From Harvey Araton’s entertaining new book,”Driving Mr. Yogi” (which can be purchased at Amazon) here’s an excerpt to make you smile:

 By Harvey Araton

The first harbinger of spring — or spring training — at the home of Ron and Bonnie Guidry was a telephone call from Yogi Berra.

“You get the frog legs yet?” Berra would ask.

“Yog,” Ron Guidry would say, “it’s freaking January.”

Too late, Berra was already in serious countdown mode for the next Guidry frog fry extravaganza. It seemed like only yesterday that Berra had looked askance at Guidry’s beloved delicacy, like it was tofu wrapped in seaweed. It had actually been years since Mel Stottlemyre had bragged one spring training day about hunting frogs in the Northwest and cooking them himself. Guidry, with all due respect, was obliged to inform him that he hadn’t really experienced frog legs until he’d had them Cajun-style, or straight from the Guidry family cookbook.

Guidry returned to his apartment that evening, fried up a fresh batch, and the next day passed them around the coaches’ room. He offered one to Berra, who immediately made a face.

“Come on,” Guidry said. “You’ll like ’em.”

Stottlemyre, munching nearby, couldn’t disagree. But still Berra demurred.

“Yogi, I’ll tell you what, if you don’t try one, we’re not going to supper tonight,” Guidry said.

Was he serious? Probably not, but if Berra knew one thing about Guidry, it was that he was proud of his Cajun culture and cuisine.

Yogi wondered if he was in some way hurting his friend’s feelings. So he finally gave in, picked one off the plate, and gave it a nibble. Lo and behold, it was delicious. He wanted another, and as the years rolled by, he would continue to fi nd a place in his diet for something no conscientious doctor would have ordered for a man in his eighties.

Following treatment in the seventies for an arrhythmia, Berra assiduously watched what he ate. He avoided cholesterol-heavy breakfasts, pushed away most desserts with a dismissive “too fattening,” and made sure that the Progresso soup prepared for him at his museum almost daily and specifically at noon by the museum’s faithful business manager Bettylou O’Dell was low in sodium.

He had even long ago disassociated himself from the Yoo-hoo soft drink that he had made famous in the fifties and sixties (by chiming in a commercial, “Me-he for Yoo-hoo!”) because he objected to the preservatives that had changed the drink’s texture and flavor. If he relaxed his calorie counting, it was usually at dinner, especially at big family dinners, where everyone down to the youngest of the Berras was taught that the heels of the long Italian bread were reserved for Grandpa. Berra’s favorite dish was tripe — the stomach tissue of cows and a peasant staple in the old country — but he enjoyed a fairly wide range of gastronomic fare that occasionally didn’t agree with him.

For instance, he liked to munch on hot peppers right out of the jar. It was another habit that Carmen wanted him to break — except it turned out that Guidry, who used peppers to spice up his Cajun cooking, was Berra’s main supplier.

“I’d have them with me in spring training, and then when he’d go back to New Jersey, he’d tell me to send him a batch when I got back to Louisiana,” Guidry said. When Guidry would comply, he would get a call from Carmen asking that he stop sending the peppers. When he didn’t send them the next time Yogi asked, he’d get a call wanting to know where the peppers were. “Either way, I had one of them fussin’ about the damn peppers,” he said with mock resignation.

After so many years of sitting across the table from him at one Tampa establishment or another, Guidry could probably expound on Berra’s culinary preferences better than anyone but Carmen. At the very least, he could discuss them like a comedian working his monologue.

“When we go to the Rusty Pelican, that’s a seafood place and they have swordfish, which he loves, so he gets that all the time there,” Guidry said. “When we go to the Bahama Breeze, he likes the black bean soup, and with that he’ll have the seafood paella or the barbecued ribs. Four times out of five, he’ll have the seafood, but let’s say we have been to the Pelican the night before, well, that means he’s already had seafood, so he’ll get the ribs.

“Now Fleming’s is the steakhouse, so that’s what he gets there, and then at the Bonefish he has to have the sea bass. Then after he moved into the Residence Inn, he went one night to eat with Carmen at Lee Roy Selmon’s, which is right next door. So he tells me the next day, ‘Hey, it’s not bad.’ The guy recognized him, sat him at a nice table, everything was fine. OK, so now we got to go to Selmon’s, and there he gets the meatloaf. But since he’s been at the Residence Inn, where they put out a spread in the evening, he also keeps a list on the door of his refrigerator that tells him what they’ll be serving. If he likes something he’s had before, he’ll say, ‘On Tuesday, I’m going to eat in the hotel.’ ‘OK, that’s good, Yog.’ ”

No Tampa meal, however, was as anticipated and as fussed over as Guidry and Berra’s “Frog Legs Night,” which by the end of Berra’s first decade back with the Yankees had taken on the ritualistic weight of Old-Timers’ Day.

