. But he was a simple kind of king, who could live large in a small, family-oriented community just across the Hudson River from the bustle of Manhattan. I always get a good laugh at something Casey Stengel once said when responding to the ridiculous notion that Yogi Berra was dumb because he said so little and had been called apelike.

“How dumb can he be,” he said, “when he lives in a mansion in Montclair, New Jersey, has a beautiful wife, three kids, and a lot of money in the bank?”

Dad himself had a variation of that. After he’d made a commercial for Puss ’n Boots cat food, he said, “People say I’m dumb, but a lot of guys don’t make this kind of money talking to cats.”

The truth is, his intelligence had nothing to do with book smarts. I was never as smart as my old man, who dropped out of school in the eighth grade. But he never craved status. He liked the fact that the town was small enough that everybody knew each other. And the house was the hub. At Thanksgiving dinner, Mom and Dad would have over not only our relatives but neighbors. Kids would be running all over, and Dad hired a horse and buggy to take them on rides around the block. Anyone could get in on a ride. He’d stand on the sidewalk, gabbing with the neighbors, personally lifting kids on and off the buggy. He loved being around people, even people he didn’t know all that well. He’d get in a conversation and it would go on for an hour.

He would also get restless and like to go out on the town every now and then with Mom, get dressed to the nines. He had sharp suits in the closet and always looked like a million bucks, but he lived frugally and kept a low profile. That was a product of his past, growing up, when he had only a couple pairs of pants and one pair of shoes. When he had the bucks and a big house, he would still wince if you used a different spoon to eat your soft-boiled egg than you did your grapefruit. He’d say, “Why are you using that damn spoon? Why do you make Mom do more work? You don’t need another spoon.”

Anything that he bought us, a bicycle, a new glove, whatever, you had to respect it, take care of it well. If he ever saw a brand-new glove he got you lying out in the rain, he’d pick it up and hide it. He’d say, “That glove doesn’t mean a lot to you, does it? So I’ll keep it.” And he wouldn’t give it back for a few days, make you miss it. Same thing if he saw my bike left out in the rain. How different were those times? Consider the kind of glove I’d leave out in the rain—a Mickey Mantle game-used one, because Mickey would switch to a new one and say to Dad, “Here, give this one to Dale.” What did I know? It was just a glove to me, so I’d play catch with a glove that would be worth thousands of dollars today. If only I knew.

You’d think Dad would have driven a big shiny Cadillac or a sports car, just because he could afford one. But he actually was a perfect match for a basic model that got the job done, and saved money. For years, he drove a compact, a Corvair, you know, the car with the engine in the trunk that Ralph Nader later claimed was unsafe at any speed. Well, maybe, but Dad drove at a safe speed. He had three of them. He’d say those Corvairs don’t need water; they’re air-cooled, less trouble. He could get in and around traffic jams and not be late to Yankee Stadium. Mom had the snazzy wheels. She had a Thunderbird, then a LeMans. She was not a Corvair type.

But in his later years he went out and bought a Jaguar. Maybe it was his midlife crisis car. Except Dad never really had a midlife crisis because he lived into his old age like a kid. He had the same sense of wonder and zest for life that he had at sixteen. There was never a time when the Yogi Berra I knew didn’t like who he was and how he was living his life.

I don’t think it was until he was inducted into the Hall of Fame that Dad saw himself in a larger prism. The ceremony was in August 1972, and what a class that was. The other inductees were Sandy Koufax and Early Wynn, and the Negro League Committee selected Josh Gibson and Buck Leonard. Dad had just missed getting in his first year of eligibility but then got only five votes fewer than Sandy did. We all drove up to Cooperstown, where he closed his speech reprising one of his most famous lines, originally delivered at a Yogi Berra Appreciation Day in St. Louis in 1972. Dressed in casual chic in a light-brown plaid suit and gray tie, slipping on his reading glasses, he took the microphone and began, “I guess the first thing I should say is I want to thank everybody who made this day necessary,” his substituting “necessary” for “possible”—something that might be called existential. As the crowd laughed heartily, he allowed himself a sly smile, having known how the line would play. Another example of how easily he lived with the caricature people had of him.

