CHAPTER 6

Eight Miles High

EVEN AFTER I became established, to a lot of media people I was still Yogi’s boy. Often when a story was written about me, that was the angle. In ’82, a reporter heard me ask Bill Madlock when he came in the clubhouse if it was raining. When he said it was, I asked, “Wet rain or dry rain?” That, wrote the reporter, “certainly seem[ed] to qualify [Dale] as a definitive chip off the old block.” Yes, it did sound like a Yogi-ism—I was pretty good at giving my own versions, in jest, because people kind of expected me to, such as when Harding Peterson asked me how I compared myself to Dad. “Basically,” I said, “our similarities are different.” Harding sort of blinked. Then, a few minutes later, he came back. “Did you say what I think you said?”

I never minded giving the writers what they wanted to write that same “chip off the old block” story, over and over again. As long as I was getting my due as a player. There were a few other sons of famous players who’d made the big leagues with me, such as Bump Wills, Bob Boone, Buddy Bell, Roy Smalley—and, of course, Cal Ripken Jr., who would win a championship in his second full season with the Baltimore Orioles in 1983. We all earned our place. We all shared the pride of our birthrights and the pride we had in ourselves. And Dad was still there for me, at a distance. During the season, he would call me a lot—even from the dugout, during a game. Our game would end before the Yankees game, and he’d call our clubhouse between innings. Don’t ask me how he knew the number, he just did; he had all kinds of little inside information like that. Our trainer would pick up and call to me, “Hey, kid, your old man’s on the phone.”

The first time he did that I said, “What do you mean he’s on the phone? The Yankees are playing right now, for Christ’s sake.” Sometimes I wish he hadn’t called. Because he’d say something like, “What the hell, Dale. You struck out three times tonight?”

“How do you know that?”

“I got the box score.”

“Dad, Sutton’s hard.”

“He’s gotta throw it over the plate, don’t he? Hell, I didn’t strike out three times in a month.”

He always thought it was fair to compare himself to mere mortals. I’d laugh at it. “Dad, Christ almighty, you’re a different animal. Nobody can hit like you.”

He never knew why that was. If he could do things, he couldn’t understand why everyone else couldn’t. I mentioned before that he never thought he was in a slump; he just wasn’t getting hits. He told me, “I went zero-for-thirty-five once when I was going bad,” which is hard to believe. “What did you do?” I asked. He said, “I didn’t do nothin’. I was hitting it good, so I knew they’d be droppin’ in soon, and they did.”

In general, though, he still wanted to keep that buffer zone between us. We would talk a lot, mainly about pitchers I was about to face and so on. I’d say, “I got Andújar tonight,” and he’d have a little scouting report on him, inside his head. These conversations were important, but to me the most important thing about them was how they ended, with our standard dialogue. Him asking me if I was all right, me saying I was, and then him saying what I always waited for.

“Kid, that’s all I wanna hear.”

The ’83 season was a replay of ’82. We were at or near the top of the National League East all season. We began September tied with the Phillies, and the Cardinals and Expos were just behind us. We had a six-game winning streak midmonth that kept us up there, but then lost three of four, fell out of first, and when we lost four of our last five, that was all she wrote. We finished second, six games behind the Phillies, with the same record as the year before, 84-78. I played all but one game—Mr. Iron Man, if only for one season—hit .251 with ten homers and fifty-two RBIs. That was the season I led the league in intentional walks, nineteen of them, batting in that number 8 hole. For trivia freaks, that was two more than Mike Schmidt, the Hall of Famer Mike Schmidt, who hit thirty-five homers and walked a league-high 107 times. Remember this. I had fifty-two RBIs even while getting walked nineteen times intentionally, meaning those were situations when I would have had the chance to drive men in or they wouldn’t have bothered walking me. I would have had the chance to have a lot more RBIs. Teams knew I’d led the league shortstops in RBIs the year before, they knew not to pitch to me. I had sixty-one walks in all. Hitting eighth.

I also led the major leagues in catcher’s interference, when their mitts would make contact with my bat or get in my way when I hit the ball. Why that was I don’t really know; it just seemed a coincidence, but a record’s a record, right? Chuck even asked me once in San Francisco if I could get an interference on purpose. I said, “No, Skip, I can’t.” Still improving, doing my thing on and off the field. I’d go back to the hotel, maybe do some coke, and not touch it for a week afterward. It all seemed very natural. I wasn’t bothering anyone, causing a disturbance, making any trouble for myself. You couldn’t have guessed I was using coke because I was hyper to begin with, and coke never really altered my outward behavior because I didn’t do all that much at a time. Again, the “right” way to do it.

