Scouting New York does The Warriors: Part One and Part Two.

Hot off the presses comes Allen Barra’s new book, on sale today.

Here’s an exclusive excerpt from Mickey and Willie: Mantle and Mays, the Parallel Lives of Baseball’s Golden Age.

Dig in.

Mickey and Willie

By Allen Barra

I don’t know that anyone’s ever calculated this, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find that Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays, in that order, are the two most written-about players in baseball history, or at least two of the top three, along with Babe Ruth. The year 2010 saw the publication of a thick and well-researched biography of Willie, Willie Mays: The Life, the Legend, by James Hirsch, and there are countless shorter lives of Willie, several autobiographies and memoirs, and a superb life-and-times account, Willie’s Time, by Charles Einstein that, in my opinion, stands as the best thing ever written about him. Also published in 2010 was Jane Leavy’s Mantle biography, The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America’s Childhood, the most detailed of the nine versions of his life.

There are also six volumes of autobiography, memoirs, and recollections, as well as numerous books by fans and collections of letters to and from Mickey, that have been published since his death. And yet, it seems to me that there has always been one major element missing from the many books on Mantle or Mays: each other. Though they are and always will be linked in the minds of millions, I don’t think it’s ever been noted exactly how much they had in common and how each man’s image reflected the other. The similarities in their lives were uncanny. Both were children of the Great Depression, born in 1931. They were almost the same size (about five-foot-eleven and 185 pounds, at least early in their careers); Mantle had a bit more muscle, and for most of his playing career probably outweighed Willie by five to ten pounds.

Both were heralded as phenoms when they arrived in New York in 1951 after brief but legendary minor league careers. (If integration had come along a couple of years earlier, they probably would have played against each other as minor leaguers.) Both started out playing for Hall of Fame managers, Mantle for Casey Stengel and Willie for Leo Durocher. Both played stickball in the streets of New York with kids (though only Willie was lucky enough to have TV cameras record the games). The burden of expectation caused each of them to break down in tears before his first season was over. Mickey exploded on the national scene in 1953 when he hit the first “tape measure” home run, and Willie the next year when he made the most famous catch in World Series and probably baseball history. In 1958 and 1959, they barnstormed against each other with specially selected All-Star teams.

Together they defined baseball in the 1950s and through the mid-1960s. Both made the covers of Time and Life, and they were the subjects of popular songs. In the 1960s, they were often pictured together on the covers of baseball magazines, including some devoted entirely to them. They were paired off on television on the popular show Home Run Derby, did commercials and endorsements together, and appeared together on numerous TV shows. Together they created nostalgia and the autograph and memorabilia craze. Finally, in the early 1980s, they were both banned from baseball by Commissioner Bowie Kuhn for doing public relations work for Atlantic City casinos.

They had exactly the same talents—everyone who saw them observed that no other players in the big leagues possessed their astonishing combinations of power and speed. And despite Willie’s far greater durability, they were, in terms of effectiveness on the field, remarkably similar. Both batted over .300 ten times and hit over 50 home runs in a season twice. Total Baseball: The Official Encyclopedia of Major League Baseball ranks Mays as the best player in the NL from 1954, the year he returned from the Army, through 1965, except 1959, when he ranked fourth. (For the 1956 and 1961 seasons, he shared the top spot with Henry Aaron.)

Mantle was Total Baseball’s best player in the AL every year from 1955 through 1962; he was also ranked second in 1952 and fourth in 1954. (Mantle was surely poised to top Total Baseball’s ranking in 1963, when he batted .314 but was limited to just sixty-five games by injuries.) In every season from 1954 through 1965, Mickey and Willie were selected for the All-Star teams. From 1951 through 1964, the Yankees or the Giants were in every World Series except in 1959. Their fortunes in the World Series and All-Star Games contrasted oddly. Mays was the ultimate All-Star, hitting .307 in twenty-four games, producing 29 RBIs and runs scored, while Mantle hit just .233 in sixteen All-Star Games without a single home run. But in twenty World Series games, Mays managed just .239 without a single home run; in sixty-five games, Mantle set the all-time World Series home run mark with 18.

That Mickey and Willie were the most dominant players of that period isn’t simply a myth built up by worshipful New York sportswriters—it’s a fact. The ultimate question isn’t “Were they the greatest of their time?” but “Which of them was the greatest?” (That’s a subject I explore in detail in Appendix A.)

Both were consummate all-around athletes who excelled at basketball and football in high school. Reversing the stereotype, Willie was a great passing quarterback at Fairfield Industrial High School in Westfield, Alabama; at the same time, Mickey was a dazzling running back at Commerce High in Commerce, Oklahoma. If circumstances had been different, they might have ended up playing for the two greatest college football coaches of their era: Willie for Bear Bryant, then at Kentucky—Bryant had been hugely impressed when he saw Willie play baseball for the Black Barons at Rickwood Field—and Mickey for Bud Wilkinson at Oklahoma.

They were both natural center fielders, but both played other positions when they were young. Mantle spent more time at shortstop than Willie, but neither of them ever quite got the hang of it. Willie began his rookie season in center field; Mickey began his rookie year in right field while Joe DiMaggio struggled through his final season, and in 1952 Mickey became the Yankees’ starting center fielder. Both had great throwing arms and were told during their early careers that they had a shot to make it as a pitcher. Mickey and Willie both idolized Joe DiMaggio. Both loved Westerns and, as boys, dreamed of growing up to be cowboys.

Their lives were dominated by their fathers, who saw baseball as a way for their sons to escape a life of brutal manual labor. For Cat Mays it was the steel mills, for Mutt Mantle the hellish zinc mines. By the time Mickey and Willie graduated from high school, both their mothers had almost disappeared from the narratives of their lives. It was often said of both that they were “born to play ball.” Whether or not that was true, they were certainly bred to the game. Cat began rolling a ball to his son while Willie was still an infant. Mutt began to throw to his son as soon as Mickey could hold a broom handle.

Both men were southerners. (New York sportswriters were fond of labeling Mickey a cowboy, a westerner—he did, after all, once ride a horse to school—but Mickey regarded himself as a southerner and often said so.) The Mantles and the Mayses were living, breathing Americana. The Mantles were what John Steinbeck’s Joad family might have been had they chosen to stay and scrape a living out of the harsh Oklahoma earth rather than emigrate to California. Willie’s folks were the country cousins of the Younger family in Lorraine Hansberry’s great play, A Raisin in the Sun; they resisted the lure of northern cities like Chicago and stayed near their roots.

They were both the products of two generations of ball-playing men, and both honed their skills through competition with industrial leaguers. Though neither of them was actually a member of an industrial league team, their fathers, uncles, and close friends played industrial ball, and Mickey and Willie played with and against them. Mantle and Mays were probably the last products of the great age of industrial league baseball that died out a few years after World War II. Neither man ever truly understood how to manage money. Mantle envied Willie’s salary; Willie was notoriously jealous of Mantle’s income from commercials and endorsements.

Needless to say, in spite of all these similarities, there were enormous cultural differences. Mickey grew up listening to country stars such as Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys; his favorite singer was Hank Williams. Willie and his family listened to country blues singers like Amos Millburn, the more sophisticated R&B sounds of Louis Jordan, and even jazz artists like Billie Holiday and Nat King Cole. The one singer both men enjoyed was Bing Crosby. The Mantle clan was large and closely knit; Mays came from a broken home. Mickey’s father drove him relentlessly toward baseball; Willie’s father helped him along and let him find the way to baseball on his own.

Mickey drank prodigiously and recklessly from an early age; Willie got sick on his first taste of alcohol and never touched it again. Mantle, though he remained married to his high school sweetheart for decades, led a sex life that was an unreported scandal. Mays, in contrast, was never the subject of rumors of promiscuity; his first marriage, to an older, more sophisticated woman, went badly. He had no biological children and, if the journalists who knew him are to be trusted, seldom saw his adopted son after his divorce.

One Mantle biographer, writing seven years after his death, concluded that “Mickey Mantle, like most heroes, was a construction; he was not real. He was all that America wanted itself to be, and he was also all that America feared it could never be.” Surely, it would be no stretch to say the same thing of Willie Mays. In his mammoth one-volume history of the decade, The Fifties, David Halberstam wrote that “Willie Mays seemed to be the model for the new supremely gifted black athlete. . . . He showed that the new-age black athlete had both power and speed. . . . [Mays was] a new kind of athlete being showcased, a player who, in contrast to most white superstars of the past, was both powerful and fast.” At the same time Mays was at his peak, there was a supremely gifted white athlete named Mantle who had at least as much power and speed. Bob Costas says, “There was one thing about Mantle that screamed out ‘The Natural.’ He was a God-made ballplayer.” Surely the same God made Willie Mays.

“Today,” Arnold Hano, one of Willie’s first biographers, wrote in 1965, “players are as skilled as most stars of the past, but something is lacking. Call it color, call it magic, but you call for it in vain. Except for Willie Mays. Oh, there are a few others. Mickey Mantle has always brought his own sense of excitement to the game.” He most certainly did, and who, at their peak, could have denied that Mantle’s “own sense of excitement” was a brand quite similar to Willie’s?

Though their names are melded in the minds of three generations of American sports fans and their careers ran along uncannily parallel lines, they are still, oddly, segregated. Indeed, for most of their playing careers the realities of American life dictated that they be segregated. It wasn’t until the early 1960s that they could meet together at restaurants and nightclubs in most parts of the country, and even then not in the Deep South. And it wasn’t until the 1970s that they began to appear together regularly at card shows, in commercials, and on television shows. Mantle and Mays were friends, probably as close as it was possible for a white man and a black man to be at that time.

In any event, their work schedules didn’t allow them to see each other more than a couple of times a year. Always, the newspapers kept one apprised of what the other was doing. “We kept an eye on each other, Willie and me. I was always aware of him,” Mantle remarked. “I’d go long periods without seeing him,” Mays said after Mantle died, “but I couldn’t go for two days without hearing about him. It was like we were never far apart.” Mickey and Willie—they were given boys’ names that they never grew out of. The private lives of both men revealed that they were ill equipped for life after baseball, a fact that those of us who loved them found almost impossible to understand. How, though, could we have understood? From our perspective, what could have been better than being Mickey Mantle or Willie Mays? Even after baseball, what better life could a fan imagine than being Mickey Mantle or Willie Mays?