I didn’t know what he would say that day, but he did, and it was simple, humble, funny, serious, and, most of all, straight from the heart. As always, the redoubtable Mr. Berra. He thanked the Yankees and Mets organizations, which he said were “the only two organizations I’ve worked for,” which were like family to him. He congratulated the other inductees. “And last of all,” he concluded, “I want to thank baseball. It has given me more than I could ever hope for. And I hope that when I’m through with this game, I will put something back.” Mom cried all the way through it, so proud of the little guy who did everything for her. And Larry, Tim, and I shed a few tears, too.

My brothers and I lived a charmed life. We played almost every sport in school and on the playgrounds, and we were usually the stars of our teams. The only one we never really got into was basketball; me, because I played hockey in the winter. Larry, who was born in St. Louis during the 1949 off-season, matured first and made his mark as an athlete. And the funny thing is that we were so into our own lives that we didn’t realize how incredible an athlete Dad was until we’d see little flashes of it at home.

LARRY: One day Tim and I were playing wiffleball in the driveway. See, we’d take a wiffleball, wrap it with electrical tape to make it heavier and keep it from being torn apart. We’d stand thirty or forty feet from each other, and one of us would just whip the ball as hard as we could to the other. Well, Dad pulled up in the driveway, and Timmy was standing there with the ball. Getting out, Dad said to me, “Gimme the bat,” then told Tim to throw him one. And Tim was what, about nine, but he never believed anyone could hit him. He said to Dad, “You can’t hit this stuff” and wound up and threw it hard as he could. And Dad hit that little wiffleball clear over the house next door. I think that was when Timmy realized his old man was even better than him.

You couldn’t beat Dad at anything, and he’d never let us. We had this pool table in the basement. In 1959 they had Yogi Berra Day at Yankee Stadium and they gave him this real fancy Brunswick pool table. We never knew that Dad could play pool. So, he picked up a cue and made every shot, bing, bang, bing. It got so that Dad was only allowed to bank a shot in, no straight shots. We said, “No, Dad, we’re not playing you unless you bank it.” Didn’t matter. Everything went in. Couldn’t help it. He was Minnesota Fats.

The games he helped us play were the thinking games. He was unmatched at those. He taught us how to play gin, checkers, Monopoly. But he still loved to beat the crap out of us. He’d say, “I’m not going to let you win.” We would wrestle with him, Tim and I. We’d stalk and jump him. If we got him in a hold he would bite you. Or pinch you. He’d grab the excess skin and pinch it. It was hysterical. We’d all laugh about it. But when he let us up, it would hurt where he pinched you for a day. That man was strong as an ox.

My brothers were my idols. I followed them around like a lapdog. I knew I was good because I could keep up with them. They threw balls hard to me even though I was seven years younger than Larry, five years younger than Tim, and I could handle it. I was playing in games with them and their friends when I was ten. And Larry was an incredible athlete. Big and strong, six feet, two hundred pounds, he moved like Dad, the same catlike steps. I don’t have the same fluidity and hand-eye coordination that Larry and Dad had. He also had the same innate hitting ability. You couldn’t throw a fast ball by him. He was always the star. And it seemed natural when he became a catcher. But he got hit by bad luck. He was playing soccer when he hurt his knee. Not bad enough for surgery, and he’s a tough guy, so he went on playing basically on one leg.

LARRY: I went to junior high in Montclair, then a prep school, Montclair Academy, where sports was pretty much nothing. I had to beg my mother to go to Montclair High because they had better teams. Mom had tried to get me to take piano lessons, just to get me to do something besides play sports. That didn’t last long. I had to play. How many kids would actually want to go to a public school instead of one of those country club prep schools? Actually, I know one guy who would. The original Larry Berra.

When Larry left Montclair State after three years in ’71, he was signed by the Mets. Dad, of course, was coaching there and would soon be the manager, but he wouldn’t have pushed the team to sign Larry. The idea of nepotism offended him and his values. No, Larry earned it himself.

LARRY: What happened was, I was playing first base at Montclair Academy, but the catcher got the measles. The coach had me go behind the plate and the other guy never caught again. I loved it. I caught all through high school and at Montclair High made first team all-state my senior year. Even then, Dad didn’t do much to teach me the position. He said, “You want it, you go get it.” In other words, prove you can do it.

Larry did that in the bush leagues. Whitey Herzog was the Mets’ minor league director then and sent him to A ball, in Marion, Virginia.