After the season, I returned to Montclair. My brothers and I have always lived within a mile or so of each other, in and around Montclair. I always kept in shape during the off-season, and in ’84, I anticipated a real breakout season. So did the Pirates, because they gave me and Johnny Ray five-year contracts to lock both of us up. My deal was for $1.5 million, a real vote of confidence. However, that was when the worm began to turn. For the first time, I had to deal with an injury. In late August, I developed bursitis in my elbow and it became infected. My right arm blew up twice its size, and I had to go on the disabled list for something like fifteen games. During that period of inactivity, I put on a few pounds, which didn’t help, and my arm was never really right. The thirty errors I made that season were a product of that. I still played 136 games, meaning that other than the time I spent on the DL, I was almost always in there. But my numbers fell—.222, nine homers, fifty-two RBIs. My intentional walks dropped to eight.

I was struggling. We started off bad and got worse, mired in last place from April 25 on. We ended 75-87, an incredible twenty-one and a half games behind. But when you’re fortunate enough to put a big-league uniform on and play a kid’s game for a living, even when you’re out of it you have to try to play the game with the same passion as if you’re in a pennant race. You’d still rather be there than any other place in the world. It was my job to get out there and play. But it was never just a job. There was always something to play for. You go as hard as you can. It’s the same feeling you have when you’re in Little League. But everybody is judged on their numbers. What Chuck had said about me and Johnny was true, and Johnny didn’t let him down. He hit .312 that year, leading the league with thirty-eight doubles for the second straight year and playing his position almost flawlessly. But I didn’t hold up my end. That was the year I should have taken off, but I went in reverse.

As a team, we all did. Only five years after the hysteria all around us, we were a last-place team. The pitching was still good, but Pops was gone and Parker and Moreno were traded, Omar to the Yankees. Guys like Marvell Wynne and Doug Frobel were in the outfield, and nobody hit more than seventeen homers. The fans had grown impatient. That is, the fans who came to the park, which for some games looked like a sea of empty seats. We all were showered with boos at some point, and I got a good share of the abuse. And you know what? I couldn’t blame them. I was a big New York Giants football fan, and I used to boo Phil Simms like everybody else when he threw interceptions. The fact was, I had shown a lot of potential, and realized some of it, but while I was still productive, I was underachieving. Looking back, I know why, although I refused to see it then.

The first sign that something was going south was my reflexes. I saw the ball as well, I wasn’t slower, but my reaction time ticked down. That doesn’t happen when you’re twenty-eight unless you’re doing something to affect that part of your brain. If I had known that it was the coke, I would have stopped immediately—or at least I hope I would have. I may have been too stupid to stop, anyway. Instead, I passed it off as just a bad year. After all, I felt good. I wasn’t overdoing coke. I didn’t miss games. I didn’t miss workouts. I was always there, on time. I didn’t need to use coke in the morning to get myself rolling, didn’t ever do it before a game. I never got into the more potent and dangerous forms of using coke, freebasing or injecting it. I was deathly afraid of that, and I never saw anyone ever doing it that way. I was a moderate user.

What I was fooling myself about was the cumulative effect. Cocaine will eat into your brain, your systems, your reactions. All of them will slow down. The insidious thing is that it takes time for that to happen, so you have to look for warning signs. I wasn’t looking. But even though I kept telling Dad I was all right, I wasn’t. What he didn’t know—because I didn’t know—was that I was sabotaging my career and my life, and dirtying the surname I wore so proudly on my back. And now, as fate would have it, I was going to be a lot closer to him. Like right there in the same dugout.

Fate does work in mysterious ways. After the Yankees won ninety-one games but finished third in ’83, George Steinbrenner had fired Billy Martin for the third time (though he officially remained with the team as an adviser). A day later, December 17, Dad signed a two-year contract at age fifty-eight to manage for a second time the team he had given most of his life to. The move was met with delight all throughout New York and among the players. Dad, as always, was cool about it, saying he hadn’t asked for the job and that they didn’t have far to go to win it all. But after spending eight years as a Yankees coach, I could see he was excited about being the main man again, and the family was overjoyed for him.

