Most Recent: “Searching For Yogi Berra” Legends often never think of themselves as such. That was part of Berra's appeal.

Editor’s Preface: In 1950, Yogi Berra had 597 at bats, 656 total plate appearances, and struck out only 12 times. When I first saw that I thought it was a typographical error. It simply did not seem possible, especially because Berra hit 28 home runs and drove in 124 runs that year, numbers any power hitter would envy, would give his right arm to have. Power hitters, even those who make consistent contact, strike out far more than 12 times a season. But Berra was also what is called in baseball a “free swinger.” If the pitcher threw it, he swung at it. That is why he walked only 55 times in 1950. Good disciplined hitters, like Ted Williams, swing only at strikes, not at pitches outside the strike zone. Berra was a notorious “bad ball” hitter, swinging at pitches over his head, pitches in the dirt. The stunning fact is that he HIT these pitches successfully. That is why he struck out only 12 times that year. All professional baseball players have tremendous hand-eye coordination, otherwise no one would be paying them to play. But Berra may have had the best hand-eye coordination of any player other than Babe Ruth, Rogers Hornsby, and Ty Cobb. The most he ever struck out in one season in his entire Major League career was 38 times. Some players think they have done all right if they strike out only that number of times in a month. Reggie Jackson, not one of Berra’s favorite Yankees, notorious for his prodigious number of strikeouts, used to rationalize by saying “an out is an out.” But that is not true. As the Little League coaches all preach, for a batter, “putting the ball in play” is nearly always better than missing it entirely. The trick is always to get the fielders to handle the ball; even if it is a routine ground ball, there is always the chance that they will screw it up. Baseball is about giving fielders that opportunity.

Berra’s appeal was that, with his gnomish face, squat body, and plain-spoken ineloquence that seemed positively poetic and epigrammatic in its ungrammatical compactness, he was more than a baseball player, more than a mere personality, but rather the embodiment of something especially American and especially noble in a comic sort of way. The D-Day veteran had a wonderful life.

Berra was nobody’s stooge. He knew how to capitalize on his fame and his appeal and made more than a few bucks from his many books and his endorsements, ranging from the chocolate drink Yoo-Hoo to Aflac Insurance. Berra should have died a rich man. And it would surprise me if he did not.

But no one begrudges Berra for hustling himself. The public loved him because he was so much the everyman but unlike say Pete Rose, another great “everyman” player, Berra had integrity. Berra never hustled to the point where he outsmarted and outhustled himself, as Rose did. Berra never lied. He loved the game and the men who played it too much to do that.

“He’s the most quoted man in the world, and he never says anything,” said son Dale about his taciturn father. Even close friends found Berra to be as difficult to interview as my daughter, Rosalind, did. (Read former Yankee pitcher Ron Guidry’s account of trying to get Berra to open up in Harvey Araton’s Driving Mr. Yogi: Yogi Berra, Ron Guidry, and Baseball’s Greatest Gift, published in 2012, to learn how tough a nut to crack Berra could be around people he trusted and liked.) Berra, even to friends and teammates, could seem cranky and self-absorbed. His humility and lack of self-consciousness made him endearing. He was not imperial like “Yankee Clipper” Joe DiMaggio and he was not a tragic, drunken lout like Mickey Mantle.

Owner George Steinbrenner hired Berra to manage the Yankees in 1984, his second stint as their manager. The team finished with an 87-75 third-place record. Steinbrenner fired Berra 16 games into the 1985 season, and Berra did not speak to Steinbrenner, or set foot in Yankee stadium or attend any Yankee event, for 14 years. He was not angry at Steinbrenner for firing him; Berra had been fired before and understood that as part of the game. He was upset because Steinbrenner sent an emissary to do it. Berra could not forgive him for that. In 1999, the same year DiMaggio died, Steinbrenner decided to eat humble pie and apologized to Berra in person. With the death of DiMaggio, Steinbrenner needed Berra perhaps even more than Berra needed him, as Berra was, without question, the most popular and beloved Yankee still on this side of the grave.

When my daughter told me she was going to the Yogi Berra Museum and Learning Center in Little Falls, New Jersey, to interview Berra for a magazine article, I was jealous but also very proud she was getting this opportunity to interview such a famous person. I wanted to go and offered to be her driver. My schedule, alas, would not permit. I am sorry it did not. I guarantee that she would have been on time for the interview if I had been driving.

—Gerald Early

“Those pinstripes, they make you do something.”

—Yogi Berra, on wearing the Yankee uniform

I was conducting a phone interview with baseball great Yogi Berra and it was not going well.