“In some ways,” Roger Kahn told me, “I believe they knew each other better than anyone else knew them. They were the only two men in America who understood the experience they had both been through.”

Reprinted from Mickey and Willie by Allen Barra. Copyright © May 2013. Published by Crown Archetype, a division of Random House, Inc.

Here’s Allen Barra and Rob Neyer on 42.

Is Ben Affleck the new Clint Eastwood? Over at Salon.com, Allen Barra gets into it.

Phillip Kaufman has a new movie out–on HBO. Allen Barra profiled Kaufman, one of our finest directors, for the Wall Street Journal last week. And Barra reviewed the movie for the Daily Beast here.

Read anything about “Moneyball” lately?

I haven’t seen the movie yet but I did read this article on Billy Beane in the New York Times Magazine.

And over at The Atlantic, Allen Barra has a critical essay on Michael Lewis’ book.

When hearing tales of Bubba Smith
You wonder if he’s man or myth.
He’s like a hoodoo, like a hex,
He’s like Tyrannosaurus Rex.

Few manage to topple in a tussle
Three hundred pounds of hustle and muscle.
He won’t complain if double-teamed;
It isn’t Bubba who gets creamed.

What gained this pair of underminers?
Only four Forty-niner shiners.

Ogden Nash, 1969

If you missed Allen Barra’s tribute to Bubba Smith last week, do check it out.

Allen Barra on James Rodney Richard:

You’ve heard stories about how great J.R. Richard was at his best, and they are all true. What the stories don’t tell you is how thrilling it was to watch him on the mound on a good day. He was the scariest pitcher I’ve ever seen. He was 6’-8 ½”, and his three-quarters side arm fastball sometimes made it to 100 mph. Imagine a right-handed Randy Johnson with 30 more pounds of muscle, and you’ll get some idea of how terrifying he was.

I don’t think he was a great pitcher—great in the sense of being the best in the league for a couple of seasons—and it’s true that he had an advantage when pitching in the Astrodome, the best hitter’s park in the game back then. But midway through the 1980 season, Sports Illustrated’s William Nack called him “the best right-hander in baseball,” and that was probably true.

By 1980, at the age of 30, he was certainly on the verge of greatness. From 1976-1979 he won 74 games, completing 62 of them and averaging 260 strikeouts per season. He had over 300 strikeouts in both 1978 and 1979. As he got older, he seemed to be getting better and smarter, with a change that startled some hitters. (Of course, when you consistently throw everything, including your slider, in the high 90s, a changeup is going to be even more devastating.)

Compelling.

Robert Lipsyte thinks that Roger Maris should be in the Hall of Fame. Allen Barra does not agree.

I just don’t see a strong case for Maris, do you?

My old man used to drink at The Ginger Man, a restaurant near Lincoln Center. The place was named after the play based on J.P. Donleavy’s novel. Patrick O’Neal, one of the owners, had stared in the short-lived play. The novel, was reissued not long ago, and over at The Daily Beast, Allen Barra calls it “the funniest novel in the English language since Evelyn Waugh.”

Dig the review.

It’s a shame that Robin Evan Roberts couldn’t have picked a more fortunate day to die. His passing on May 6 Thursday was lost in the media swirl surrounding the arrest of former New York Giants linebacker Lawrence Taylor on rape charges and the speculation over whether Lebron James would be playing next season in Cleveland or New York. Before his memory fades entirely, a few things about his life and career should be remarked on.

Roberts pitched in relative obscurity for most of his 19 big league seasons, and his death at age 83 was relegated to the status of second-tier news. Now, after some reflection, we can put his career in perspective: he was baseball’s greatest pitcher since World War II and one of the most important men in baseball history.

He was also scandalously unappreciated. In 1960 the Associated Press conducted a survey of “164 Top-Flight Sportswriters” and “76 Nationally-Known Public Figures” to determine “The All-Star Team of the Past Decade.” Roberts didn’t make the team. He finished second to the Yankees’ Allie Reynolds. Allie had a fine career, but he was only great after coming to the Yankees in 1947. He won 131 games over the next eight seasons, and that was pitching for the New York Yankees, who won six World Series over that span.

Pitching in seven seasons from 1948-1954, Robin Roberts won 137 games, and that was while pitching for the Philadelphia Phillies, who won one National League pennant in that time. For most of those season, the Phillies were the worst team in their league, or at least would have been if it hadn’t been for Robin Roberts. From 1952-1954, Roberts won 74 games and lead his league in victories each year. (He also lead the league in 1955.)

Three decades after the AP’s poll, I talked to Bob Broeg of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, who had voted for Reynolds over Roberts, and asked him why. He told me that he had voted for Reynolds mainly because he had beat Roberts in Game Two of the 1950 World Series (2-1 in 10 innings on a Joe DiMaggio home run.)

In 1976 Roberts was elected into the Baseball Hall of Fame in his fourth year of eligibility. Whitey Ford, practically his exact contemporary, retired a year after Roberts and was elected in 1974 in his second year of eligibility. Mr. Ford, an undeniably great pitcher, won 236 games in his career, 50 fewer than Roberts. Needless to say, Mr. Ford pitched for the Yankees.

Rich Ashburn, the only other Phillies player of note during the 1950s and later a popular sportscaster in Philadelphia, once asked me rhetorically, “With all due respect to Whitey, if he had pitched for the Phillies and Robin had pitched for the Yankees, who do you think would have made it to the Hall of Fame first?”

The Yankees, always the Yankees. After Roberts was passed over in the 1974 HOF voting, novelist James Michener wrote in the New York Times, “If he [Roberts] had pitched for the Yankees, he would have won 350 games.” I wrote pretty much the same thing in my 2004 book, Brushbacks and Knockdowns, except I projected 340, which would have made Roberts one of the seven winningest pitchers in baseball since 1901 and one of the four winningest since 1945.

But James Michener and I were both wrong. If Roberts had pitched for the Yankees, he would never have won that many games. For the best team in baseball, the Casey Stengel era Yankees had very few 20 game winners; Stengel seldom went with a regular rotation and often held his best pitchers out for important games. (There was also a rumor that the Yankees front office liked to limit the win totals of their starters so they could hold their salaries down.)

If, however, Roberts had pitched for the Brooklyn Dodgers of his era, that would have been a different matter. “Robin Roberts on the mound,” says Roger Kahn, author of the definitive book on the Brooklyn Dodgers, The Boys of Summer, “Forget it. Backed by Jackie Robinson, Pee Wee Reese, Roy Campanella, Gil Hodges? Put Robin Roberts on those Dodgers teams and they’d have been the New York Yankees.”

Not that Roberts had anything to be embarassed about. He won more than 20 games six times, including going 28-7 in 1952 for a Phillies team that played under .500 ball when he wasn’t on the mound. He lead the National League for five consecutive seasons in innings pitched and complete games. And, amazingly, he is only in the record book now for allowing the most home runs (505) of any pitcher and for having the lowest batting average (.167) of anyone with more than 1500 at-bats.

His greatest contribution to baseball, though, came off the field in 1966 when he helped recruit a former economist for the steelworkers union named Marvin Miller as executive director of the players union. “I don’t think any former ballplayer,” says Mr. Miller, “with the possible exception of Jackie Robinson, had the respect and gratitude of more players.”

In the end, Roberts had no regrets. He once told me, “I had a tremendous career, and I pitched for a whole decade in front of some great fans.” Surely he is the only player in baseball history to accuse the Phillies fans of the era of being great. “Let me tell you,” Mr. Ashburn said. “The Phillies fans in that time were the booingest bunch in the major leagues. But they never booed Robin Roberts.”

Allen Barra’s latest book, Rickwood Field: A Century in America’s Oldest Ballpark (Norton), will be published  in June.

Good long piece by Hillel Italie in the Huffington Post on Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, and cooperative biogrpahies:

“Before I got to Aaron, the best advice I got was from David Halberstam, who wrote a book on Michael Jordan without getting Jordan and a book about Bill Clinton without getting Clinton,” [Howard] Bryant said of the late Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist.

“He said to me, `The strategy was very simple – for every day they didn’t talk to me, make three phone calls to other people.’ You have to work around obstacles. It was the best piece of advice anyone’s given me.”

After Bonds overtook Aaron, in 2007, Aaron opened up to Bryant.

“When Henry and I finally spoke, he was tremendous, he was unbelievably gracious,” Bryant said. “He was even somewhat embarrassed someone was taking an interest. He didn’t ask for any money. He didn’t ask for any review copy of the book. He could have made the one phone call that every author dreads – which is to call all of his people and say, `Hey, this guy is writing a book about me. Don’t talk to him.’”

Earlier this week, Allen Barra gave his take on Bryant’s book:

Just when it seemed as if all the great baseball subjects had been done, Howard Bryant checks in with this biography of Henry Aaron, which, amazingly, Mr. Aaron had to wait 34 years to get.

Mr. Bryant, author of “Shutout,” the definitive study of race in baseball, and “Juicing the Game: Drugs, Power and the Fight for the Soul of Major League Baseball,” is a great writer for a great subject. Mr. Aaron’s story is the epic baseball tale of the second half of the 20th century, in many ways the equal to Jackie Robinson’s.

And in the Village Voice, Barra praises Bryant’s frank handling of the relationship between Aaron and Mays:

Bryant argues that “so much of the relationship between Mays and Aaron was perceived, often rightly, as tense if not acrimonious, stemmed from their personalities — the self-centered Mays and the diplomatic Aaron.”

There’s no doubt, says Bryant, that “Mays exemplified the rare combination of physical, athletic genius, and a showman’s gift for timing. What went less reported and, as the years passed, became an uncomfortable, common lament was just how cruel and self-absorbed Mays could be.”

…Bryant cites a first-hand account from 1957, a United Press/Movietone News reporter named Reese Schoenfeld, that Mays ragged on Aaron from the sidelines while Henry was being interviewed in front of a TV camera: “How much they paying you, Hank? They ain’t payin’ you at all, Hank? Don’t you know we all get paid for this? You ruin it for the rest of us, Hank! You just fall off the turnip truck?”

While Aaron became more and more agitated, Mays laid it on thick: “You showin’ ‘em how you swing? We get paid three to four hundred dollars for this. You one dumb nigger!”