If George hired him to be a name on a marquee and take orders from above, he found out Yogi Berra was no puppet. He had his own ideas and made some changes right away. The Yankees were an old team and he wanted to go with young guys he believed in. The best of them was Don Mattingly, who like me had started in pro ball at age eighteen, torn up the minors for four years, and made the big club in ’83, hitting .283 in ninety-one games, splitting first base with the aging Ken Griffey Sr. Dad also wanted to ease in a replacement at third base for thirty-eight-year-old Graig Nettles, as great a glove man as there ever was but in decline. Dad traded for veteran Toby Harrah, and then dealt Nettles to the San Diego Padres, but he had his eye on Mike Pagliarulo, who like Donnie was only twenty-three and started the season in Triple-A. Dave Righetti, just twenty-five, had won fourteen games as a starter in ’83. Dad moved him into the bullpen, as the closer.

Dad was thrilled to have great veterans like Dave Winfield in the outfield, Don Baylor at DH, Willie Randolph at second, and my old teammate Omar Moreno in center. But he wanted the young guys—his guys, he called them, channeling Casey Stengel—to take over and didn’t want to wait. When the Detroit Tigers got off to a ridiculous 32-5 start and the Yankees were ten games behind at the end of April with an 8-13 record, he said, “I’m playing my guys.” Griffey went to center field so Mattingly could play every day. Roy Smalley was replaced at shortstop with Bobby Meacham, who was also twenty-three and in his first full season. In July, Pagliarulo was called up.

All this activity didn’t pay off right away. On July 3, the team was a staggering twenty-one games behind, still nine games under .500. George, imploding with every loss, called Dad into his office—never a good thing. He didn’t fire Dad, which might have been suicidal, but he did all but order him to play the veteran guys Dad had moved out. George seemed particularly miffed about the kids at the corners and lobbied for Steve Kemp to play first base, and Smalley third. Dad listened, sat up straight, and threw down the gauntlet.

“I’m playing Mattingly at first and I’m playing Pags at third,” he said. “And if you don’t like it”—now he picked up a pack of matches and threw it across the desk—“fucking fire me.” Then he strode out of the room.

It’s doubtful anyone had ever spoken like that to George, who always lived up—or down—to his moniker of “the Boss.” He must not have known what to say—another first. But as Dad walked out, he knew he was beaten. Dad was not going to take orders. It had been a long time since D-Day.

If the team had continued to play badly, I’m sure Dad would have been fired. But they didn’t. They caught fire, going 54-34 the last three months, finishing in third place but with an 87-75 record. Mattingly ended up winning the batting title at .343 and came in fifth in the MVP race. Ask Donnie about that season and he will tell you not that he did these things but that Dad fought for him. I think every Yankee felt the same. Dad came home for the winter satisfied he hadn’t let them quit and had stood up to George and lived to tell the tale. And that’s when our professional paths merged.

In Pittsburgh, Chuck and Harding were working toward remaking the Pirates. After their disastrous season, suddenly keeping me and Johnny Ray together wasn’t so important. That’s how suddenly things can turn in baseball. I knew I was on the trading block and had no objection to that. Sometimes you just need a change of scenery to get your edge back. I had no idea if the Yankees were interested in me. Dad said he thought I could help them at third base, where Mike Pagliarulo was penciled in but was only in his second year, having played just sixty-seven games as a rookie. But Dad played it coy. The only thing he told me was that “things could be in the works.” You bet he was a really good poker player.

It didn’t take long for the new Yankee GM, Clyde King, to make the decision. On December 20, 1984, just three days after Dad agreed to manage in 1985 with the assurance from Steinbrenner that he would not be fired, the Pirates traded me along with pitcher Alfonso Pulido and minor league outfielder Jay Buhner to the Yankees for Steve Kemp, Tim Foli—who would bounce back to Pittsburgh—and cash, which the Yankees had a lot of. The next day, we drove together to Yankee Stadium for a press conference, both of us wearing suits and Yankee caps. We smiled a lot and hugged for the cameras, one of the greatest moments of my life. Many made the assumption that Dad had pulled the strings to get me. And he did make it known he wanted me, but not for personal reasons. He needed depth at third base, and I had the credentials. Dad being Dad, he told it like it was.

“At the ballpark, he’s just another player to me. If he can play, he plays. If he doesn’t, he sits.”