LARRY: I probably would have had to go to Vietnam but for a technicality. When I turned twenty in 1969, they had the draft lottery and my birthday was drawn early. After college, I was eligible. But I caught a break. At 1Y, you couldn’t be drafted unless we were officially at war, and the Vietnam War was never declared; it was called a “police action.” Otherwise, I would have gone. I had no problem going if I had to. In fact, I might have had to go in ’69—actually, I likely would have been drafted twice back then, in the military draft and the baseball draft—if Mom hadn’t insisted that at least one of her kids go to college. I said, “Mom, I’ll go to school later, I promise.” She said, “No, I want you to go now.”

So I went to Montclair State College for three years, but I was like Dad. I had to go for my dream. When I turned twenty-two and didn’t need a parent to sign my contract, I dropped out and signed with the Mets. I just had to see if I had a shot. I was a good catcher and a good hitter. But I’d already had two knee surgeries by that time, so it was going to be iffy. And Dale’s right, Dad had nothing to do with them signing me—at least he said he didn’t. But he was happy about it. When I hit a home run, they put it on the board up at Shea, for his sake. I hit only that home run in the minor leagues. You know who I hit it off? A guy named Ron Guidry. I tease Gator about it all the time.

Larry could hit, but he literally couldn’t catch two days in a row because his knee would blow up like a balloon. In college, they played like three games a week, not six or seven. The knee couldn’t take it. After three or four games in a row, he was shot. He was operated on three or four times over the next couple years, and in a second minor league season could only play a handful of games on Mets teams in Batavia, New York, and Pompano, Florida, and had to retire.

LARRY: It’s up to nine surgeries now. It was just too much. I didn’t feel sorry for myself, not at all. I gave it my best shot. If there’s one thing I do regret, it’s that Dad never saw me play as a pro. But I’m proud that he did see me play nine games in my life—and in those games I hit six home runs. Those were my thank-you gifts to him.

Larry having to quit was a damn shame, because he’s an amazing athlete. He’s like Dad. Even now, if you put Larry in a bowling alley, he’ll bowl 250. Put him on a foul line and he makes ninety out of a hundred shots. Put a Ping-Pong paddle in his hand and you can’t beat him. He still plays a hundred softball games a year at age sixty-eight. He doesn’t run, he walks to first, and they have a Larry Berra rule: if he hits a ball into the gap, they’re not allowed to throw him out; they give him first base, so he can get the respect he deserves. They won’t even throw him out even if the winning run is on third. Now that’s respect.

Dad was hurt seeing Larry’s chance at a baseball career end like that. Not because it was a failure for the family name but because it hurt Larry so much and always would be the great what-if of his life. Dad regretted not being able to see Larry play. But Timmy’s time to shine came next. When he went to Montclair High, he grew to be five-eleven and 190, and he was the most physically gifted of all of us, built like a horse.

LARRY: Timmy never backed down from anything or anyone. I was older, but he laid the law down to me: don’t touch my stuff, keep outta my room. And you did. You didn’t want to cross him. We didn’t know what he might do if he snapped.

We were so different in personality. Larry was stable, responsible, Timmy completely the opposite, me somewhere in between. Timmy was mysterious, aloof. You couldn’t predict what he’d do. He was a renegade. He’d go off hunting and fishing. There’d be shotguns and BB guns in his closet and squirrel and raccoon pelts draped his walls. Dad, Larry, and I would be in the kitchen talking and from Timmy’s bedroom window upstairs, we would hear the sound of a .22 rifle going off. Bang-bang. He’d run down the stairs, pick up his kill, bring it to the garage, and skin it. The rest of us didn’t do anything like that—outside of the war, Dad never fired a gun in his life. I think he saw the devastation and death associated with gunfire and didn’t want to hold a gun again. It was good enough to watch a shoot-’em-up cowboy show on TV.

Timmy was our James Dean. He rode motorcycles, which Mom and Dad weren’t happy about. But all they could do was say, “What the hell, just don’t kill yourself on the New Jersey Turnpike.” That couldn’t have happened, though, because he was always under complete control. He was a hell of a baseball player, too. He could throw a guy out from deep in the outfield, throw ninety miles an hour. But he had a football mentality and excelled as a receiver. He liked to mix it up, ram his head into other guys’ chests. If you want to know, he was kinda nuts, in a good way. People were attracted to him, girls like bees to honey. What can I say? Ladies like Berra men.