According to Bryant, “Henry’s reaction for the next fifty years — to diffuse, while not forgetting, the original offense — would be consistent with the shrewd but stern way Henry Aaron dealt with uncomfortable issues. The world did not need to know Henry’s feelings towards Mays, but Henry was not fooled by his adversary. Mays committed one of the great offenses against a person as proud as Henry: he insulted him, embarrassed him in front of other people, and did not treat him with respect.”

Say Hey: fight, fight!

One last thing about the Aaron book that’s interesting to me is that it was written by a black man. So many sports biographies of black and Latin players, from David Maraniss and Larry Tye, to James Hirsch and Brad Snyder, are written by white guys. That’s not a knock just a fact. And it’s not to say that race is enough to judge the merit of the final product. Reporting and writing is what makes a great book no matter if the author is white or black, man or woman. Bryant wasn’t magically granted access to Aaron’s inner circle because he’s black, he did so because he’s an ace reporter who has paid his dues.

Still, I can’t help but wonder what kind of sensitivity and empathy he brings to the subject that a white writer might not. For instance, when I was writing about Curt Flood, I had to imagine what it was like to be a black kid playing ball in the deep south in the mid-1950s. I was earnest, no doubt, but it was largely an intellectual excercise, one where, through reporting and research, I attempted to intuite something beyond my experience. That’s a distance Bryant doesn’t have to cover. It doesn’t necessarily mean his writing will be better, but it’s sure to be palpably different.

Moreover, I think great biographies often tell the story of the subject and in some way, even if it is largely subconscious, the story of the author as well. My Flood book was no great biography, it was a first book, but when I look back on it, I see that I was drawn to it for several personal reasons too. The first was to learn more about Flood (and to learn how to write a book) and share his story with a YA audience.  But I think my attraction to him had everything to do with my relationship with my father. Flood was talented and troubled, alcoholic. My need to find out more about him, to appreciate his accomplishments, and forgive his failings, was directly related to how I felt about my Old Man.

[The Tortoise and the Hare picture by Esoule]

Our old pal Allen Barra sat down with me recently to talk about his new book, Yogi: Eternal Yankee.

Bronx Banter: You make the argument that Yogi was a better catcher than Johnny Bench. How close was Roy Campanella to Yogi during the Fifties? Was there any catcher even close to these two at the time?

Allen Barra: In Rio Bravo, Walter Brennan asks John Wayne if Ricky Nelson is faster than Dean Martin. “I’d hate to have to live on the difference,” says Duke. The real truth is that if you take Campanella at this peak, there’s probably very little difference between Berra, Bench and Campy. The only thing I might add to that is that it’s possible that, if given the same material to work with, Johnny and Roy could have gotten as much out of as many mediocre pitchers as well as Yogi did. But Yogi did do it, and that has to give him the edge.

BB: Did Yogi really deserve the 1954 and ‘55 MVP awards? In ‘54 the Indians won and Bobby Avila had a big year, also playing a key defensive position, and Mickey Mantle had a monstrous year. And in ’55 Mantle again had another ridiculous year.

AB: That’s a tough question. I don’t know if anyone’s done a “Value over Replacement Factor” kind of analysis for those years, but it’s arguable that Yogi might have had the highest value over anyone who could have replaced him at that position. In 1954 my guess is that the difference between Mantle and Berra wasn’t that great. Avila played a key defensive position, but not more key than Yogi’s. It probably should have been Mantle in ’55, but then I think there’s an equally good case that it probably should have been Yogi in 1950 instead of Phil Rizzuto. What’s interesting is that so many people thought that it should have been Yogi those years. I think that tells us something very important about him.

BB. Was there any year that Yogi should have won an MVP when he didn’t?

AB: Well, as I just mentioned, there was 1950. And you could turn the ’54 argument on its head and ask why Al Rosen, an Indian, wins the MVP [in 1953] when Yogi’s team won the pennant. I’m not saying Rosen didn’t deserve it, I’m just saying that if Yogi had won it, nobody would have gone to the barricades to say he didn’t deserve it, and I’d argue that he was also one of the top five players in the league in 1952. It’s more difficult to figure the value of a top-flight catcher. He did so many things to hold his pitching staffs together back then, I just don’t know if you can figure his worth compared to payers at other positions.

BB: It ‘s well known that Yogi helped Elston Howard when he joined the team but did Yogi ever question or go on the record about the Yankees’ institutional racism?

AB: No, I’m not aware that anyone in that period did. For one thing, when you talked to the players of that era, they all say, “Well, every year we heard that they were brining black players up through the minor league system, and we thought each year would be the next year.” I think there’s something to that – Gil McDougald told me something to that effect. I mean, the Yankee players were ready for it. They had no objections at all to integrating the team. It was only after a few seasons of George Weiss signing a black player for the minor league system and then trading him that they began to catch on. I’d have to say, though, that while the Yankees front office was as racist in its policies as the Boston Red Sox, the Yankees themselves got good marks from Elston and Arlene Howard and Larry Doby for their overall attitudes. Both the Howards and Doby put Yogi at the top of their list of good guys. Arlene Howard told me that Yogi and Elston “hit it off right away.”

BB. I know that walk rates were up in the Fifties and comparatively Yogi didn’t walk that much. But he was contact hitter and it’s hard to point this out as a major flaw. That said, were there any noticeable holes in his game, either offensively or in the field?

AB: No, none, and it ought to be mentioned that though Yogi didn’t walk that much, his on-base average was actually six points better than Johnny Bench’s in about the same number of games, and that’s what’s important. No, Yogi had no flaws. We all know he wasn’t much of a catcher until Bill Dickey learned him all of his experience, but by 1949 he was a very good catcher, and by 1950 the Yankee staff was pretty much relying on him to call their pitches. Or rather, he knew them well enough to call their pitches for them – did I just make some kind of Yogiism? Anyway, all that crap in David Halberstam’s The Summer of ’49 about Allie [Reynolds] and Yogi not getting along is fiction. All the Yankees told me so.

BB: I remember the The Summer of ’49 being criticized in one of the Bill James books.

AB: The errors and misrepresentations I found in both Halberstam’s baseball books, The Summer of ’49 and October ’64, made me call into question his entire reputation. If I had time, I’d go check out some of his other books and see if they are as sloppily written and reported. I found dozens of mistakes, but far worse, some stories that just seemed to have been invented. I’ll confine myself to just one. Halberstam seems to have thought that Allie Reynolds was pissed off at Yogi for trying to call his pitches and threatened to cross him up and hit him in the chest with a ball. Where he got this story was not explained. Reynolds never said anything like that, and all the Yankees I talked to said it was nonsense. Phil Rizzuto was actually angry about it. “It couldn’t have happened without me knowing about it,” he said, “and I never saw or heard anything like it.” In truth, all the Yankee pitchers understood that the pitcher always calls his own pitches and the catcher is merely suggesting. But after about a year of working with Reynolds, Ed Lopat, and Vic Raschi, and I guess you have to include the architect of the Yankees pitching staff, Jim “Milkman” Turner, Yogi had won everyone’s confidence, and they all agreed that Yogi knew their stuff well enough to call it right. They almost never shook him off. But I’m getting ahead of the question. Halberstam included several stories like the Reynolds-Berra thing and never said where he got them. I think they are nonsense and he invented them because they sounded good.

BB: Speaking of Reynolds, tell us the story about Yogi famously dropping a pop up in one of Allie’s 1951 no-hitters?

AB: The story is more intriguing than I had originally heard. It’s September 28, 1951. Ted Williams – Yogi’s pal – is at the plate: one out left to go for the no-hitter and, of course, Ted Williams is the batter. Who else? That’s the way they’d do it in a movie, right? Reynolds had already pitched a no-hitter that year, so this would have given his a record no-hitter. Yogi tells Reynolds he wants a fast ball up and in. Allie obliges. Williams pops it up. Reynolds immediately perceived that it was going to be a tough play: the wind was blowing the ball away from Yogi. Reynolds, who was running in from the mound, later recalled. “I hope to make a grab for it. I was afraid I spiked Yogi on the hand when I jumped over him. Yogi dropped it.” Settling back behind the plate, Yogi called for the same pitch to Williams in the exact same spot – how much guts did that take? Williams popped it up again, Yogi battled the swirling winds again and made a snow cone catch. There are two other stories connected to this. Carmen Berra was in a New Jersey hospital recovering from having given birth to their son, Tim. She was listening on the radio, and when Yogi dropped the first pop-up, she screamed “Yoggeeeee!” and nurses came running down the corridor. She told them, “My husband dropped the ball!” The second story is that a year later Yogi, the American League’s MVP, was working in men and boys’ clothing in a Newark department store to help support his family. A smart-ass kid tells him not to misjudge the sleeve length, “Like you misjudged the pop-up in that Allie Reynolds game.” Yogi politely reminded that he had held on to the second one, and Yogi said later, “He wasn’t a bad kid.”

BB: If Yogi didn’t actually say half of the things he is quoted as having said, is he really as funny as he appears? I have read accounts that Yogi wasn’t nearly the wit that Casey was, and in fact, his persona was created largely by Joe Garagiola on the banquet circuit.

AB: Casey was a wit. He prepared things to say to the press. Yogi was never intentionally funny. Yogiisms – the real Yogiisms – tend to fall into two categories: the malapropisms (like in 1947 at Yogi Berra Day in St Louis, when he got tongue-tied and said, “I’d like to thank everyone for making this day necessary”) and the little bits of Zen wisdom (like “When you come to the fork in the road, take it,” which is simply quick and accurate directions on how to get to his house – he lives on the top of a circle). Joe Garagiola didn’t invent Yogi, though he did broaden him a bit. Yogi invented Yogi – no one else could have.

BB: Yogi has benefited from his public image greatly over the years, as a spokesman for Yoo-Hoo and more recently Aflac. How shrewd a businessman is he?

AB: You just answered your own question. He was shrewd enough to exploit his own image – he couldn’t beat him, so he joined him. Something momentous in the history of commercials came about in 1960 when Yogi hooked up with advertising genius George Lois, who would later go on to fame as the creator of the MTV logo and his “In Your Face!” campaign for ESPN. Lois shrewdly perceived that Yogi’s real appeal was not as a straight pitchman, so he came up with a commercial for Puss’n’Boots that had Yogi talking to a cat. People loved it. His teammates kidded him about it, but Yogi’s response was “Did you ever get paid for talking to a cat?” By the way, the voice of the cat was Whitey Ford’s, which Yogi didn’t recognize.