That off-season was going to be a happy one in any case. I’d bought a home in Glen Ridge, around five minutes from Dad’s house and my brothers’ and began what should have been a joyous winter. And I would move into it as a married man. I’d been going with a local girl from Montclair named Leigh O’Grady, a fun Irish gal I’d met when I was home for an off-season and she was a senior in high school. We set a date for after the new year, which began with me on a natural high.

My sense of excitement was obvious when I told the press, and meant it, “Fortunately, I didn’t get traded to Cleveland.” I wasn’t lying when I said the Yankees were the team I always wanted to play for, and while it probably would be easier on Dad if he was a coach rather than manager, there would only be pressure on me if I messed up. “If I play well,” I added, “the possibilities are endless.”

Dad kept on playing it cool, but Whitey Ford, who knew him so well, told the press, “Yogi’s tickled about it.” That made two of us. But even Whitey cautioned that if I made mistakes, “Yogi’ll chew his butt good.” I knew that, too. Because he kept telling me all winter.

I truly believed I would bring the Yankees more intensity. As I pointed out, “I’m hyper on the field, very talkative, in constant motion”—which was natural, not a product of cocaine. “I don’t know where I get that,” I said. “My dad was quiet. And his little short dumpy body could hit better than my ‘good’ body. I don’t have that intuitive thing going for me that he did. When I’m going good, I flow. You make plays you don’t think you can make. But sometimes I think too much and try too hard.”

That was pretty honest talk, but that was just me. I’m my own toughest critic. In some ways, I played like Pete Rose, taking it to the limit every play. All I ever asked for was a chance to prove myself. So did Dad.

But, in the blink of an eye, the winter got a lot colder. In early January, the doorbell rang at my mom and dad’s house at six a.m. I didn’t know it, but that was the beginning of a whole new turn in my life. I still hadn’t moved into the house in Glen Ridge, so I was upstairs sleeping in my old room, just as I always had after baseball season ended. Mom and Dad were sleeping in their own room, and Mom got up and answered the door. A few minutes later, half-asleep, I saw her come into my room, looking a little ashen.

“There are two men downstairs who want to talk to you,” she said. “They say they’re from the FBI.”

I didn’t know what to say. To be honest, this wasn’t a complete shock to me. There had been some talk going around the league toward the end of the season that there was an investigation of some sort about drug dealers in baseball. But I comforted myself with the assumption—the wrong assumption—that they would not bother with me, a small fry. It was the same old song. But it was the wrong song.

When I got downstairs, the FBI guys told me that they had a subpoena for me to appear in front of a federal grand jury in Pittsburgh investigating drug trafficking in the city. They were respectful and polite, and didn’t treat me like I was some sort of criminal, because I wasn’t. I was in no danger of prosecution for anything I did. But that’s all they would tell me. They were only there to serve the subpoena, then they were back out the door.

Mom and Dad had left me alone with them, giving me privacy. After the guys left, both of them came down and asked what it was all about. I explained that they just wanted me to testify about drug use in Pittsburgh but that I wasn’t involved in anything bad, that I was just a witness, which I was.

But you could never pull the wool over Dad’s eyes. He was too smart.

“Is this about you?” he asked. “Are you in trouble?”

“No, Dad, I just have to tell the truth about what I know.”

That was the first time I ever had to walk a tightrope about drugs with my parents. Not that I was in fact some sort of criminal, but it was not fun to have to tell your folks you had used drugs. I said it had been just a recreational thing, not an addiction, told them not to worry.

“Are you all right?” Dad asked. “That’s all I wanna know.”

“Yes, Dad. I’m fine.”

A couple weeks later, I went and testified. Only then did I find out the scope of the investigation. I was one of eleven players known to have purchased cocaine, mainly current and ex-Pirates including Rod Scurry, Dave Parker, Lee Lacy, John Milner, Al Holland, Lee Mazzilli, and other stars like Keith Hernandez, Tim Raines, Lonnie Smith, Jeffrey Leonard, and Enos Cabell. The first to be identified was Scurry, the pitcher who had come up with me and had missed a month of the ’84 season undergoing cocaine rehabilitation. But security was so tight when I entered the courthouse—the entire ninth floor was sealed off to the media—that no one knew which players had been called to testify. There were rumors that Willie Stargell testified, but he never was called. The questions and answers were over and done in a few hours, and I was on my way home. All I did was tell the truth about cocaine use on the Pirates, that I’d used it a few times and that I’d bought from Curtis Strong. Moreover, in order to get to the real targets, the dealers like Strong, all of us were granted immunity from prosecution. That was all well and good, but Mom, Dad, and my brothers were shocked and worried about me. I knew they would be.