TIM: I wouldn’t say I’m James Dean. I’m gonna be seventy in a few years, and I’m still trying to figure out who I am. But I’ll tell you what. Being Yogi Berra’s son feels very good. Only three guys can say that.

We were all thrilled when Timmy won a football scholarship to UMass in 1970. Dad, Mom, and I would drive up to Amherst to watch the games. We’d sit with Frank Tripucka and his wife—their son Mark was on the team—then we’d go to dinner with them. At the time, Julius “Dr. J” Erving was starring on the basketball team. The football team was less well known, but under a new coach, Dick MacPherson, they started winning. In Tim’s four years he broke school records for both kick and punt returns, and as a senior he had 922 yards receiving. He finished there as the number four receiver in UMass history.

The only question was his speed. NFL wide receivers were supposed to be blazing fast, and that was one thing Dad couldn’t give us. The top receiver drafted in ’74, Lynn Swann, was almost a carbon copy of Timmy in size but with blinding speed. Timmy had no idea if he’d get a call. In those days there was no televised draft. We sat around all day waiting for the phone to ring. Finally, he was chosen in the seventeenth and last round, 421st overall, by the Baltimore Colts, who were in turmoil. The year before, Johnny Unitas was traded, and they had gone 4-10. The coach, Howard Schnellenberger, drafted receivers for his quarterback, Bert Jones. (A side note: a twenty-one-year-old Bill Belichick, whose dad was an assistant coach at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, was a summer assistant, really a ball boy, with the team at the time.)

The Colts, obviously trying to get some PR mileage out of our name, threw a press conference when Tim signed, Dad standing beside him, beaming. Dad, Mom, Larry, and I were so proud. We didn’t expect him to start, but he was great on the kick returns. But that season was a horror show. They went 2-14, and Schnellenberger was fired after the third game. We went to that game, a 30-10 blowout in Philadelphia, and I went to the locker room to see Tim afterward. When I got in, I saw Schnellenberger, having been told he was fired, crash through his office door and split. He couldn’t wait to get out of there. And Tim got a raw deal the next year when the Colts cut him. He was pissed about it, and so was Dad, with reason. He’d never even been tried as a receiver. He then went to the New York Giants and was the last cut of training camp. The receiver coach told him, “Tim, in my eyes you made this team, but I can’t do anything about it.” The head coach, Bill Arnsparger, made the decision. He had built those great Miami Dolphins defenses for Don Shula, but he didn’t know anything about offense. Timmy said he was a real jackass.

LARRY: He had a bad shoulder, too. I think he popped it out and they wanted to do surgery on it, and he didn’t want to do it.

TIM: Dad was a little angry. When the Colts released me, I told him about it and he shook his head; he didn’t say it, but he was mad. Good and mad. The Giants thing, that one really hurt, both of us. But it was like he always said, nothing is guaranteed. You can’t rely on others to give you a break. You have to leave no doubt, and I guess I didn’t do that. I think that was a lesson to Dale. He had to be the one to pick up the flag.

Tim said, okay, I gave it my best, now it’s time to turn to real life. Larry had to do that, too. He went into the construction business. He puts Environmental Protection Agency–approved, nonporous floors in pharmaceutical plants so that if there’s a chemical spill the floors don’t crumble. He put a lot of thought into it and didn’t just settle for the usual sort of construction. He was looking at the future realities of that industry. And Timmy, who’s a fitness nut, built and for a long time ran a fitness place called the Yogi Berra Racquetball Club. And he still thinks nobody can hit his wiffle fastball.

Before my physical gifts kicked in, I had been handed down the morals, perseverance, and lessons of being a Berra, mostly because I saw those traits in my brothers. They were my idols in a more relevant way than Dad was. The sports stars didn’t really grab me, but I did love guys like Bud Harrelson, Tom Seaver, and Cleon Jones, the first big leaguers I had any recognition of. I had met them when Dad was coaching on the Mets. In fact, our house had been like a sleepover party at times when various Mets coaches like Joe Pignatano and Rube Walker and players like Seaver, Buddy, Ken Boswell, and Jerry Koosman came over. They’d sit with Dad for hours talking baseball, and it would be too late to drive home and they’d sleep over. Then they’d get up, Mom would make them breakfast, and they’d go. I’d share waffles and a bathroom with Tom Seaver. You think that wasn’t surreal?

