Yogi Berra is a few feet from second base at Yankee Stadium, his arms folded across his chest. It’s April 25, 1952, and the Yankees are going through a few light drills before a game with the Senators, their tenth of the young season. Berra has yet to play a regular-season game, a big reason for New York’s 4–5 start. Berra says his sore left wrist, the result of a wicked foul tip that nailed him in a spring training game back on April 4, prevents him from gripping his bat.
Manager Casey Stengel has a lot to say, too, and little of it good. His Yankees have left 81 runners on base with their best run producer on the bench, and Casey has waged a verbal war to get Berra back in action. And today Berra’s best friend is at home plate, hitting ground balls to infielders, playfully imitating one of Stengel’s jabs at Yogi.
“Look, Jerry,” Phil Rizzuto says to second baseman Jerry Coleman. “Yogi just moved—he blinked his eyes.”
“At least that proves he’s still alive,” Coleman says, trying unsuccessfully not to laugh. Berra pretends he doesn’t hear a word.
Rizzuto sends a slow roller toward his friend. “Oops,” Phil shouts. “Betcha he doesn’t pick it up.”
“He has to—what else can he do?” Coleman says.
Berra doesn’t change his blank expression or unfold his arms. Instead, he walks leisurely toward the slow roller until it crosses his path, then kicks the baseball in the general direction of coach Frank Crosetti’s ball bag.
“Yippee!” Rizzuto shouts. “Hey, if Yog isn’t careful he’ll work up a sweat. And that could be fatal.”
Berra usually smiles at the teasing he gets from teammates—especially from Rizzuto—but the league’s reigning MVP is in no mood for jokes. New York’s slow start has already sparked talk that these Yankees are wilting under the pressure of pursuing their fourth straight World Series title. Rizzuto’s little joke notwithstanding, there hasn’t been a lot of laughs around the Yankees these days.
There are plenty of reasons only one team—the 1936–1939 Yankees of Joe DiMaggio, Lou Gehrig, and Bill Dickey—has won four consecutive titles. Veterans begin to break down. Check. Both 33-year-old Vic Raschi (sore knee) and 33-year-old Eddie Lopat (sore arm) are feeling the effects of averaging more than 225 innings each since the Yankee run of three straight titles began in 1949.
Players are called into military service. Check. Jerry Coleman, their slick-fielding second baseman, will rejoin the Marines by the end of April to fly jets in the ongoing war in Korea. Hard-hitting third baseman and med-school student Bobby Brown will leave for the Army hospital in Tokyo in a few months. And Whitey Ford is spending his second year in an Army uniform instead of Yankee pinstripes.
Replacements get hurt. Check. Billy Martin, whose fierce competitiveness made him one of Casey’s favorites last year in his first full season, broke his ankle in two places on March 12 while demonstrating how to slide for a TV pregame segment. Others don’t rehab after getting hurt. Check. Mickey Mantle, who will never be known as a workout warrior, limped through spring training and much of April, still looking to rebound from last fall’s knee surgery.
And superstars get old and retire. A great big check. When Joe DiMaggio—the face of this franchise for 16 years—officially put down his glove and bat this past December, he left a big hole in center field, another hole at cleanup in Stengel’s lineup, and a large void in the Yankee clubhouse.
Stengel thinks he can take care of the clubhouse himself—he always wants to be the center of attention anyway. But only two players have hit cleanup for the Yankees since they began dominating baseball in 1923—DiMaggio and Gehrig. On March 6, Stengel anointed Berra—who has more home runs (75) and RBI (303) than any other Yankee the last three seasons—to bat fourth and anchor the team’s offense.
The Yankees made their commitment to Berra clear in January, when Yogi walked into the Fifth Avenue office of George Weiss and was surprised when the GM handed him a contract for $32,500—a $4,000 raise. Berra quickly said yes to a salary that is almost 15 times larger than America’s $2,300 median income. (In addition, each of Yogi’s four World Series winner’s checks has been in excess of $5,000, more than what 90 percent of Americans earn in an entire year.) Weiss was so pleased when Berra reported to St. Petersburg on time he threw in an extra $500 the day Yogi sat down to sign the papers in the team’s spring headquarters.
Berra’s popularity off the field continues to climb. He’ll soon be pitching Rheingold beer in a full-page ad scheduled to run nationwide. Publisher Grosset & Dunlap has hired New York Daily News Yankee writer Joe Trimble to write a biography of Berra for its Big League Baseball Library series; Yogi will do book signings in every American League city. He’ll take a bow on The Ed Sullivan Show, one of his three television appearances for the year. Agent Frank Scott continues to line up endorsements for everything from Shelby bicycles for kids to Doodle Oil bait for fishermen.