Before leaving for Tampa every spring, and after being badgered by Berra, Guidry would pack about two hundred legs into the truck, having purchased them inexpensively (about $200 for a hundred pounds) in Lafayette, where they are plentiful and sold year-round.

From the same vendor, he would buy a mixture of fl our and cornmeal seasoning in a gallon jar.

“They’re so simple to fix,” Guidry said. “You got the egg batter, the fry mix, dip ’em in the batter, throw ’em in the frying pan.” From the frying pan, the frog legs would be transferred to paper towels, to soak up some of the grease. It took about ten minutes to cook up a batch of forty legs.

Guidry would ration his supply so that it would last throughout spring training. He would prepare some for the more adventurous players looking for a break from the standard clubhouse fare. Jorge Posada was a longtime fan. CC Sabathia joined the club when he came on board in 2009. Guidry would also invite two or three buddies over on one of his first nights in town and playfully have Goose Gossage dial New Jersey to let Berra know what was on the menu that night.

“Yogi, we’re over here at Gator’s, and we’re eating all the frog legs,” Gossage would say.

That was enough to set Berra off. “There’d better be some goddamn legs left when I get down there,” he’d growl.

Excerpted from DRIVING MR. YOGI: Yogi Berra, Ron Guidry, and Baseball’s Greatest Gift. Copyright © 2012 by Harvey Araton. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

[Photo Credit: Edward Linsmier for The New York Times, Saed Hindash/N.J.com]

From George King III in the Post: Hiroki Kuroda has been given a spot in the starting rotation. C.C. Sabathia, of course, is the ace. But nothing is a lock for the rest of the fellas:

Barring an injury, Girardi is going to have put somebody in the bullpen — Hughes, who has 49 relief appearances, and Garcia are the favorites — or send a pitcher to SWB.

“I am not trying to cause a stir,’’ Girardi said. “I am making sure that when we leave spring training we are taking the five best. And to be fair, there are no guarantees.’’

Girardi recalled Don Zimmer offering advice and is reminded of it every day.

“Don’t guarantee spots in spring training,’’ Zimmer told Girardi.

Around Yankeeland:

IIATMS runs down their list of the top 30 Yankee prospects.

Mike Axisa looks at the Russell Martin situation over at River Ave.

Rebecca Glass writes about Alex Rodriguez and Mark Teixeira while Steve Goldman fights off paranoid nightmare blues about the Yankees’ offense over at the Pinstriped Bible.

And over at Lo-Hud, Chad Jennings provides the notes of the day.

Via Pete Abe in the Boston Globe, Joe Girardi had some nice words for Jason Varitek who recently announced his retirement. Meanwhile, right on time, Bobby V is lobbing verbal grenades across enemy lines.

[Photo Credit: New York Times, from their amazing new tumblr site: The Lively Morgue]

Joe Posnanski has the piece:

No man in the history of American sports—perhaps even in the history of America—has spent a lifetime facing more expectant silences. And it is happening again. Another afternoon. Another silence. Strangers stand at a respectful distance and wait for Lawrence Peter Berra to say something funny and still wise, pithy but quirkily profound, obvious and yet strangely esoteric. A Yogi-ism.

It ain’t over till it’s over.

When you come to a fork in the road, take it.

You can observe a lot by watching.

In this case the strangers waiting in the silence are a mother and son. They had been touring the Yogi Berra Museum in Little Falls, N.J., in anticipation of having the boy’s bar mitzvah here. The family had decided that there is no better place for a boy to become a man than in the museum of the greatest winner in the history of baseball. And when they got word that the legend himself was present, they had to meet him, of course. They found him here, in the museum office, looking for a glass of water.

“I cannot believe it’s really you!” the woman says to Yogi Berra.

“It’s really me,” he says.

Meanwhile, here’s a video from SI:

Bronx Banter Book Excerpt

Last week, I got a copy of Neil Lanctot’s new book, “Campy,” a biography of Roy Campanella. I was duly impressed by Lanctot’s previous effort, a meticulously researched book about the Negro Leagues and so I opened his new book book with considerable anticipation. The prologue was so striking, and so fitting for this space, that I immediately contacted Simon and Schuster for an excerpt. They generously agreed, so here is the prologue to “Campy.”

Please enjoy and then go to Amazon to buy the book. Looks like a keeper.