In fact, Buddy is my all-time favorite player—with an asterisk, of course, since I never got to see Dad play. He seemed like the bat boy next to the other guys, but he didn’t concede an inch. He usually batted in the eight hole but got a lot of clutch hits during the ’69 miracle season when everything went right. What he did hitting eighth was an example I would remember. But the biggest reason I liked Buddy was that when Dad took me to Shea when I was eleven or twelve, I didn’t have a Mets uniform to put on so I could play catch on the field, and Buddy gave me one of his, because he was so small and his uniform fit me. So he was my main man. He taught me the fundamentals of playing the infield.

I was seventeen in 1973 when Dad became the Mets’ manager, after Gil Hodges tragically died of a heart attack while playing golf on an off day late in spring training. It was a shock to everybody, especially to Dad, who absolutely revered Gil. Rather than hiring an outsider as the manager, the team made a wise move naming Dad, because he smoothed the transition and the players loved him the way they did Gil. But he was so different than Gil, who was a stern and distant man. Gil never would have brought players and coaches home because he wanted his players to respect him through fear; guys were physically scared of him. Dad was the opposite. He was tough when he had to be, but he wanted players to respect him because they liked him.

As I grew up, my brothers were really my only idols, not any sports stars. They were the ones who I looked up to and followed around until I was old enough to hang with my friends, and old enough to take sports seriously.

TIM: Dad had never influenced me in deciding whether to play baseball or football. I was good at both sports and could have had a career in either one. I just wasn’t into baseball that much. But at no time did Dad believe Larry or I were as good as Dale. He says we were better athletes. Uh-uh. No way. With Dale, Dad saw a future big leaguer as a little kid. He would say, “If Dale sticks to it, he’ll be good.” That was saying a lot for him. The most he ever said about any of us was when he would brag to his friends and say, “My kids are good.” And we were good. But Dale had a chance to be great.

I played every sport under the sun and took it to the max at Montclair High. I’d bloomed to near six feet and 180 pounds. Someone said I looked like a cobra, all arms and legs, and I had Dad’s strong wrists. I wasn’t really built to be a catcher, but I could suck up ground balls like a vacuum, so I played third and shortstop. Again, Dad made it clear he was not going to be our personal coach. And that helped us, too, because it took the pressure off. I don’t think there’s another son of a great player who didn’t feel complete pressure to follow their father. Take Mickey’s kids. Mickey Jr. and David were overwhelmed with pressure.

Mickey was the idol of millions of Baby Boomer boys, the quintessence of manhood and sports heroism before anti-heroism became the thing. And Mickey was fun in his early days. It was when he got older that the drinking caught up to him. I know Mickey’s kids struggled with the pressure of having Mickey as their dad. My dad was much more responsible. He cared more about living a clean life, being a family man. He was no prude; he could put away those vodkas. But I never once saw him drunk. He knew when to stop. He never would have wanted us to see him not in control of himself.

LARRY: Lord, how that man could drink. He only drank vodka but would say one thing to never do is mix. You don’t mix. He didn’t mean mixed drinks but having a Scotch, then a vodka, then beer. He said that was the worst thing you could do. But he could drink. He’d come in at six p.m. and say to me, “Get me a vodka.” His drink was vodka on the rocks. He’d have two or three or four of those things and get up totally unaffected, like he’d drank Yoo-Hoo. None of us ever saw him drunk. He once told me why. “I looked at the ceiling,” he said, “and when it started to move, I’d stop drinking.”

He also never wanted any of us to think we were his “favorite” son. It wasn’t a Smothers Brothers thing where one brother would look at another and say, “Dad always liked you better.” Dad made sure of that. He told all of us the same exact thing: if we wanted to play, we damn well better be good at it, because nobody would give us a break because of our name.

LARRY: Dale says he wasn’t spoiled, but he was. He was the baby of the family, so he was spoiled a little bit. He was Daddy’s little boy. Don’t let him tell you he wasn’t, either.