BB: Did your feelings about Yogi change dramatically during the writing of the book?

AB: Nope, he was Yogi when I started and Yogi when I finished. But to know him more was to love him more.

BB: What did you learn about him during your research that came as a surprise to you?

AB: Well, I didn’t really get this until I finished the book, and I rewrote the introduction to accommodate this insight. Basically, it’s this – what did Jacques Barzun say about those who would earn the hearts and minds of Americans had better learn baseball? Well, if there is one life you would study to understand baseball, it would be Yogi Berra’s. From hitting the first pinch-hit home run in World Series history in 1947 to coaching with the Houston Astros in that great series with the Mets four decades later, Yogi Berra was involved in more great baseball moments than any player or possibly two players you could name. When I finally realized at the end is that Yogi’s life is a cutaway view of baseball in the 20th century.

BB: Yogi was clearly respected by the writers. Was the same universally true amongst the players? The reason I ask is because I know he came up against some attitudes, the famous harmonica incident comes to mind, when he took over as the Yankee skipper in ’64.

AB: Actually, I’d say it was the other way around. The players had complete respect for Yogi. I’d say it was the writers, especially the younger sportswriters who grew up with stories about what a joker and clown Yogi was and were disappointed to find out that he wasn’t very quotable. The harmonica incident was nothing. The problem may actually have been the older players, Yogi’s former teammates – particularly Mantle. After the Yankees lost the doubleheader to Chicago, Phil Linz was noodling with a harmonica on the team bus and Yogi told him to stop. Linz didn’t hear him and asked the guys around him “What did he say?” Instead of showing a little maturity, Mantle said “He said ‘Play it louder.’” If Mantle had told Linz “he said shut the f___ up,” the whole thing wouldn’t have happened and the press would have had nothing to harp on later.

BB: How would you evaluate Yogi as a manager?

AB: Well, Billy Martin said Yogi was too nice a guy to be a good manager, but Yogi won two pennants – same as Billy. If he’d had Ford available after the first game in the ’64 Series, Yogi probably would have won as many World Series as Martin. I’d have to say on that evidence that Yogi was a pretty good manager.

BB: Did you seek Yogi’s participation in this book? If not, what are the benefits of not collaborating directly with a subject?

AB: Well, in this case the truth is the benefits were that Yogi’s memory isn’t quite what it once was, so it was much more reliable to quote from interviews given many years ago – I mean, how many times did Yogi need to be asked about his relationship with Mickey Mantle or about what happened in the Copa incident? The truth is that I between materials that were made available to me, people I needed to talk to, and questions I was able to ask Yogi at Museum events. I got everything I wanted.

BB: You don’t dig into his personal life too deeply. I know his son Dale had a lot of troubles. Why did you choose to steer clear of a thorough examination of his personal life like Richard Ben Cramer did with his DiMaggio book?

AB: First of all, I loathed Cramer’s book. He dug into DiMaggio’s personal life to such a degree that he fantasized about Joe and Marilyn Monroe in the shower. Exactly whose fantasies were we reading about – DiMaggio’s or Cramer’s? Second, I don’t know why you think that I didn’t look into Yogi’s personal life. I would argue that I got as deep into Yogi’s life as Cramer did into Joe’s. As for Dale’s brief drug problem, I gave the basic facts and let it go. The book is about Yogi, not Dale. I don’t think it’s fair to suggest that because someone’s life is devoid of personal scandal that he didn’t have a “personal life.” For Mickey Mantle, a personal life was his relationship with his mistresses; for Yogi, it was carrying pictures of his mother in his wallet. Everyone’s life is personal in his own way.

BB: This is something that Jonathan Mahler mentioned in his review for the New York Times Book Review. How did you react to that piece?

BB: I call it what it was: negative. A lot of people say, Well, gee, you got a full page review in the New York Times. I say, Yeah, but it was really nasty – the only bad review the book has gotten. It is a really weird review. In one paragraph he’d say “Berra loves Yogi too much to be objective,” and in the next paragraph, “It’s like he’s holding him at arm’s length.” My reaction was “How can I be guilty of both at the same time?” Some of his criticism was bizarre. Talking about my account of Yogi’s experience during D-Day, he wrote, “Here and elsewhere, Barra sticks to the facts, relying on other writers, in this case Cornelius Ryan, to set the scene for him. The book suffers as a result.” Say what? The book suffers by sticking to the facts? Cornelius Ryan’s account of D-Day is definitive: why shouldn’t it be referred to? I mean, didn’t Mahler use many other writers to “set the scene” when he wrote The Bronx Is Burning? What really baffles me is that, if he had turned the page, which I guess he failed to do, he would have seen several paragraphs by Yogi, talking about D-Day and his war experiences. It’s all right there in Yogi’s voice. What is he complaining about? Mahler says things like “Barra never gets into Yogi’s inner life.” I shook my head at that. There are perhaps 100 pages devoted to Yogi’s home life, both in St. Louis and in New Jersey, including several scenes in their home. There are perhaps 30,000 of Yogi’s words from his own books, other interviews, and interviews I’ve done with him. If that doesn’t constitute “an inner life,” I’d say Yogi must not have one. I guess Mahler wanted me to dig up more dirt on Yogi than I was able to find and was upset that I didn’t find any.

BB: Do you know Mahler?

AB: Not exactly. Years ago when he was working on The Bronx is Burning he sent me some emails asking for advice on some background materials, which I was happy to offer. As I recall, I think I steered him towards some stuff that was in the Village Voice. He’s sent me several emails over the years, to which I replied. In the Times review, he acted as if he had never heard of me. In the review, he praised two books and stories I had written for the New York Times more than six years ago, as if I hadn’t written anything since then – as if I haven’t been writing for the Wall Street Journal over the last six years and didn’t write a best seller, The Last Coach, about Bear Bryant. He must have known that I had been writing for the Journal because he got my email and sent me copies of stories he had written, including one on the Steinbrenners he wrote for the New York Times last year. It was a pretty good piece, but I pointed out an error he had made on when George Steinbrenner bought the team. Maybe he was a little miffed at that? Anyway, I think he should have informed the Book Review editors that we had been in touch for several years and let them make up their own minds about that.

BB: Is there one aspect of Yogi Berra: Eternal Yankee that you would have liked to have seen discussed more in the reviews?

AB: What I miss are the long, detailed reviews books used to get years ago, where a critic could devote some space to talking about something he particularly liked in a book that the average reader might regard as a bit tangential. In regard to Yogi Berra, I would have liked for someone to write about the atmosphere of certain places I described, for example, “Dago Hill” – if I may use the phrase – in St. Louis, where Yogi grew up. The descriptions of the sandlots and the games the kids played there. The scenes – and I apologize to Billy Joel for this – in Italian restaurants, where I took pains to describe the food, the smells , the feeling of being there. In the 1940s and 1950s the Yankee stayed in the Soreno Hotel in St. Petersburg, a huge old relic of a bygone era. Or Toots Shor’s saloon in New York, which was the ultimate sports hangout in the ‘50s. Also, the scenes in the Berras’ home in Montclair and the Berra-Rizutto bowling alley in Clifton, New Jersey – things like that. I find it very irritating to hear a criticism like I offered only “a superficial portrait of Berra off the field” when I wrote thousands of words describing the world Yogi grew up and lived in in such detail. I would have liked to see someone notice a little of that.

BB: You’ve written three biographies about iconic figures–Wyatt Earp, Bear Bryant and now Yogi. Is there any connection between these figures or what attracted you to them?

AB: Well, let me put it this way: I’ve always loved writing about people who everyone knows but about whom there has been no definitive biography. I like people around whom stories and legends build up, whether dark, like Earp, or light, such as Yogi. I like pealing away the layers of legend and finding not just the truth but how the legends originated and evolved.

BB: Who, pray tell, would you like to write about next?

AB: Next I’m probably going to do a book on three men – an Italian, Charles “Lucky” Luciano, a Jew, Meyer Lansky, and an Irishman, Owney Madden. Three men from radically different backgrounds who attainted their version of the American dream, and in so doing established the modern crime syndicate.

• The Yankees slashed prices for the primo seats, an altruistic move that still leaves many of us thinking, “You know, you have your own network, and it’s on my cable system. I’ll contribute to your bottom line that way and I won’t feel like I got stabbed in the wallet.”

• Alex Rodriguez did everything necessary in extended spring training and returned to the lineup Friday. He punctuated the return with a home run on the first pitch he saw, thus fulfilling his job as the media-anointed savior of the team’s season. He proceeded to go 1-for-10 with two strikeouts in the remainder of the series, and perhaps fearing aggravating the hip injury, didn’t hustle down the line to run out a ground ball, thus reclaiming his role as the team’s most prominent punching bag.

• The Yankees lost two straight to the Red Sox at home and have lost the first five meetings of the season. (Sound the alarms! Head for the hills! There’s no way the Yankees can win the division without beating the Red Sox! Except that they can, and they have. In 2004, the Yankees went 1-6 in their first seven games against the BoSox, ended up losing the season series 8-11 and still finished 101-61 to win the American League East by three games.)

• Joba Chamberlain 1: His mother was arrested for allegedly selling crystal meth to an undercover officer. Following Chamberlain’s own brushes with the law during the offseason, it stood to reason that the tabloids attacked this story like starving coyotes. It’s remarkable that he was able to pitch at all given the negative attention he received.

• Joba Chamberlain 2: Flash back to Aug. 13, 2007. Chamberlain struck out Orioles first baseman Aubrey Huff in a crucial late-inning at-bat to end the inning and in the heat of the moment pumped his fist in exultation. Yesterday, following a three-run home run in the first inning that gave the O’s a 3-1 lead, Huff mocked Chamberlain’s emotional outburst with his own fist pump, first while rounding first base, and again when crossing home plate. Apparently, Mr. Huff holds grudges. Thanks to the New York Daily News’s headline, “MOCKING BIRD” with a photo of the home-plate celebration, this story will have wings when Baltimore comes to the Bronx next week. Even better, as it currently stands, Chamberlain is due to start in the series finale on Thursday the 21st. Get ready for a rash of redux stories leading up to that game.

• Mariano Rivera surrendered back-to-back home runs for the first time in his career last Wednesday night, a clear signal that something is wrong. Maybe.