LARRY: I didn’t know he was in any way involved with drugs. It was a complete shock. Mom called and told me what had happened with the FBI the next day, and I said, “Oh my God.” I could hear in her voice that she was scared to death. So was Dad. None of us knew what to think.

TIM: I was shocked because we were so close. We didn’t spend that much time after we all were married and Dale was playing ball. But I would never even have thought that he would do anything that could ruin his career. Drugs? Shit, that didn’t even dawn on me. We were all clean-nosed kids, and Dale was the one who was the most regimented, the levelheaded one who played sports twenty hours a day.

But the culture of the time was everybody did all that crap. Dale was a rambunctious type of guy and sort of an addictive personality, but he’s also right that there were no hidden skeletons in our closet he was escaping. I was the rebel, but not against Dad; I just liked being adventurous, not self-destructive. For Dale to do that, I can’t even explain it on any rational level.

The newspapers were on the story, with headlines such as SCURRY, BERRA TESTIFY IN GRAND JURY PROBE. And, truthfully, I thought I might be given a much worse third-degree grilling by my own family than I’d gotten by the district attorney. Instead, to my relief, they were totally sympathetic. They didn’t confront me; they didn’t even know the extent of what I’d done. Dad kept asking the same thing—“Are you all right?” That’s all he cared about, was I all right. He didn’t say it, but I remembered what he’d told me: don’t drag my name into something stupid. I didn’t think I would again, or even admit to myself I’d done it now.

LARRY: We didn’t confront him. He was a grown man, he was getting married, he had responsibilities. All we could really say was, “I hope you learned your lesson. You’re smarter than that.” But mostly we worried about his well-being, his health. Dale said don’t worry, he didn’t have a drug problem, it was a dumb mistake, a recreational thing, it was over. We didn’t know how involved he was, and to tell you the truth we didn’t want to know.

You’d think I would have learned from it; that I would have told myself, okay, even if nothing happens here, you have to be really careful now or risk everything; if you’re caught again it’s over for you, stop doing coke and stop being stupid. But I had no intention of stopping. It wasn’t that I wanted to flout the law; it was just too easy to keep on with my routine, which I always told myself wasn’t hurting anyone, not even me. It wasn’t like I was trafficking cocaine, selling it, something like that. I was just a guy who did a toot every now and then. Nobody was killing me for doing that, because so many players were doing the same.

It was hard to see the downside of it. I felt I was home free. The wedding went on as scheduled, with not a soul even thinking about the Pittsburgh thing. Timmy was my best man. You would think Dad would be like the Godfather on his daughter’s wedding day, that everyone would come over and pay homage to him, he’d be the center of attention. Being Yogi, he couldn’t help some of that. And, also being Yogi, there’d be other great Yankees who’d attend with an envelope for you. Whitey, Scooter, Ellie, Gil McDougald, they’d be mingling with everyone. But Dad didn’t call attention to himself. He’d hold court at times, tell his stories, but he’d usually blend in, be inconspicuous. He got up and did the spotlight dance with Mom, only because he had to, but no one would have ever seen Yogi Berra dance the tarantella—although I’m sure that with his graceful moves, he would have killed out there. And, no, he didn’t call up Sinatra to sing at the wedding.

After I was married and we moved to our new home, I turned my attention totally on my new career as a Yankee. And nobody in the Yankees front office said a thing about the drug issue when I went to spring training, when being managed by my dad was the only story anybody cared about. It wasn’t that it was glossed over, or covered up, it just seemed so irrelevant, so small. Not even the writers brought up the grand jury. Sports Illustrated didn’t even get around to it until late May when it got out that the probe was widening and that there would be grand juries in St. Louis and Atlanta, as well. The magazine reported that there was “evidence of players buying cocaine from dealers in three Pittsburgh bars, in hotel rooms on road trips, and in the parking lot of Three Rivers Stadium. The money laid out for drugs was often substantial—tens of thousands of dollars a year in the case of some players.”

Yet, at the same time, it added, “some of the speculation about the Pittsburgh investigation is overblown. Most of the players who testified in Pittsburgh have admitted using cocaine, and it’s always possible that some will be indicted. But the targets of the investigation were suppliers, not users.…”

None of the guys on the team, or on other teams, mentioned it. I didn’t have to make a public apology. The commissioner’s office said they’d look into the growing coke problem in baseball, but no action had been taken against us. As far as I was concerned, I was still living a fable. Or maybe in a bubble.