Dad’s advice was fundamental to life in general, but his wisdom had meaning applied to baseball. There were Yogi rules—I’d call them the ten commandments, but there were a lot more than ten. The first was be punctual—which meant, in his case, ten minutes early, or you were late, and you’d take hell for it. Then there was be happy with what you have, don’t obsess about wanting more. Don’t cheat yourself; always play hard and never look to take the easy road. Never dwell on success, and learn from failure. When other kids were just trying to hit a fastball or curve, I was already on a deeper level. I was trying to train my swing to get the best wood on any pitch. I had the ability to drive in a run from second base with two outs, or from first by finding a gap in the outfield. Dad said he never guessed what a pitcher would throw, not one single pitch, and neither did I. Even so, he had a general idea. Hitting is all about recall. Dad wouldn’t know what he hit for a home run. He saw it and hit it. But he’d remember what got him out and set himself for it. Usually guys know exactly what they like to hit. They cultivate that knowledge over years and years, and they hold it dear. But Dad only cared about what got him out.

That’s how he caught, too. He would know what got a hitter out the last time, and he’d play a little mind game with the guy. Like with Ted Williams, if Ted would come up and it was like 5-1 in the ninth inning with two outs, he would never show him the pitch that he would use to get him out in a big spot the next game. He would give him pitches he could hit hard and dare him to do it. He was saving the out pitch. That was why he would tell me, “Remember what the pitcher threw that got you out. Don’t remember what you hit.”

Hey, you can’t argue with success. He never looked bad on a pitch. I did. A lot. But I knew what he must have felt like when I was doing well and could hit any pitcher. What was more important was to be the kind of man he was, which was even tougher to do than hit a round ball squarely. He had a favorite expression, which was more of a warning: “You have a rope, and if you hang yourself with it, that’s your problem.” That sounds like another Yogi-ism, but it was his way of saying our lives, our futures, were in our hands, and we had better give our all, focus, be the men we had to be. As I grew, we made a habit of replaying a simple dialogue, which went like this:

“Are you all right?”

“Yeah, Dad, I’m all right.”

“Kid, that’s all I wanna hear.”

That was all I wanted to hear.

There was never a time when I didn’t know I was going to be a professional athlete. I don’t even know what I might have been if I didn’t become a ballplayer. All I did was play sports, all day, every day. Five or six sports at a time. I’d start by putting on my Little League uniform in the morning, and by the time I came home at 5 o’clock, I had also played tackle football in that same Little League uniform. There were no cell phones. Your parents didn’t follow you around. Mom and Dad wouldn’t know where I was. I could have gone anywhere. But I knew one thing: I had to be home when the streetlights came on. That was Grandpa Pietro’s rule for Dad, and his rule for my brothers and me. The eggheads call that laissez-faire. And the freedom gave me some slack to get into trouble. Not much, and not serious trouble. But I could be a bad boy. I would egg houses, throw snowballs at cars, rocks at girls. I knocked a girl’s teeth out with one of those rocks. I threw a stink bomb into a moving van once, and it stunk up all the furniture. I pretty much got away with it because Dad and Mom didn’t know. I could talk myself out of trouble. I had that gift.

But Larry’s wrong. Dad never spoiled me. It wasn’t like I had a chauffeur drop me off at school. My first car was a used, faded gold Chevy Nova he bought me. I had to climb in the window because the door wouldn’t open. He made it clear he wasn’t going to get me a new car. He said, “You’re lucky to have this.” As I said, that was another Yogi rule—whatever you got, you’re lucky you got it. Like his Corvair, he’d point out that it was economical, cheap on gas. “If you want a new car,” he said when he bought me the Nova, “you go save up and get it. Otherwise take this and be happy you have it.”

As I got older, Dad didn’t care what I did when I jumped in that car, but I had to be back not when the streetlights went on but by midnight. If you started to ask for a later time, he would repeat it, more emphatically. “Be in by midnight.” By then, I had stopped throwing rocks at girls and began wanting to do other things with them. Dad wouldn’t say it, but I knew what he was thinking. I’d bring over a girlfriend or something, and Dad would say what a wonderful young lady she is, then add slyly, “She’s good-looking, too.” That was code. It meant “Go for it, kid.” He’d wink and pull me aside as I was walking out the door with the girl.

“By midnight,” he’d say. Translated from the original Yogi, that meant “Don’t waste too much time before getting down to it.”

If I put up an argument, his eyes would bore a hole in you. “Midnight,” he repeated, in a way that ended all discussion.