• The team as a whole. The Yankees are 15-16 through 31 games, and some rabid fans (the “Spoiled Set,” as Michael Kay likes to call them; the group of fans between ages 18-30 that only knows first-place finishes for the Yankees) are calling for Joe Girardi’s head. As in the above note on the Red Sox, some context is required. The Yankees’ records through 31 games this decade:

2000: 22-9 (finished 87-74, won AL East)
2001: 18-13 (finished 95-65, won AL East)
2002: 18-13 (finished 103-58, won AL East)
2003: 23-8 (finished 101-61, won AL East)
2004: 18-13 (finished 101-61, won AL East)
2005: 12-19 (finished 95-67, won AL East)
2006: 19-12 (finished 97-65, won AL East)
2007: 15-16 (finished 94-68, won AL Wild Card)
2008: 15-16 (finished 89-73, missed playoffs)
2009: 15-16 (finish TBD)

No one is going to make excuses for the team with the billion dollar stadium and the highest payroll, least of all your trusted scribes here at the Banter. Looking at the last three years — including 2009 — it should be noted that similar issues of injury, age, and woes throughout the pitching staff have befallen the Yankees.

But in the same way announcers like to tout the “baseball card theory” with players who get off to slow starts and end up reaching or eclipsing their career averages, it stands to reason that the Yankees will reach at least 90 wins despite their slow start and myriad problems. A closer examination of the above list reveals that the Yankees averaged 92.7 wins per season in the three years they reached the 31-game threshold at or below .500. That is a testament to the overall talent of the players, and to the manager. It may not have made a difference if Joe Girardi, Joe Torre, Don Mattingly, Larry Bowa or Lou Piniella was managing this team. Given everything, a 15-16 record might be the best this team could have achieved to this point. As Joe Auriemma wrote on YESNetwork.com last week, you are what your record says you are.

• The release date for Selena Roberts’ biography on Alex Rodriguez was jumped to last Monday, May 4. The local broadcasters had a field day with the reviews (more on this below).

The combination of all those stories led to information and sensory overload. The dead horse couldn’t have been beaten any more, on any story. The question I tried to answer in examining all of this was: Which story was covered the best?

The winner: the Selena Roberts A-Rod book fallout. Taking a panoramic view — I can’t examine this with a magnifying glass since I haven’t read the book yet — the analysis not only of the book but of Roberts’ journalism was excellent. It got me thinking that the New York media are at their best when they attempt to discredit someone.

An invasive round of questioning regarded the issue of pitch tipping. To wit: On his interview with Roberts, SNY’s Gary Apple rightly asked who her sources were regarding incidents she documented during A-Rod’s time in Texas. Roberts answered, “They’re people who would know. Obviously I can’t tell you who they were. … They were people (with the Rangers) who saw him every day.” Apple followed by asking if she was as confident in the pitch tipping story as she was in A-Rod’s steroid usage. She said, “Absolutely.” Apple asked the tough questions and Roberts volleyed them right back, a theme throughout her New York junket.

Perhaps the most contentious interview came last Monday on WFAN, when Boomer Esiason and Craig Carton questioned Roberts’ overall credibility based on her coverage of the Duke Lacrosse case when she was a New York Times columnist. The morning duo agreed that Roberts covered the Duke case in a one-sided manner (DISCLAIMER: That is not my opinion; I am recounting the Boomer and Carton opinion), but while Esiason couldn’t get past that, Carton believed Roberts was the authority on A-Rod’s steroid usage, based on her February report in Sports Illustrated.

The additional details of the book angered the hosts. Esiason asked about the purpose of the book, and Carton asked her if she had “an axe to grind” with Rodriguez and was seeking to get wealthy based on the book’s salacious contents. Both grilled Roberts on the pitch tipping and asked if the other acts — wearing a Yankee hat into a strip club and tipping 15% at Hooter’s — were worth inclusion. All were valid questions, and Roberts, to her credit, defended herself without getting defensive. She even took the high road, giving Esiason and Carton credit for making good points, when the hosts weren’t necessarily as willing to give her points. Esiason, his words dripping with sarcasm, remarked, “Maybe Alex Rodriguez will read this book and take something out of it to turn his life around.” Roberts’ response: “You know, that’s a great point.” Esiason cut her off before she could finish the sentence and said, “Let’s not get crazy there, Selena.” Was the condescension necessary?

On the national front, Allen Barra’s review at Salon.com, which Diane Firstman excerpted in this space on Saturday, was spot-on in terms of his analysis of her knowledge base of PEDs, advanced stats, and standard operating procedure of the players’ union. All are subjects which Roberts should have researched in depth, especially if they enhanced the message she was trying to send through the book.

The Bob Costas MLB Network interview did little but leave one to wonder why MLB would devote an hour program to a book that, on the surface, destroys the legacy of one of its greatest players (prior to his steroid usage).

Roberts’ SI colleague Tom Verducci, himself the author of a controversial Yankee book that took Alex Rodriguez to task, predictably defended her protection of anonymous sources.

There was one hole for me in all the coverage: there was, in some cases, an overt gender bias in the analysis. In particular, the Esiason-Carton interview at times reeked of a “she’s a woman and shouldn’t be allowed in the locker room” tone. If we’re looking to get answers and call out your interview subject’s credibility, presenting your own agenda during the process does nothing to enhance your own credibility.

And why did no reporter, writer, or talkie comment on Girardi’s statement of “I don’t understand why anyone would write a book like that?” Girardi has an engineering degree from Northwestern. He played arguably the most intellectual position on the baseball field during his career. He is a smart man, yet he made himself sound like a simpleton. Worse, Girardi painted Roberts in a dark light without having read the book or talking to Roberts to get the full story.

Do you agree or disagree with the assessments above? Which story was the preeminent story of the past two weeks? Are you tired of all of it? Which was covered the best and why? Your feedback is respected and appreciated.

Until next week …

Everybody Loves Yogi

One of the most anticipated baseball books of the spring is Allen Barra’s biography on Yogi Berra: Yogi Berra: Eternal Yankee (W.W. Norton).  Yogi is perhaps the most beloved Yankee of them all but he is also one of the most underrated great players of all time.   In his enthusiastic and provocative manner, Barra makes the case for the unadulterated greatness of Yogi.

Here is an exclusive excerpt.

By Allen Barra

He was the guy who made the Yankees seem almost human.

—Mickey Mantle

Sometime in the summer of 1941, two of the great legends of baseball narrowly missed making a connection that would have radically altered baseball. Some historians place the date in 1942, but the two men with reason to remember it best, Yogi Berra and Joe Garagiola, say, and I have taken their word, it was ­1941.

Lawrence Peter Berra, a then somewhat stocky, ungainly looking ­sixteen-­year-­old Italian-American kid from the “Dago Hill” area of St. Louis, had attracted the attention of the best organization in the National League for a tryout in Sportsman’s Park. Jack Maguire, a scout for the St. Louis Cardinals, told his boss, general manager Branch Rickey, that Berra had a powerful left-­handed swing, a great arm, and heaps of potential. Rickey wasn’t sure; he was more interested in another kid from the Hill, Joseph Henry Garagiola, a year younger than Berra. Garagiola was thought by Rickey to be faster, smoother, and more polished. Dee Walsh, another Cardinals scout, talked Rickey into signing Garagiola with a $500 bonus, but Rickey was skeptical about offering anything at all to ­Berra.

Rickey had been getting reports on both boys all summer, not just from his scouts but also from two of his outfielders, Enos Slaughter and Terry Moore, who occasionally showed up to give pointers at the WPA baseball school at Sherman’s Park. Rickey’s initial offer to young Berra was a contract—but no bonus. To a boy that age, a professional baseball contract, even without a bonus, was nothing to be scorned. But Lawrence, displaying the kind of stubborn integrity that would, in just a few years, stymie the most powerful organization in sports, balked. “In the first place,” he would tell sportswriter Ed Fitzgerald nearly two decades later, “I knew it was going to be tough enough to convince Mom and Pop that they ought to let me go away. But if Joey was getting $500 for it and I wasn’t getting anything, they would be sure to think it was a waste of time for me.”

Hedging, Rickey offered $250. Branch Rickey was the most influential executive in baseball—by the end of the decade, it was estimated that nearly 37 percent of all big league players had been developed in one of his farm systems—and Larry’s brash reply took him aback: “No, I want the same as Joey’s getting.”2 Rickey did not mention to Berra how much a month he would be earning under the contract, and Berra never asked. “That didn’t matter to me. I would have taken anything. All I was interested in was that if Garagiola was getting $500, I wanted $500, too.” Yogi would later take pains to emphasize that he wasn’t jealous of his pal, but he was convinced, from years of sandlot and street games, that he was as good a ballplayer as Joe. Garagiola disagreed. “Yogi wasn’t better than me,” recalls Joe. “He was much better. There were a lot of good ballplayers on the Hill at that time, and ‘Lawdy’—as his friends called him, echoing his mother, who couldn’t pronounce ‘Larry’—was the best. You know how kids choose up sides with a bat, one hand on top of the other until you reach the end of the handle? When the last hand got to the top, the first thing said was ‘We want Lawdy.’ ”

Jack Maguire argued with his boss, but Rickey was intractable: Berra would never be more than a ­Triple-­A player. He was too clumsy and too slow, Rickey said, to be a genuine big league prospect. Maguire never understood Rickey’s decision. Berra’s coaches, and certainly his opponents, did not find him either slow or clumsy, though he often appeared to be both. Branch Rickey was, simply, the greatest judge of talent the baseball world had ever seen and, perhaps, with the possible exception of a man whose path would cross Yogi’s, the greatest front office man in the game. In his time, Rickey pegged Jackie Robinson, Roberto Clemente, and dozens of other great players as future stars; he had been a catcher himself and was capable of evaluating all body types. He understood that baseball was a game that benefited from all manner of physical tools. Yet, Rickey, against the advice of his own scout, would not put out the additional $250 to sign Larry Berra. It was the most colossally shortsighted blunder ever made by a baseball executive, surpassing even Boston Red Sox owner Harry Frazee’s dealing Babe Ruth to the Yankees in 1920. Frazee, at least, got the incredible sum of $425,000 in cash and loans.

If, that is, Rickey’s decision was a blunder. In later years, a counterstory would circulate that Rickey was actually being shrewd: he knew he ­wouldn’t be with the Cardinals much longer, he was preparing to leave the St. Louis club for the Brooklyn Dodgers, and his real intention was to “hide” Berra and sign him for Brooklyn. Joe Garagiola points out that just a couple of months after the tryout, after Rickey had moved to the Dodgers, he contacted Berra to offer him a contract. “Rickey tried to sign Yogi after he went to work for the Dodgers,” says Joe. “Why would he have kept a file on him if he hadn’t intended to sign him for Brooklyn?”