The Yankees’ spring training complex in Ft. Lauderdale was the very grounds where Dad had trained in the early ’60s, where Mantle and Maris tuned up before their historic dual chase of the Babe’s home run record in ’61. Of course, anyone just seeing Dad would be transported back in time. He was the same guy, just older. He walked the same, talked the same, put a chaw of tobacco in his mouth the same. And he was always the story. The year before, when he had been hired, Sports Illustrated in its baseball preview issue made Dad the central story of the season. They posed him on the cover, back to the camera, the number 8 enough of an identification, gazing out across the field next to the words YOGI’S BACK!

We both enjoyed the hubbub about being the first father and son tandem since Connie and Earle Mack. The first day, Dad teased the reporters, whose numbers dwarfed the press corps in Pittsburgh, and then threw his arm around my shoulder as we, wrote one reporter, “ran up the tunnel to the clubhouse like a couple of happy kids.” The vibe around the team was unusually harmonious, which is also something that never changed around Dad. After years of “Bronx Zoo” turmoil, controversy seemed past tense. Even George Steinbrenner seemed pleased. As one article noted, “Each spring the Yankees lead the league in soap opera and locker-room turmoil. This year—with Boss Steinbrenner lying low—everyone in camp is laughing, smiling, kissy-face. The sportswriters are deeply depressed.” Sarcasm abounded, one thought being that the real Yankees were kidnapped and on their way to Jupiter. Some wondered if we were the Stepford Yankees.

However, maybe it was an omen when, after we lost a few exhibition games, George was already bitching. “Yogi’s not in trouble,” he insisted. “I’m willing to take his say-so, but we’re getting close [to the season] now and I’m going to have to have some answers soon.” With George, there was always a but. As one of the writers mused, “The regular season record is 0-0 and [Yogi] already needs a vote of confidence.” And, “An intelligent man like Yogi may soon be having second thoughts about this job. He should have learned from watching Billy Martin nearly lose his mind. The only difference between Martin and Berra is that Yogi doesn’t deserve this kind of treatment.”

Talk about prophetic.

Although most media people thought all the good vibes were as temporary as George would render them, Dad honestly believed the team was primed for a championship. Which was why he had insisted that George give him a verbal promise he would not fire him and allow him to serve out his two-year contract, no matter what. That was for his self-protection, and George’s, given that the players would be furious if he fired Dad. That was the big difference between Dad and Billy. Few players ever cried when Billy got fired. It was pointed out that George had made the same promise to Bob Lemon in ’78, only to fire Lemon in ’82 after fourteen games and hire Gene “Stick” Michael, whom he had fired to hire Lemon. But George asserted, “I put a lot of pressure on my managers in the past… This will not be the case this spring.” And Dad, his better angels guiding him as always, believed him.

Dad was serious about changing things. He put us through a flexibility and stretching program. And he also signed off on more bold moves, none bolder than trading five players to the Oakland A’s for Rickey Henderson, the best all-around player in the game, who as the quintessential leadoff hitter had hit over .300 twice and stole over one hundred bases three times, setting the Major League record with 130. Henderson was fun to watch, the way he took off on a steal and “snatched” fly balls in center field like a Venus fly trap. He was a real character who often spoke of himself in the third person and made statements like “If you look at some of the people in the Hall of Fame, my numbers are compatible,” and “Rickey don’t like it when Rickey can’t find Rickey’s limo.” Drawing a dubious parallel, Sports Illustrated said he “existed somewhere between fact and fiction,” and in this way, “Rickey is the modern-day Yogi Berra, only faster.” They could have added less lovable, more self-centered, and less loyal. Dad played his whole career with one team; Rickey played with eleven.

Don’t get me wrong. Rickey was a surefire Hall of Famer, and his acquisition reflected Dad’s plan for building teams, which he learned from Casey—being strong up the middle: catcher, shortstop, second base, and center field. Rickey, who signed for five years and $8.6 million, seemed to be the last piece of a championship puzzle. Another new piece was a third baseman named Berra, who may have been just another third baseman for his father’s team but couldn’t help but feel a tickle go down his back when his dad let his guard down for just a minute after being asked during an interview if he was excited about the coming season.

“Yeah,” he said, “I’m excited. I’ll finally get to see my son play.”