Major League Baseball

The many reasons we loved Yogi Berra

Updated Mar. 4, 2020 10:38 p.m. ET

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I never had the pleasure of meeting Yogi Berra, let alone enjoying a conversation. Of course it didn'€™t have to happen this way, as I know people who knew Yogi, and of course my job does occasionally lead to conversations with immortals.

But never with Yogi.

The closest I came was about a dozen years ago. At that time, there was a Yogi Berra website where you could (as I recall) purchase Yogi books and Yogi-signed baseball and other Yogi things. Well, you could also e-mail Yogi (supposedly). I was working on a book about pitchers, and hadn'€™t been able to find anything interesting about Bob Grim, a Yankees pitcher in the 1950s. So I figured what the hell and e-mailed Yogi.

Within 30 seconds, I had a response from Dale, Yogi'€™s son. I'€™m sitting here with Dad. What do you want to know about Bob Grim? Well, I wanted to know what sort of pitches Grim threw. Via Dale, Yogi gave me exactly the sort of answer I wanted, which duly wound up in the book. When I see it now, I hear it in Yogi'€™s voice: "€œBob had a good sneaky fastball. That was his best pitch, followed by a curve, a little slider, and a changeup." And every time, I smile.

Now, this was about a half-century after the fact. But when I later found a contemporary quote from Grim'€™s pitching coach, it matched almost exactly what Yogi said. And thinking about this now, I sure hope someone sat down with Yogi at some point in the last 10 or 20 years and asked him about all the pitchers he caught. Because I suspect he was a wellspring of knowledge that might otherwise be lost.

Of course Yogi Berra's been a part of my life for a lot longer than that. I started paying attention to baseball more than 40 years ago, which means Yogi Berra'€™s been in my life for more than 40 years.

I'€™ll bet he'€™s been in your life, too, for about as long as you can remember.

But . . . why?

Yogi was a tremendous player in the 1950s and '60s, but there were other tremendous players in the 1950s and '˜60s.

Yogi played for a lot of championship teams, but so have a lot of other guys.

Yogi had a winning personality, but he'€™s hardly the only engaging superstar.

No, I think there was something else about Yogi Berra.

Yogi wasn't just an immensely talented athlete --€“ which of course he was, and let's never forget that --€“ but he was also immensely talented at being Yogi Berra, and being Yogi Berra meant playing, not the fool, but whichever role we chose for him.

Someone once observed that rooting for the New York Yankees was like rooting for U.S. Steel (back when U.S. Steel was, you know, actually big business). When the Yankees were winning the American League pennant every year, veterans were famous for growling at careless rookies, "€œHey, kid, you'€™re stealing my money."€ His World Series money, he meant. One of the men who signed Yogi's paychecks during his entire playing career with the Yankees was a real-estate magnate named Del Webb, who loved to boast about building concentration camps for Japanese-Americans during World War II, and then a pioneering resort in Las Vegas for mobster Bugsy Siegel just after the war. The Yankees in Berra'€™s time were infamously among the last teams to integrate, with Elston Howard -- coincidentally, Yogi's eventual replacement behind the plate --€“ not debuting until 1955.

But you wouldn't think of Yogi growling at a rookie. Naw, he'€™d just loan the kid the latest issue of Superman. Yogi wasn'€™t U.S. Steel; he was more like Mad Magazine or maybe Sergeant Bilko. And who couldn't root for Alfred E. Neuman and Bilko? Yogi --€“ yes, along with Mickey Mantle --€“ made it OK for just about anybody to root for the Yankees. Still today, makes it OK to remember those Yankees with fondness, or at least with some measure of ambivalence. If Yogi was the Yankees, how can you hate the Yankees?

Another distasteful subject: Commerce. Naked commerce.

But how could you hate commerce when Yogi was involved?

And boy, was he involved, from long-ago campaigns for long-ago companies like Prest-o-Lite batteries and Doodle Oil to a single spot for Aflac that ran for five years, thousands and thousands of times, in the 21st century. Could you really hold all that commerce against him, though? No, maybe he didn'€™t drink Yoo-Hoo or Miller Lite or Florida Orange Juice --€“ I mean, maybe he did or maybe he didn'€™t, but does it really matter? It was enough that Yogi, unlike fellow endorsers like Joe DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle, seemed to believe in whatever he was pitching at the moment.

As Yogi once said about his career as a celebrity pitchman, "€œIt was great. I had nothing to do in the winter, so I did all these non-baseball things. The money was good, and the commercials were always a lot of fun."€

They were fun for Yogi, which made them fun for everybody else. Or at least tolerable, unlike most of the other advertisements of the last half-century that weren'€™t conceived by Don Draper.

Finally, there were the Yogi-isms. Of course we're aware that Yogi didn'€™t actually invent many of "€œhis"€ most famous sayings, but that also seems utterly irrelevant. Just as Yogi sold the Yankees and Yoo-Hoo and Aflac insurance, he served as the ultimate promoter of all those things he would have said if only he'€™d said them. Yogi wasn'€™t the first to observe that nobody went to a restaurant anymore because it was too crowded, or that when you come to a fork in the road, there'€™s nothing to do but take it? Well, phooey on you. Almost all those things were said by someone else first, but wouldn'€™t still be said if Yogi hadn'€™t said them, or have been said to say them.

Turns out, we needed Yogi. But it'€™s a good thing somebody invented him, because we couldn'€™t have invented him by ourselves.

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