In 1961, when his autobiography was published, Yogi flat-out denied that Rickey had tried to “hide” him. “I’ve never believed that . . . From everything I’ve heard about him, he’s too big a man to do anything like that.”  In recent years, probably from hearing the opposite version so much, Yogi seems to have reversed his stance on Rickey’s intentions. In a 1999 interview with Bob Costas, he said that he believed Rickey had intended all along to keep him for the Dodgers. It’s easy to see why: this explanation offers a simple, logical reason for a decision that seems otherwise inexplicable.*

The problem is, there isn’t any evidence to support this interpretation. Rickey himself never mentioned it. In his 1965 book, The American Diamond: A Documentary of the Game of Baseball, Rickey devoted a brief entry to “Yogi and Campy”—Berra and Roy Campanella, the great Dodgers catcher whose extraordinary career parallels Yogi’s. “In the last decade,” wrote Rickey, “the two dominant catchers in baseball were Roy Campanella of Brooklyn and L.P. Yogi Berra of the New York Yankees. By 1955 they were at the top of their game, and each had earned the Most Valuable Player award in his respective league for the third time. Both men were clutch hitters with ­extra-­base power, both were powerfully built but deceptively fast, both were very smart behind the plate . . . both Campy and Yogi had splendid throwing arms . . . They have hit over 550 home runs between them, surpassing all catchers in history in this department . . . Baseball may never see two such talented men for a long time.”­

There isn’t a word about Rickey’s having passed up a chance to sign Yogi in St. Louis in 1941, or, in fact, of Rickey’s having contacted Yogi later when Rickey was with the Dodgers and Berra had signed with the Yankees. Such an omission was unusual for Rickey, who was an encyclopedia of facts and memories. Murray Polner, Rickey’s best biographer, ­doesn’t recall a mention of Berra in any of Rickey’s papers. “I tend to disbelieve the story of Rickey’s trying to ‘hide’ Yogi for the Dodgers,” says Polner. “Rickey was a notorious tight wad, but painfully honest. He wouldn’t have set up a prospect for the Dodgers while working for the Cardinals. He wouldn’t have paid Garagiola $500 of Cardinal money if he didn’t think Joe was major league caliber.”

And if Rickey was still doing his job for the Cardinals, he would have signed Yogi Berra for them if he thought Yogi was a genuine prospect. The only plausible explanation for Rickey’s later failure to mention his contact with Yogi would seem to be his ego: he simply did not want to admit that he missed signing one of the greatest players in the game’s history.

There is another possibility as to what happened with Rickey and Berra, but it rests on tenuous evidence. In a 1949 profile of Yogi in Collier’s magazine, a writer named Gordon Manning stated that in the September after the tryout, Rickey phoned Berra “and said he would contact him in a few days”—presumably when his contract with the Cardinals was up—“but Yogi, confused by the Great Man’s ­double-­talk, signed with the Yanks after scout Johnny Schulte had duplicated Joe’s bonus on a tip from Leo Browne.” Where would Manning have gotten this information? Surely not from Rickey. Either Berra mentioned it to him during their interview or Manning misunderstood something Yogi did say. If it’s true, then it would seem Rickey did try to “hide” Yogi from the Cardinals, but I have seen no mention of a September call from Rickey anywhere.

Many years later the phrase “Berra’s Luck” would make its way into articles about Yogi. Looking back on his career, it was amazing how many times something seemingly bad would turn out not merely well but better than Yogi or anyone could have anticipated. Rickey’s failure to sign Yogi is the first known example of Berra’s Luck. After the tryout in Sportsman’s Park, Larry was hurt and humiliated. He went home ­empty-­handed, while his pal, a lad younger than he was, went home to his parents not only with a contract but with $500, more in one lump sum than his family would otherwise have come across in decades.

If fate, like an angel in the films of Frank Capra—an Italian immigrant born about the same time as Yogi’s father—had tapped him on the shoulder and said, “Don’t let it bother you, you will go on to the winningest career in the history of American sports, your words will be quoted by movie stars and presidents, and you will be rich enough to take care of your parents and your whole family,” Larry Berra could not possibly have believed him.

One of the most popular staples of adventure comic books is parallel universes, where “What if?” stories show us what might have happened if, for instance, Batman’s parents had lived or if Superman’s Krypton had not exploded. The life of Yogi Berra, who enjoyed those comic books nearly as much as he enjoyed baseball, would have made for a fascinating series of “What if?” stories. If Branch Rickey had stayed in St. Louis or if he had just offered Yogi the $500, what might Berra’s career have been like? And how might the world as we know it be different? Given Berra’s natural talent and capacity for hard work, he would have been a Hall of Famer had he spent all or most of his career with the Cardinals—though, oddly enough, his career at catcher, his natural position, would have been slowed by the earlier maturity of Joe Garagiola. Rickey’s judgment was correct at least as to where the two youngsters stood in 1941; Joey was more developed as a backstop and would catch more games in his first two seasons as a Cardinal than Berra would in his first three seasons with the Yankees. Also, in New York Berra had the great Bill Dickey to bring him along, and Yogi’s progress would almost certainly have been even slower without the help of the fabled catcher. Still, there was no holding back a player of Berra’s talent. He would hit more home runs in his first four seasons than Garagiola would hit in his entire career.

After 1946, Garagiola’s rookie year, the Cardinals would not win another pennant until 1964, when they would face a Yankee team in the World Series managed by . . . Yogi Berra. Between 1947 and 1963, though, the Cardinals finished second five times and third four times. It’s likely that Berra would have made the difference in at least a couple of those pennant races. If the Cardinals had boasted Berra during that span, they might well have challenged the Dodgers for National League supremacy. Yogi, a St. Louis boy, would have been, along with Stan Musial, one of the two most popular players in the history of America’s greatest baseball town. St. Louis fans relished nicknames—they gave one to an entire team, the 1934 “Gashouse Gang” Cardinals, as well as nearly everyone on it: “Dizzy” and “Daffy” Dean, “Pepper” Martin, Yogi’s first great baseball idol “Ducky” Medwick, and Yogi’s early instructor “Country” Slaughter. In the 1940s, their greatest player would be Stan “The Man” Musial. “Yogi” would have been an instant favorite. Playing against the Dodgers in the National League, though, would have pitted Berra against the other great catcher of his time, Roy Campanella, so, had he been a Cardinal, Yogi wouldn’t have been an automatic selection to start the ­All-­Star game every year as he was for the Yankees. It also isn’t certain that he would have won three Most Valuable Player awards. However, it seems safe to say that Berra, had he played for the Cardinals those seventeen seasons, would have been one of his league’s best players, an obvious Hall of Famer, and that St. Louis would have won a couple more pennants. A statue of Yogi would probably be standing next to Stan the Man’s outside Busch Stadium.

The more intriguing “What if?” is: “What if Branch Rickey had signed Yogi for the Brooklyn Dodgers?” The possibility is so monumentally disruptive to the existing order that to even contemplate it leaves one dizzy; it’s like one of those science fiction stories where the protagonist changes something in the past then returns to the present to find everything altered. The Brooklyn Dodgers were the only other team of that era with the potential to challenge the Yankees for baseball supremacy. To many Americans, the Dodgers were America’s team; even in the Deep South (where their games were broadcast on the Armed Forces Network) they were often seen as small town underdogs whom millions rooted for against the cold, corporate, ­big-­city Yankees. The Dodgers of the late 1940s and 1950s, the Dodgers of Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Duke Snider, Pee Wee Reese, and Gil Hodges, produced as many household names as the Yankees of the same period. Yogi would have been a spectacular fit—what the rest of the country called malapropisms would have been regarded in Brooklyn as heightened ­
awareness.

From the first year Berra played more than 80 games, 1947, through 1963, his last year as a player with baseball’s most dominant team, the Yankees won 1,649 games during the regular season and lost 989, a ­won-­lost percentage of .625. The Dodgers, over the same span, were the second best in baseball, 1,560–1,080 for .591, a difference of .034. Take away Yogi—who never finished lower than fourth in the MVP voting from 1950 to 1956—from the Yankees and replace him with anyone besides Campanella. It’s more than reasonable to assume that the Yankees would have won an average of three fewer games per season and that the Dodgers with Yogi would have averaged at least three more wins. If Yogi had been a Dodger then (and if my ­three-­wins-­per-­season average is correct), the Brooklyn/Los Angeles Dodgers of 1947–1963 would have been baseball’s most dominant team, with a record of 1,600 to 1,610 wins, while the Yankees (again holding to Yogi’s value of three wins per season) would have won fewer than 1,­600.

What about the World Series? The Yankees won fourteen pennants over those seventeen seasons, and the Dodgers won eight. Take Yogi out of pinstripes and put him in Dodger blue, and I would wager that at the least the difference would be split. Yogi’s presence could have been enormous in Brooklyn’s heartbreaking pennant races of 1950, when they lost to the Philadelphia Phillies Whiz Kids, and in 1951, when they lost to the New York Giants on Bobby Thomson’s last swing of the season. Those were just two of the five Dodgers’ ­second-­place finishes over those seventeen seasons. As a Dodger, Yogi could easily have turned World Series history on its head. Between 1947 and 1963, the Yankees and Dodgers faced each other in seven World Series, with the Yankees winning five. The Yankees’ edge in victories in those series is surprisingly small, just 23 wins to the Dodgers’ 20, though four of those Dodger victories came in 1963, a season in which Yogi played just 64 games, so perhaps 1963 should be left out of the equation. That leaves the Yankees with 23 World Series victories over the Dodgers between 1947 and 1956. How many of those games could Yogi have turned around? Well, if he had turned around as many for the Dodgers against the Yankees as he actually did for the Yankees against the Dodgers, the Dodgers, not the Yankees, would have been baseball’s dominant team over those seventeen seasons.*

And here’s a really scary thought: given Yogi’s amazing track record handling young pitchers, what might he have done with Sanford Koufax, who made his debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers at the age of nineteen? In 1961, Koufax finally lived up to his incredible potential, with 18 wins and 269 strikeouts, breaking Christy Mathewson’s ­fifty ­eight year-­old National League record of 267. Prior to that, in six seasons, Koufax had been just 36–40 in 103 starts. Is it unreasonable to assume that Sandy would have fulfilled that potential a little sooner with Yogi catching? In 1958 Roy Campanella suffered a horrendous auto accident that paralyzed him and ended his career. (In any event, by 1957 he was ­thirty-­six and winding down, appearing in just 103 games and hitting only .242.) What if Yogi had had a shot at working with Koufax when he was ­twenty-­two ­or twenty-­three?*

In either scenario, on any team, Yogi’s greatness would have emerged. He would have become an American folk hero and icon no matter what team he played for, but if he had not been a Yankee, I would not have written this book. He would have wound up living in St. Louis or, God forbid, Hollywood, and I would not be living less than ten miles from the Yogi Berra Museum and Learning Center and would not have the privilege of regarding Yogi as a neighbor. And if Yogi had not been a Yankee, would he truly be the national hero he is today, particularly to ­non-­Yankee fans all over the country? It seems paradoxical, but Yogi Berra is known and loved by millions who hate the team he played for, the team that regularly beat their teams. Of what other former athlete could something similar be said? As Mickey Mantle said, “He was the guy who made the Yankees seem almost human.”