But right now Berra is missing in action. Yogi’s injury problems began when he missed first base on a double-play grounder March 15 and pulled ligaments in his right ankle trying to scramble back to touch the base. Berra returned March 30, hit a three-run homer and a run-scoring single against the Braves, and looked ready to step into Joe D’s big shoes. Then Yogi hurt his left wrist in an exhibition game on April 4—x-rays showed several badly bruised bones—and he’s been sidelined ever since.
Berra was still hurting when he received his Most Valuable Player plaque from Commissioner Ford Frick before the Yankee home opener against Washington. DiMaggio, reluctantly taking time away from his intense courtship of Marilyn Monroe, was the star of the pregame ceremonies. Joe gave his uniform and glove to a representative of the National Baseball Hall of Fame, then threw a one-hopper to home plate—the ceremonial first pitch—from his box seat beside the Yankee dugout. A few moments later Berra, his left wrist still too painful to swing a bat, took a seat and watched the Yankees hit eight harmless singles in a 3–1 loss to the Senators.
Casey, never patient with players and their injuries, starts pushing hard for Yogi to ignore the pain in his wrist and return to the lineup. Stengel knows each of his team’s three pennants was won in the final weekend of the season. The rest of the league is only stronger this year—especially the Indians and White Sox—and a slow start can crush this team’s chances of making history. Especially since most observers think this season’s Yankees are the least talented of Casey’s teams.
Each game counts, Stengel keeps saying, and the Yankees have been giving away games. Case in point: a 3–2 loss in 11 innings to the first-place Red Sox on April 24. The Yankees squandered a two-run lead, left 17 runners on base, and walked in the winning run.
Casey was furious after the loss, and is in no better mood when he arrives at the Stadium for the Friday, April 25 game against the Senators. It’s been a full 21 days since Yogi last played, and Berra reluctantly tells his manager he can play—painful wrist and all—if Stengel needs him. But rain starts to fall before the Yankees finish batting practice and officials soon decide to call the game. With downpours in the forecast for the rest of the weekend, it doesn’t look like Berra will play his first game of the season any time soon.
The Yogi Berra Era is off to a slow start.
The injury Berra suffered in early April turned out to be more than bruised bones. A second x-ray taken soon after Opening Day revealed a torn ligament, and that takes time to heal. Yogi finally returns to the lineup on April 30, catching both ends of a doubleheader split with the Browns, and it’s soon clear it will take Berra some time to regain his swing. By the end of May, he has hit just three home runs and knocked in only 13 runs in 26 games. Not surprisingly, the Yankees enter June in fifth place, 3½ games behind first-place Cleveland.
Nor is it surprising that Stengel is making changes.
Stengel decides the knee Mantle injured in last year’s World Series is finally fit enough to shift the 20-year-old from right to center field. When doctors declare Martin’s ankle sound after he played second base for the final two weeks of May, Stengel announces Billy’s spot in the lineup is permanent and hopes his short-tempered favorite will put an edge on the team’s persona.
Stengel also considers replacing Berra as the team’s cleanup hitter, but Yogi begs him to wait just a bit longer. Stengel grudgingly agrees, tells his catcher he won’t wait much longer, then mentions that he and coach Bill Dickey think Berra is standing a few inches too far up in the batter’s box. Berra makes the adjustment and almost instantly begins an assault on American League pitchers.
Yogi warms up with a two-run homer on June 4 that propels the Yankees to a 6–3 win against the White Sox. Six days later Berra starts a streak of 10 home runs in 13 games that carries the Yankees into first place and lifts Berra to the league lead in home runs. No catcher has ever won the home run title in the American League; Berra says he’s determined to be the first.
By July 1, when it’s announced the fans have again selected Yogi to start the All-Star Game in Philadelphia a week later, Berra has 15 home runs and 41 RBI in 57 games. Despite catching every game since returning to the lineup—he’ll get only three games off the rest of the season—Berra is on pace to break Dickey’s league record for catchers—29 home runs.
All talk has ended about searching for a new cleanup hitter. So has any question about who will step into DiMaggio’s big shoes. Berra has grabbed that role and made it his own.
The Yankees have just suffered a tough 10–6 loss in Detroit on July 26 when Yogi gets a phone call every parent dreads. His 2½-year-old son Larry has suffered a badly broken right leg and a deep gash over his right eye in a car accident. Carmen is in St. Louis with their two sons to visit her sister Bonnie, who is recovering from a bad case of peritonitis—inflammation of the abdomen’s inner wall. Her brother Norman was driving the family to see Yogi’s parents when his car was rammed by a drunk driver.