I had read a 400-page book about Berra and written 30 probing, thoughtful questions. I started off with an easy one, designed to get him to start recollecting.

“When was the last time you were on The Hill?” I asked. Berra grew up in an Italian neighborhood in St. Louis called The Hill, where today Berra’s street is named Hall of Fame Way.

“What?” Berra replied. His voice was gravelly with a New York accent. I asked again. He said he had been there about a year ago when his sister died. It was an inauspicious start, though things improved, but not by much.

It was 2011. I was interviewing Berra for an article for St. Louis Magazine called “My Hometown,” where famous St. Louisans reflected on where they grew up.

Berra had become famous as the catcher for the New York Yankees. He won 10 World Series as a player, five of them in a row, and was voted American League MVP three times. He went on to win three more World Series rings as a coach and managed his beloved New York Yankees and their cross-town rivals, the New York Mets at various points in his career. He also served as a coach with the Houston Astros. In a striking irony, Berra’s first year as manager of the Yankees was 1964, when they played the St. Louis Cardinals, Berra’s hometown team, in the World Series. The Yankees lost in seven games. Berra was promptly fired after the World Series even though the Yankees had won 99 games that season and Johnny Keane, the manager of the World Champion Cardinals, was hired in his place. Keane, in 1965, did not come close to having Berra’s success. The Yankees would not return to the World Series again until 1976 under the managership of another former Yankee player, the irascible, alcoholic Billy Martin.

But Berra’s success in baseball was only necessary—not sufficient—to make him one of the most famous and cherished athletes in American history. He became even more famous for his illogically profound “Yogi-isms,” like, “You can observe a lot just by watching.” Or “If you can’t imitate him, don’t copy him.” Or “It ain’t over till it’s over.” He even had a cartoon character, Yogi Bear, named after him. (The mannerisms and speaking style of the pic-a-nic basket­–stealing bear were, however, based on Art Carney’s character Ed Norton from The Honeymooners.)

I was trying to get Yogi to tell a few stories about his childhood for the magazine, ideally they would be nostalgic and sweet. My word count was around 500, and by the end of the interview I knew I did not have enough even for that.

Dave Kaplan, the director of programs at the Yogi Berra Museum and Learning Center, who had helped me get the interview, came back on the line after Yogi left.

“I might need to call back …” I began.

“Yeah sorry, you know he’s 86,” Kaplan began. “It’s easier to talk to him in person. You could come out here, and we could show you around the museum.”

“OK,” I said without hesitation. “Let me talk to my editor.” I hung up the phone knowing that St. Louis Magazine would never pay for me, an assistant editor, to fly out to New Jersey to interview Yogi Berra. But I was determined to go in any case.

I wanted to meet Berra, a legend who had played with some of baseball’s greatest players like Mickey Mantle, Edward “Whitey” Ford, Joe DiMaggio, Bill Dickey, Phil Rizzuto, Casey Stengel, and against Roy Campanella, Jackie Robinson, and Ted Williams. I also had this idea about “the man behind the myth,” that there was some essence of Berra that dozens of biographers, hundreds of journalists, and others had missed. And I, the rookie reporter with no formal training, was going to find it. So I booked my ticket to New Jersey.

I landed on a gray drizzly day in October and, bad with directions as I am, got lost on my way to Montclair State University, where Berra’s Museum and Learning Center was housed on campus. When I finally parked my rented minivan, I was 45 minutes late. I had heard that Berra was a man of routine, a stickler about people being on time. I was convinced I had blown the interview.

I burst into the museum, panicked. The woman at the front desk called Kaplan, who took me to the back office and there was Berra, dressed in sneakers, khaki pants, a long-sleeved shirt and a red sweater vest.

He was shorter than I imagined, but I liked him immediately. He smiled wide when he saw me, like we were old friends and he was happy to see me again. I smiled too, the apologies for my tardiness died on my lips. I realized Berra did not mind, or was too polite to mention it. What I had read over the phone as him being terse was simply him being a man of few words. I could not imagine Berra angry—well, at least not angry about a reporter asking him questions he had already answered hundreds of times.

The Cardinals had made it into the World Series against the Texas Rangers, which would start in a few days. Berra was rooting for his homies. “They gotta win that first game,” Berra said. “If they win the first game, they’ll win the series.” For what it is worth, the Cardinals did wind up winning the first game and the series in seven.

We went into the museum. Kaplan did most of the talking, with me trailing behind with my pad and recorder and Berra taking shuffling steps beside me.