I don’t really remember if I was a Yankee fan in my youth—ours was a Willie Mays household that revolved around the daily checking of box scores to compare Mays’s productivity with Mickey Mantle’s. Like millions of people around the country, I never felt I had to root for the Yankees to love Yogi, and like everyone else, whatever my feelings about the Yankees—I distinctly remember rooting against them when they played Mays and the Giants in the 1962 World Series—I always loved Yogi. But, I asked myself as my daughter and I wandered through Yogi’s museum, do we really appreciate Yogi Berra?

Everyone loves Yogi—or as the title of a play based on his life which he was too shy to attend says, Nobody Don’t Like Yogi. But do we really take him—I know this sounds strange, but hear me out—seriously enough? Everybody acknowledges that Yogi was a truly great player, but has he ever really been given his due? When it came time to vote for the ­All-­Century team in 1999, Yogi finished second to Johnny Bench, 704,208 votes to 1,010,403. I don’t want to sound as if I’m knocking Johnny Bench, another of my favorite players, but Yogi Berra was unequivocally the greatest catcher in the history of baseball, as good a hitter as Bench and an even better defensive catcher, and as every Yankee fan knows, the biggest winner in baseball history in terms of pennants and World Series rings. He was the cornerstone of the most dominant baseball team of the twentieth century, the only team to win five consecutive World Series, the 1949–1953 Yankees. It’s entirely possible that Johnny Bench, given the chance to play with the same teammates as Yogi, would have collected just as many rings—maybe. But Yogi did win them. Yogi was the glue that held the Yankees together between the fading of Joe DiMaggio and the rise of Mickey Mantle.

I don’t want to spend too much time on the Bench versus Berra argument now—you’ll find a detailed comparison of their careers in Appendix A—but for now suffice it to say that Yogi is, by all objective measurements I can find, the greatest player at baseball’s most demanding position. There are, after all, only sixteen catchers in the Hall of Fame, and with good reason, considering the wear and tear catching takes on the human body and the skills one must possess to be just a competent catcher in the first place. Catchers’ equipment is commonly referred to as “the tools of ignorance,” and the man who coined the phrase should be horsewhipped: no other position demands such intelligence, instinct, and leadership skills, and at no other position are great players ­so underappreciated. (As Joe Garagiola told me, “Catchers are the fire hydrants at the Westminster dog show.”)
Moreover, Yogi was an extraordinary player in other ways, a smart base runner and, though no one would mistake him for DiMaggio in the outfield, competent enough to have played 74 games in the outfield as the Yankees broke him in to the catcher spot and then, in his ­mid-­thirties, to become the team’s semi-regular left fielder, thus getting his successor Elston Howard into the lineup and continuing to contribute to his team when his own primary skills were fading.* As a manager, he won two pennants, one in both leagues, taking both teams to the final game of the World Series. As a coach with the New York Mets and Houston Astros, he was involved in two of the most thrilling postseason series ever, the 1969 World Series and the 1986 National League Championship Series.

You can find all of that in the record book. Modern baseball analysts hotly debate the existence of such things as clutch hitting and other “intangibles,” with most denying them. But this reality was not doubted in Yogi Berra’s day. Branch Rickey, no mystic when it came to the analysis of baseball, called Yogi one of the greatest clutch hitters he had ever seen. Mantle said it best, recalling a tight situation in the World Series, “There was no one I would rather see batting in that situation than Yogi, unless it was me.”8 No one has yet succeeded in offering a satisfactory explanation as to what clutch hitting is, but nearly everyone Yogi played with or against insists that whatever definition you want to use, it applies to Yogi Berra. In the final analysis, the question of whether or not clutch hitting is real may not be as important as the fact that so many players believe that it is real. Just as there are no atheists in foxholes, there are no agnostics in dugouts in the late innings of close games. Yogi’s teammates wanted to be on his side in tough, tight situations, and the guys on the other team didn’t want to face him when they felt the game was on the line.

This leads to the question of intangibles. Webster’s New World College Dictionary says intangibles “cannot be easily defined, formulated or grasped.” Nothing drives analysts nuttier than fans who rate players by their supposed “intangibles,” which Bill James once called “a fan’s word for talents that don’t exist.” Twenty­five years of writing about sports has left me uncertain as to whether or not I believe intangibles actually exist; I rather feel like the Irish peasant woman who, when asked by the writer Sean O’Faolain if she believed in the fairies, replied indignantly, “I do not.” But, she cautioned, “They’re there.” Intangibles may be in the eye of the beholder, but it’s also possible that some things we lump under the heading of intangibles might simply be things we have not yet found a way to quantify—or which do exist but can’t be quantified. What they call “being good in the clubhouse” (meaning a player who fosters good vibes and inspires confidence), the capacity for capitalizing on opponents’ strengths and weaknesses, the faculty for passing on experience to younger players (as Yogi did to future Hall of Fame second baseman Craig Biggio, whom he steered away from the catching position while with Houston), and the handling of pitchers come under the heading of intangibles. Not for nothing did Casey Stengel, the most successful big league manager ever, refer to Yogi as, “Mister Berra, my assistant manager.”

Deny the existence of clutch hitting and the value of intangibles, and you are in conflict with those who saw Yogi Berra play. Define clutch hitting and intangibles any way you like; whatever definition you put on them, the men who played with and against Yogi Berra thought he possessed them. As a player, manager, and coach, Yogi played on more winning teams and was involved in more legendary games and more famous plays than any player in the history of the game. In fact, far, far more than anyone else. He is so much ahead of whoever is in second that I cannot at the moment imagine who that might be. He helped put World Series rings on the hands of pitchers whose names are now forgotten by all except the most rabid Yankee fans, pitchers such as Frank “Spec” Shea, Joe Ostrowski, Tom Ferrick, and a score of others. And if you don’t believe Don Larsen should be included in their number, you can ask him.

His life and career are a virtual cutaway view of the game of baseball in the twentieth century.

And yet, the question persists. Do we take Yogi Berra seriously enough? And the answer, I think, is no. Joe Garagiola gives a surprising reply to the question “What’s the first word that springs to mind when you think of Yogi?” “Underrated,” says the man who has known him since childhood. And Garagiola is right, as is ESPN’s Jayson Stark in his book, The Stark Truth: The Most Overrated and Underrated Players in Baseball History. Stark regards Berra as not merely the most underrated catcher of all time but the most underrated player. And Stark is correct in pointing out that Yogi occupies a peculiar niche: unlike other underrated players, Berra has not been forgotten: there has simply been a wrong turn taken somewhere in regards to what he should be remembered ­for.

That Garagiola should call Yogi underrated is, of course, ironic, since it was Joe who helped create the mindset that caused him to be underrated. Through decades of telling Yogi stories, many real and some apocryphal, to audiences of millions during Joe’s days at NBC, he undermined the perception of Berra as a great player and competitor and replaced it with the image of an amiable clown who was lucky enough to have been around when the Almighty handed out roster spots on winning teams. I don’t imply that that was Joe’s intention, but the stories, repeated endlessly on television and paraphrased in newspapers and magazines and then in subways, in offices, and in bars, created a ­pseudo-­Yogi that took on a life of its own, a caricature of the real man.* This wasn’t all Joe’s doing by any means; Yogi Bear, the cartoon creation with whom the original Yogi was none too pleased, made his debut three years before Garagiola began telling Berra stories on NBC’s national baseball broadcasts. (And who’d have guessed back in the early 1960s when Yogi Bear was the most famous cartoon character on TV that ­forty-­five years later the first Yogi would once again be more familiar to audiences than the animated bear he inspired?)

It must be admitted, too, that Yogi himself has done his share to perpetuate the pseudo-Yogi. The Aflac commercial, currently among the most popular on television, is a case in point. If you haven’t seen it, which means you’ve been in solitary confinement on the moon for the last couple of years, it presents Yogi in a barbershop (presumably one near his home in Montclair) dispensing ­pseudo-­Yogiisms such as “If you get hurt and miss work, it won’t hurt to miss work” and “They give you cash, which is just as good as money.” The commercial is funny, but the lines don’t sound like Yogi.

On the day I write this, June 4, 2006, in a column headed “As Yogi Berra Never Said,” the syndicated columnist James J. Kilpatrick writes, “In 1953, the New York Yankees won their fifth World Series in a row. Their popular catcher, Yogi Berra, took it in stride. ‘It’s déjà vu all over again,’ he said. The trouble is, he never said it. It’s also probable that he never said of a particular restaurant, ‘It’s so crowded nobody goes there any more.’ And if Berra was the first to remark, ‘The future ain’t what it used to be’ the evidence is hard to come by.”

Actually, Yogi did say (or at least reliable witnesses swear he did say) “It’s déjà vu all over again.” But nobody remembers it being after the 1953 Series: they remember he said it after Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris hit ­back-­to-­back home runs in 1961. Yogi most certainly did say, in regard to dining at a particular restaurant, probably Toots Shor’s, “Nobody goes there any more, it’s too crowded.” However, he never said he was the first to say it, and to my knowledge no one, least of all Yogi, has ever claimed that he said “The future ain’t what it used to be.”