Those diversions aside, my entire teenage existence was really a launching pad for my sports career. I started in three sports as a freshman. A guy named Connie Egan was my baseball coach at Montclair High, and he guided me along, though my favorite sport was—and still is—hockey. Love to play it, love to watch it. Played it since I was seven. And we had a great hockey team. I played left wing and could move, loved to fire shots. In fact, it was my hockey games that Dad came to the most. He couldn’t make it to the baseball games because he had his own to worry about. But in the winter, he would get over to the outdoor arena we played in. He had his favorite place to watch from, standing behind the goalie. He didn’t sit in the stands because he didn’t want to be a distraction.

But I think he had a little psych-out game with the opposing goalies. I’ve since talked to some of those guys, and they said, “You know, your dad used to stand behind me, and he made me very nervous.” One guy who went to West Essex High said he put some snow on the end of his stick and flicked it at Dad. “Watch it, kid,” he told him, and that was the end of that.

Larry’s right about Dad getting up at four in the morning so he could take me to hockey practice at five. That was the only time we could get the ice. Dad would sit there with his coffee and watch me for an hour and a half, then take me home. He knew I loved hockey, and he always said, if you do something, you better do it good. That meant getting my ass out of bed. I didn’t complain. I scored at least twenty goals every year. As a senior, I was All-State in three sports: baseball, hockey, and football. In my senior year playing baseball, I went fifty-two for one hundred—that’s .520—with eighteen home runs and sixty-five RBIs. All in thirty games.

They treat you different when you do things like that. I would come to school and leave my books in the gym office rather than carry them around. Never looked in ’em. When we had a test, two days before it I’d meet with the teacher, and he would let me take it in advance. I’d get my C’s and that was all I needed to keep playing sports. I was starring in How to Succeed in High School Without Really Trying. And no one thought it was unfair. I don’t think it’s because of who my dad was. I just think I had earned it, being the star jock. That’s just how it is.

LARRY: Timmy and I had the same privileges. I walked into gym class, and my baseball coach was my gym teacher, and he looked at me and said, “What are you doing here?” I said we had to take the gym test, climb the rope. He said, “You have to catch today. You’re not getting hurt doing this stuff. Go over there, pull on the rope, just lift your feet an inch off the floor.” So I did that, and he goes, “Good, you got a B. Now get the hell out of here.”

In the end, I had a choice to make. I’d played defensive back and wide receiver, just like Tim, received around twenty scholarship offers, baseball and football. I could have gone pretty much anywhere. Bobby Richardson was the baseball coach at South Carolina and he’d recruited Whitey Ford’s son, Eddie, for his teams.

“You going to send Dale to play for me?” Bobby asked Dad.

“That’s up to him, Bobby,” he told him.

There was never any doubt in my mind about that. And I didn’t see the sense of waiting three, four years before starting a career. I wanted it all, right now. Just like Dad had.

The major leagues had their amateur draft in early June. There were some great Jersey boys on the board that year, like Rick Cerone and Willie Wilson. And, no, Dad wasn’t about to pull any strings. That’s not how it works with scouts. They’re not going to do anybody any favors. Dad knew all the scouts, but they didn’t do favors with Mickey’s kids, who failed in the minors, so why would they have done that for me? I was good, and everyone knew it. At times, there were fifteen scouts in the stands staring mainly at me.

I knew the Pirates were high on me. They sent Gene Baker, who oversaw the entire East Coast scouting. Then came Howie Haak, the special adviser to general manager Joe Brown. Howie had been around forever. Back in the early ’40s, as a traveling secretary in the Cardinals’ chain, he found a young Stan Musial. When Branch Rickey moved to Brooklyn and then Pittsburgh, Howie was his chief scout, plucking an unknown Puerto Rican outfielder named Roberto Clemente. Howie was the most famous scout in baseball next to Tom Greenwade, who signed Mickey Mantle. He had signed to the current team Willie Stargell, Manny Sanguillén, and Rennie Stennett. And now he wanted me.

Howie was a character out of an old baseball movie, gray-haired, spitting tobacco juice, habitually getting up and walking around the stands. I played well, so I figured that if a guy like that was there, I had to be on their list of high draft picks. But I was still nervous. Maybe he’d seen something in my play he didn’t like. Maybe I thought I was better than I really was. That draft day, I went to a luncheon for area high school ballplayers at a local restaurant, the Robin Hood Inn. There was no way for me to keep tabs on the draft. Again, this was the dark ages, no cable, no internet, no real-time coverage. I only learned later that Mets coaches tried to convince the GM, Joe McDonald, to draft me first, but they didn’t. And Dad may not have wanted to put me under that kind of pressure or open us up to questions of nepotism. After all, Larry had been signed by the Mets, and Dad didn’t want the team to be the refuge of the Berra family. I wouldn’t have wanted that, either.