From “Campy,”

By Neil Lanctot

FOR SOME CITIES, a World Series game is an all too rare event to be savored and debated for years afterward. But for a New Yorker in 1958, the Fall Classic was a predictable part of the October calendar, as humdrum as a Columbus Day sale at Macy’s or candy apples at a neighborhood Halloween party.

The great catcher Roy Campanella was a veteran of the October baseball wars. Between 1949 and 1956, his Brooklyn Dodgers had taken on the New York Yankees five times, coming up empty all but once. On Saturday, October 4, Campy was returning to Yankee Stadium for yet another Series game, but everything had changed since the last time he’d set foot in the House That Ruth Built. The Dodgers no longer played in their cozy ballpark in Flatbush but in a monstrosity known as the Coliseum a continent away. And Campy no longer played baseball at all because a January automobile accident had left him a quadriplegic. For the past five months, he had doggedly worked with the staff and physicians at the Institute of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation on Thirty-fourth Street in Manhattan to learn how to function in a wheelchair. He had now sufficiently progressed to leave the hospital on weekends.

His doctors had encouraged him to accept Yankee co-owner Del Webb’s invitation to attend Saturday’s game at the Stadium, although Campy was initially not so sure. He had not appeared in public since his accident, nor had he sat on anything except a wheelchair. Nevertheless, he set aside any lingering anxiety to make the early-afternoon car ride to the Bronx, where box seats behind the Yankee dugout had already been set aside for Roy, his wife, two of his children, and a male attendant.

When the family station wagon arrived at Yankee Stadium, Campy could not help but think of the times he had suited up in the locker room in the past. He had never liked hitting at the Stadium, but he had enjoyed his fair share of glory there, whacking a key single in the deciding game of the Negro National League championship game as a teenager in 1939 and a more crucial double in game seven of the World Series in 1955, the year the Dodgers finally bested the Yanks. Today, he would just be another fan.

Campy soon discovered his wheelchair was too wide for the Stadium’s narrow aisles. He had no choice but to be bodily carried by his attendant, two firemen, and a policeman. “I felt like some sad freak,” he later recalled. “It was the most embarrassing thing that ever happened to me. I felt ashamed.”

But the fans whose glances he so desperately wanted to avoid soon began to shout out encouragement. “Hi, Slugger!” one greeted him. “Attaboy, Campy!” yelled another. “Stay in there, Campy, you got it licked.” Before long, virtually every one of the 71,566 present realized that the fellow with the neck brace and “tan Bebop cap” being carried to his seat was three-time MVP Roy Campanella. “By some sort of mental telepathy thousands in the great three-tiered horse-shoe were on their feet and when the applause moved, like wind through wheat from row to row, I doubt if there were many there who didn’t know what had happened,” wrote Bill Corum of the Journal-American. “It was a sad thing. Yet it was a great thing too, in the meaning of humanity. No word was spoke that anybody will know. Yet it had the same effect as that moment when a dying Lou Gehrig stood on this same Yankee diamond and said … ‘I’m the luckiest man in the world.’”

Down on the field, the top half of the second inning took a backseat to the heartfelt hoopla in the stands. With the count 1-1 on Milwaukee’s Frank Torre, Yankee pitcher Don Larsen stepped off the mound as the players in both dugouts craned their necks to see what was causing the commotion and then began to join in the ovation themselves. Upon spotting Campy only a few yards away, Yankee catcher Yogi Berra flipped his mask and waved, while home plate umpire Tom Gorman offered “a clenched fist in a ‘keep-fighting’ gesture.”

Campanella, who had vowed beforehand that he “wasn’t going to cry,” struggled to keep his emotions in check. He smiled back at Yogi (who “kept looking back and hardly could resist the temptation to run over and shake Campy’s hand,” said one reporter) and winked at the mob of photographers who gathered at his seat. For the rest of that warm October afternoon, he tried to focus on the game, even trying to eat a hot dog without success, but he could not stop thinking about the outpouring of love he had just experienced. “It’s hard to explain the feeling that came over me. I don’t believe any home run I ever hit was greeted by so much cheering,” Campanella said later.

It was the first time he had received such applause in a wheelchair, but it would not be the last. For the rest of his life, his presence, whether in a major league ballpark or in front of a Manhattan deli, would evoke similar responses. He was no longer just a ballplayer but a symbol of something much more.

© 2011 Neil Lanctot

Joe Torre and Don Mattingly are expected to be at Yankee Stadium tonight to honor the late George M Steinbrenner. This will be Torre’s first trip to the new Yankee Stadium. Imagine the hand he’s going to get. For once Mattingly, Reggie and Yogi will have to take a back seat, because the loudest cheers will go to Joe.

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.

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.