Berra told a few stories as we went, chestnuts he probably had tossed out for other visitors, but he still chuckled as he told them.

In front of a picture of his family: “Lefty [the nickname for his oldest brother, Tony] was the best [athlete] in the family,” Yogi said. “My other two brothers could have played professional ball too, and my dad says, ‘You go to work. You aren’t going to go play baseball. You better bring that check home.’ They told him, ‘We’re all working, Pop. Let Lawdy [what Yogi’s family called him, his real name is Lorenzo Pietro Americanized as Lawrence Peter Berra] play ball.’ I always teased him. I said, ‘Dad, you could have been a millionaire if you let your sons play ball.’ He said, ‘Blame your mother.’”

Later, I asked him where he took out Carmen, his wife whom he met in St. Louis, on dates.

“We went to hockey games. I double dated with [childhood friend, former MLB catcher and announcer] Joe Garagiola.” We stopped in front of a picture of Yogi in a St. Louis Flyers’ hockey uniform. “They did that shot just for publicity, ‘cause I used to go and watch them play all the time. Hockey. Still do. We’ve got the Devils over here. You’ve got the St. Louis Blues.”

“Tell Rosalind the story about when …” Kaplan began.

“When George Weiss [then owner of the Yankees] saw me on them skates like that he called me on the phone and said you better get your butt off of them skates.” Yogi chuckled and we all laughed.

“Yogi Berra!” Three men in the museum came up to us. They shook Yogi’s hand and asked for a picture. Yogi agreed but turned to me before going over for the photo.

“Pictures! Why does everyone always want pictures?” he asked.

“You’re a legend!” I replied. He shrugged. This was a guy who while catching for the Yankees, worked the off seasons as a maître d’ or a salesman. Berra played before the Players Union was able to get star players the big money they get now, although star players in Berra’s era still made ample salaries, much more than the average working person. His father did not want him to play because he could not understand how anyone could make money playing a child’s game.(Roy Campanella’s mother felt exactly the same as did Stan Musial’s parents, so this sentiment must have been common among working-class people of an earlier time.) It was quite possible Berra did not think of himself as a legend, just a guy who could play ball well in a country where it happened to be a way to make a living.

As Berra walked over to get in the picture though, he was beaming.

We walked around the rest of the museum and then returned to the back office. Kaplan asked me what time my flight was. It was in a few hours, but I needed at least an hour to get back. But since I had some time, Berra said that he could sit with me and I could ask him a few more questions.

By then, I had thrown away my carefully thought out, probing questions asking him to analyze his life. When I asked him if it was nerve-wracking when he was catching Don Larsen’s perfect World Series game (when a pitcher gets all 27 players out without anyone getting on base through a hit, error, or walk) in 1956, Yogi had said, “Well, when it comes down to the last inning, he got ’em out, so that was good.”

I guessed that Berra was not a reflective man, which made some journalists accuse him of being dim-witted. But it would be very lucky indeed if a dim-wit could coin so many immortal sayings. I thought he just took the shortest route to a thought. When he wanted to say something, he said what he meant, and though it sometimes seemed on the surface contradictory, “No one goes there anymore, it’s too crowded.” It also somehow made sense. “Even if the world was perfect, it wouldn’t be.”

So, we talked about Carmen and how it was a shame I couldn’t meet her. She had gone to New York with her girlfriends to see a show. We talked more about the Cardinals and a card game he has going to with his buddies. When it was time to leave, he walked me out, much to the delight of a few excited visitors who had just come into the museum.

As I was walking back to the car, I thought about all the reasons people say that Berra is a great American story. His parents emigrated from Italy. He was short and plain, making him an underdog (Ted Williams, when he first saw Berra behind home plate said, “Who are they trying to fool with this guy?”) And the biggest scandals surrounding him were, as manager of the 1964 New York Yankees, slapping infielder Phil Linz’s harmonica out of his hands on a team bus ride when Linz would not stop playing it after a particularly frustrating loss to the White Sox, and a fight with a racist at the Copacabana in defense of Sammy Davis Jr.

And after an afternoon with Yogi Berra, I had one more thing to add. He was never grand. Even after all he accomplished, he was still surprised when people wanted his picture, and he did not think twice about spending several hours in the middle of the afternoon speaking to a rookie journalist from a local magazine he had probably never heard of.

I realized Yogi was right. You can observe a lot just by watching.

He called me when I got home to make sure I arrived safely. I was deeply touched by that.

RIP Mr. Berra. You will be missed.