If Yogiisms have become a light industry, then the debunking of Yogiisms practically qualifies as one. Kilpatrick is far from the first to set up a straw Yogiism just to knock it down.

Generally speaking, there is a significant difference between the genuine Yogiisms and the pseudo Yogiisms, and it is this: the things Yogi said that he actually said usually make sense in fewer words than most anyone else would use. “When you come to the fork in the road, take it” refers to the quickest way to get to his house (it’s the same distance whether you keep to the right or left). That “You can’t think and hit at the same time” will be confirmed for you by any great hitter. Yogi never said that being able to think wouldn’t help you to hit—quite the contrary. As he phrased it in a Q&A session at the 1998 Montclair Booktober Fest, “You do your thinking before you get up to bat. We used to spend a lot of time before the games talking about certain pitchers, what they threw, and what was the best way to hit them in certain situations. We did a lot of talking and a lot of thinking about hitting. We just didn’t stand there thinking when we were up to bat.” Another man with a great eye, French photographer Henri ­Cartier-­Bresson, said as much about his profession: “Thinking should be done beforehand and afterwards—never while actually taking a photograph.” No one laughed at him.

“Why buy good luggage? You only use it when you travel” just seems like plain good sense to me. “It ain’t over till it’s over” was supposed to have been coined by Yogi during the Mets’ 1973 pennant race, and he turned out to be right: it wasn’t over until it was over. (Yogi, for his part, thought that Rocky Bridges might have said it first; in any event, he insisted he always tried to say “It isn’t over until it’s over.”)

“Ninety percent of this game is half mental”? Who knows better what the percentage is? And, as anyone can tell you who has ever tried (including Bear Bryant, who was no one’s idea of an amiable clown but who was always quoting his favorite Yogiism), you can observe a lot just by watching. And so on. True Yogi fans, of course, make a distinction between real Yogiisms—distilled bits of wisdom which, like good country songs and old John Wayne movies, get to the truth in a hurry—and the famous malapropisms, such as when he told the fans at Yogi Berra Day in St. Louis, “I want to thank everyone for making this day necessary.” And who can say for certain that the St. Louis fans didn’t make the day necessary?

The commercials are merely Yogi’s most recent jujitsu on the media, who long ago created a semi-fictional persona described by Yogi himself as “a kind of ­comic-­strip character, like Li’l Abner or Joe Palooka.”9 They’ve been doing it to Yogi for nearly sixty years now, and for nearly sixty years Yogi, instead of doing what almost anyone else would have done, nursing resentment and allowing bitterness to fester, has had the last laugh by turning the pseudo Yogi into a cash cow. No one, of course, has more of a right to benefit from any image of Yogi than Yogi himself. But though it has helped make him the most famous living former athlete, one of the most quoted Americans of the last two centuries, and, in the words of the New York Daily News’ Bill Madden, “the most recognizable figure in America,”10 it may have cost him something as well. Namely the full measure of respect that should be accorded a man of Yogi’s accomplishments. An exhibit at Yogi’s museum traces the evolution of an American legend in such pop cultural artifacts—let’s call them Yogiana—as baseball cards, comic strips, milk cartons, soft drink bottles, and figurines, as well as books, including his 1961 autobiography, Yogi; his 1966 instruction manual, Yogi Berra’s Baseball Guidebook; reflections on his ten championship series, Ten Rings, ­co-­written with Dave Kaplan; and published in 2008, You Can Observe a Lot by Watching: What I’ve Learned About Teamwork from the Yankees and Life (also ­co-­written with Kaplan).

What there isn’t in that glass case is a copy of a comprehensive biography of Yogi,* which, if you think about it, is absolutely amazing and a fact that has slipped under the radar of Yogi’s enormous fandom. Surely he is the greatest ballplayer never to have had a serious biography—a gap in baseball history that I hope to fill with this book. In fact, for all of his fame and the endless stories affirming or debunking Yogiisms, there has been little written about Yogi and his enormous role as the most valuable player of the greatest of all baseball dynasties. He is excluded (by his own wishes) from most oral histories of the Yankees in that period, and thus his role has been kept to a minimum in most narratives of the Yankees from World War II on. He is, of course, prominent in most of his teammates’ memoirs, including those of Whitey Ford, Phil Rizzuto, and Mickey Mantle, as well as those of his manager and mentor, Casey Stengel, and, of course, Joe Garagiola.

Partly this is because Yogi, contrary to his public image, is a painfully shy and deeply private man who is extremely uncomfortable in formal interviews. But those who encounter him in informal situations can attest that he is surprisingly quick and engaging. At the Montclair Book Center in 1998, he was autographing copies of The Yogi Book: “I Really Didn’t Say Everything I Said!, when I showed him a copy of his autobiography, Yogi, which he had signed for me ­thirty-­seven years earlier. “Do you remember signing this for me at the Menlo Park shopping center in 1961?” I asked. “Yeah,” he replied with a grin. “How ’ya been doin’?”

Baseball historian Dom Forker, working on a history of the 1955–1964 Yankees, received this reply from Carmen Berra some seventeen years ago: “If you know Yogi, as I’m certain you do, you know he hates to give interviews. He doesn’t like to talk about himself. Do you want to hear about our six grandkids?” (This was in 1990; it’s eleven grandkids now.) “That told me as much about Yogi as any interview,” says Forker. “He just wanted to talk about his grandchildren. Charlie Keller, his teammate for years on the Yankees, told me ‘Yogi Berra won’t talk about himself. You’re going to need all the help you can get.’ Charlie was right.”

How shy is Yogi Berra? In 1998, after the team from Tom’s River, New Jersey, won the Little League World Series, they paid a visit to the Yogi Berra Museum in Montclair. Berra, in the middle of a congratulatory address to the boys, began to tear up. Yogi’s reticence to play the public figure has often caught sportswriters nurtured on the ­pseudo-­Yogi by surprise, leading them to the conclusion that Yogi was some sort of media creation. Jack Mann, later a columnist for the Detroit Free Press, came to New York in the mid-1950s and met Berra while writing for the New York Herald Tribune. He was told he would be wowed with Yogi quotes, but he never got anything in the locker room worth using. By 1967, when he chronicled the fall of the Yankee empire for a book, he concluded that “Yogi Berra wasn’t really a character…He wasn’t even especially interesting. If there had not been a Yogi Berra, it would have been necessary for those attempting to write cute copy about the Yankees to invent him, and they did.”11 Mann was on the verge of an insight, but he was so focused on debunking the popular notion that he missed the real point: the Yogi Berra that everyone read about in the papers every day and heard about on television was an invention. The real Yogi was no cliché, and he was nobody’s invention but his own.

*Though Yogi himself might have offered the simplest and best explanation for Rickey’s puzzling decision in his 1961 book: “I think it’s just that it was getting harder to get players as the war went along, and he remembered me and figured it would be worth a few hundred dollars to see if I could help him. Anyway, it didn’t make any difference.” (Berra and Fitzgerald, Yogi, p. 64)

*Perhaps the most intriguing question about the ­Yogi-­as-­a-­Dodger scenario is: Who would have been the Dodgers’ catcher—Yogi or Campy? There are some who would regard the question of which of the two great catchers to start as a problem. I think having Yogi Berra and Roy Campanella on the same team and wondering where to play them is a problem all managers would like to face. For one thing, both Berra and Campanella were capable of playing other positions—Campy played all his major league games at catcher, but in the Negro Leagues he was a capable first baseman, third baseman, and outfielder—and in addition to having both their bats in the lineup on most days, the Dodgers could have had the option of using one to relieve the other in, say, second games of doubleheaders. Imagine having Yogi Berra or Roy Campanella as your backup catcher! Campanella lost quite a few games to injury, and in those situations they could have pulled Berra out of, say, left field and put him behind the plate.

If they played together, Berra would have been the starting catcher because he reached the major leagues sooner than Campanella. It’s true that Yogi’s skills behind the plate were honed considerably by Bill Dickey, but if Yogi had been on the Dodgers, Branch Rickey would certainly have seen to it that Berra had ­first-­rate ­coaching.

*To my knowledge, the only writer to have considered the possibility of Yogi as a Brooklyn Dodger was Gordon Manning. in Collier’s: “What a daffy Dodger Yogi would have made!” Manning wrote that Berra didn’t care for the idea: “ ‘Brooklyn,’ he says with obvious distaste. ‘What a place. Anytime we play at Ebbets Field in a spring exhibition or somethin’ I always gotta leave the house two hours early. I know I’m going to take the wrong subway, so I gotta allow time for gettin’ lost.’ ”

*Carlton Fisk played 31 games in the outfield for the Chicago White Sox at age thirty-nine—he had made eight previous outfield appearances in his career before that—but not many other catchers have been able to make the move so late in their ­career.

*Berra himself has always been a bit ambivalent about Garagiola’s version of Yogi. “It was good for him to say all he has said about me over the years,” he recalled for Tom Horton in his 1989 memoir, Yogi: It Ain’t Over, “and it had been good for me, too. At least it was not bad. That’s the way I would like to say it. It wasn’t bad . . . We were childhood friends and still are and will always be. Joe is not the only one who used me as a stooge, if that is a good word (I am not sure it is, but I’m going to use it anyway). He was the most well known. A writer friend suggested I use ‘foil’ in place of ‘stooge.’ It didn’t work for me.” (p. 59)

*At the time I wrote this, I had not yet seen Carlos DeVito’s 2008 biography, Yogi: The Life and Times of an American Original.

Yogi Berra: Eternal Yankee, published by W.W. Norton, is on sale now.

Perhaps the lasting legacy of Bill Heinz is something he told me in a phone interview 15 years ago. What, I asked him, was the greatest lesson he had learned in nearly half a century of sportswriting? His answer was surprising. “In the end, all of us — fans, writers, coaches, athletes — have something in common: We’re all losers. Everybody is a loser, let’s face it. None of us wins all the time, in games or in life, not Joe DiMaggio, not Muhammad Ali. And none of us is going to live forever.”

Not even Roger Clemens…

This reminded me of what Roger Angell once said about failure, and why, when he started writing about baseball, he was drawn to the Mets and not the Yankees because, he contended, there is more Mets than Yankees in most of us. Most of us can generally relate more to failure than success. Pat Jordan was a failure as a pitcher and then made a career out of profiling so-called “failures” (though he writes just as convincingly about success stories). Check out Jordan’s latest, from last weekend’s Play magazine, on two young golfers.