During the first round, one of the owners of the restaurant came over and told me, “You’ve got a phone call, Dale.” It was Joe Brown. He said, “The Pirates are making you our first-round draft pick.” It was the twentieth pick, meaning that Howie really had liked what he’d seen. There’s a picture of me that day wearing a Yoo-Hoo shirt, so I must have worn it for luck. Media coverage of it was mild, focusing on the angle that the Mets’ manager had bypassed his son, which incidentally came only a year after the Yankees had passed on Whitey Ford’s son Ed, a shortstop, in the first round. It didn’t matter to me. And Dad, always Yogi-like, played it cool.

“I’m very happy he was drafted by the Pirates, even though they’re in our division,” he said. “If I didn’t think he could play, I wouldn’t let him sign. I didn’t get to see him play but twice, but I only had to see him swing the bat a few times to know that he’s a prospect.”

LARRY: We were happy as heck because Dale was not your model-A student, so we knew he wasn’t going to go to college. He did it the way Dad did, getting right to it.

I was thrilled to go that high. Besides, the draft order didn’t prove anything. The top pick was Danny Goodwin, a catcher, who also had been drafted number 1 four years before but chose to go to college and never really panned out in the majors. Those who did came after, like Lee Smith (recently elected to the Hall of Fame), Carney Lansford, Bob Horner, Lou Whitaker, and Dave Stewart. The only position player who made the Hall of Fame from that draft, Andre Dawson, didn’t go until round 11. John Tudor went in round 21.

In baseball, there is no truer reality than the one Jackie Robinson used as the title of his autobiography: I Never Had It Made. All of us that day had visions of the Hall of Fame dancing in our heads. And all but two of us would get nowhere close.

Two days later, Gene and Howie both came to my house armed with a contract. I didn’t even think about hiring an agent at that point—hell, my agent was a Hall of Famer who was also my dad, whose adviser on all things was my mom. This was on a Sunday, and the Mets were playing at Shea that afternoon, so they didn’t come over until early evening. I was still a minor, so one of my parents needed to sign, just as Pietro Berra had cosigned Dad’s first contract. But if those guys expected to steamroll us, they didn’t know Yogi or Carmen Berra.

It had to be uncomfortable for Howie and Gene, with a Hall of Famer standing right there with his son. I would think a scout would be uncomfortable trying to crack nuts with Yogi Berra. For a long time, Howie and Dad talked about old times, just like you’d expect two baseball lifers to do. They reminisced all night long, even during the negotiating, recalling hitters and pitchers from the ’40s. It was like being at a reunion. But Dad didn’t lose sight of doing right for me. He would never have been bamboozled into accepting a bad deal. So we all sat around the living room table for hours. Howie kept asking, “What’s it going to take to get Dale to sign with us?” Dad kept saying, “I don’t know.” But Mom was more forceful.

“A lot of money,” she said.

She had a number—$100,000. Hearing that, Howie laughed and said, “Should I get up and leave now?” and “They’ll hang me if I go back to Pittsburgh with that number.” But Mom didn’t budge. “That’s what it is,” she said. We took a break, and Mom served what Howie said was the best meat loaf he ever had in his entire life. It got late—in this case, not late, early—and, just like those Met players, they spent the night at the house. I have no idea if this is unprecedented or not. But it was clear they didn’t want to leave without a deal.

I hadn’t said much, but I was feeling very uncomfortable about haggling over money. I tossed and turned and in the middle of the night I got up and went into my mom and dad’s room. They were sleeping, and I woke them up. “Mom,” I said, “I really want to play. I don’t want to hold out. What they’re offering me I want to take.” Dad, who seemed to think Mom was being overprotective of me, agreed with me.

“Carmen, let him go,” he said, either meaning from home or to the Pirates—or both.

The next morning, around the breakfast table, we agreed on $50,000. That was my bonus, only $15,000 less than Dad had made in 1955 at his peak. The salary was only $500 a month, the standard minor league minimum. It could have been five dollars for all I cared. And so I signed, opening the door to my dream.