Carmen is calling from St. John’s Hospital, not far from The Hill. She was sitting in the front seat and holding their baby son Tim when the drunk crashed into their car. She’s lost part of a front tooth, but Tim is unhurt. Her mother, sitting between Larry and Bonnie’s 3-year-old son Steve, suffered a fractured leg. Steve was unhurt, but Larry’s leg is broken in several places, and he needed 10 stitches to close the gash on his face, which left streaks of blood all over the back seat.
“Don’t worry,” says Carmen, who does all she can to shield Yogi from everything outside of baseball during the season. “We’ll be all right. Just concentrate on the game.”
Berra’s focus has been sharp all month. Despite getting just one day off, Yogi hit .316 with six homers and 17 RBI in 34 games in July. He follows that by catching every game in August, hitting seven more home runs—the last coming in a 6–4 win August 30 against Washington that matches his career high of 28. He ties Dickey’s American League record two days later against Boston, but the heavy workload is beginning to wear him down.
“I’m 27 years old,” Berra tells reporters after the 5–1 win over the Red Sox, “but I feel like I am 36. I’m tired.”
Other Yankees are having strong seasons, too. Mantle is still learning how to play center field, but the switch-hitter is crushing the ball from both sides of the plate, belting 12 homers and driving in 43 runs the past two months. Raschi, Lopat, and Reynolds—who’s on pace to win 20 games for the first time—are all pitching well.
But the Yankees can’t shake the Indians, who cut New York’s lead to a mere four percentage points on September 12 with a nine-game winning streak. New York has a 1½-game lead two days later with a dozen games left when Stengel chooses Lopat to face the Indians before 73,608 fans in Cleveland’s Municipal Stadium. Indian manager Al Lopez picks 20-game winner Mike Garcia, who hasn’t allowed a run in his last 28⅔ innings, for this one-game showdown.
The Yankees strike early on this sweltering afternoon, and it’s Berra who delivers the key hit. With a run in, one out, and the bases loaded, Berra yanks Garcia’s pitch down the right field line to drive in two runs. The Yanks are leading 5–1 in the 6th inning when Stengel brings in Reynolds, who yields just one hit the rest of the game. The Yankees leave Cleveland with a 7–1 win, a 2½-game lead, and a pronouncement from the team’s leader.
“They had their chance,” Yogi tells teammates after reporters leave the clubhouse.
Berra’s right. The Yankees win seven of their next eight, setting up the pennant clincher on September 26 in Philadelphia. The Yankees convince the A’s to move the game to a nighttime start and televise it back to New York, only their second road game on TV all season. The Yankees jump to an early 2–0 lead, but the A’s match that in the 6th. Four tense innings pass before Billy Martin slaps a two-out, bases-loaded single in the 11th that drives in a pair of runs. The Yankees add another run, shut down the A’s in their half of the inning, and shortly before midnight the Yankees walk off with a 5–2 win and their record-tying fourth straight pennant.
But there is just one bit of unfinished business, which has Yankee public relations man Red Patterson panicking.
“Yogi, Yogi,” he shouts over the celebration in the Yankee clubhouse. “You gotta hit homer number 30 because in the World Series program I have you down for 30.”
Berra laughs, but it’s a tired laugh.
“You shoulda asked me in June,” he says. “I am tired!”
Tired or not, Berra is back behind the plate the next two meaningless games for a shot at the record. Bill Dickey, whose AL-record 29 homers has stood since 1937, tells Berra how much he’d like to see it broken after Yogi goes hitless in the season’s penultimate game. So it’s no surprise to see Dickey, the team’s first-base coach, jumping up and down a day later when Berra sends a fly ball soaring to right field at Shibe Park. And Dickey is ecstatic when the ball sails over the fence, pumping his prize pupil’s right arm as Yogi passes him during his 30th home run trot of the season. Yogi now holds the American League home run record for catchers.
Berra’s 30 homers leave him two behind Cleveland center fielder Larry Doby, who becomes the first black player to lead the AL in home runs. Berra’s 98 RBI leads the Yankees for the fourth straight season and is fifth best in the league. His .273 batting average is the lowest of his career, a clear result of catching a league-high 140 games, including 20 doubleheaders. Little wonder Berra is tired.
But there is no time to rest. In three days, Yogi and the Yankees will take the field in Brooklyn to start the quest for their fourth straight World Series title. There is more history to be made.