After shooting to stardom on the sandlots of St. Louis, Berra, who died Tuesday at 90, become one of the greatest Yankees to ever wear pinstripes.
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By Craig Wolff
Yogi Berra, America's master of misshapen wit, holder of more World Series rings than anyone who ever played baseball and the strongest link to the Golden Era of the 1950s when the Yankees and New York ruled the game, died Tuesday.
He was 90.
Squat, bowlegged and droopy-eyed, with the smile of a cherub, Berra was the unlikeliest of athletes to transcend not only the game he came to love on the sandlots of St. Louis, but all of sports. Even as he grew frail, the name itself -- the sort of name a familiar uncle might have -- never lost a mystique that stretched across generations and oceans.
His observations -- part Mark Twain, homespun as Will Rogers, and Jack Benny droll -- were infused somehow with the linguistic wisdom of the sages, enough to fill anthologies and college dissertations, which they regularly did. Yogi-isms formed their own school of philosophy, rooted in a confounding circular logic. That he offered them not with guile but with an unassuming mumble and a shrug added to the aura, as did the uncertain roots behind many of the sayings, which grew to be proverbs.
Did he say, "You can observe a lot from watching?" Or, "It ain't over till it's over?" Had they been misattributed or embellished? Who knows?
Yogi himself was not always sure.
"I didn't say all the things I said," he often said.
Either way, he is among a few people in the history of the world whose name appears eight times in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations.
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His retirement from baseball was spent in the public eye in and around his Montclair home, but appearances were rare in recent years. The past few years he was unable to make his ritual spring visit to the Yankees training camp in Tampa, where he was revered by ballplayers more than a half-century removed from Berra's heyday as a player.
He would slip on the old pinstripes with the familiar solitary 8 on the back, and sitting, ankles crossed, on the dugout bench with his cap tilted high, he resembled in stolen moments the Yogi who first won New York's and New Jersey's heart long ago.
Yogi Berra at Yogi Berra Stadium in Montclair, the home of the NJ Jackals. (William Perlman | The Star-Ledger)
Figures across sports, politics, the media and the arts recognized him yesterday as a man without pretense, who embodied the virtue of being yourself.
On the diamond, Berra, all of 5-foot-7, was the misfit among his more graceful and imposing teammates. Next to the elegant Joe DiMaggio and the strapping Mickey Mantle, he gave the powerful Yankees who won with mechanized regularity a trace of humanness, even lovability. He is the rare athlete whose star brightened after he was done playing, relegating his game-to-game, year-in and year-out baseball achievements to a faraway past. But what he did on the field is no myth.
From 1947 through 1963, he played in 14 World Series (no one has played in more) and won 10 of them, accomplishments engraved on his Hall of Fame plaque in Cooperstown. Three times the American League's Most Valuable Player, 15 times an All-Star, he was certainly among the greatest catchers to ever play the game. He was the first catcher to hit 30 home runs; only three catchers have more home runs over their careers than Berra - 358 - and none has driven in more runs.
Because he overlapped the eras of DiMaggio and Mantle, and Willie Mays with the New York Giants, and because he played his first full season the year Jackie Robinson broke in with the Brooklyn Dodgers, he often was the overlooked man. The Yankee teams he played on had a combined winning percentage of .625, and surely, they were stocked with a phalanx of All-Stars and future Hall of Famers. But for all their firepower, it was Berra who led the them in RBIs seven straight seasons from 1949 through 1956. In team history, only Lou Gehrig matched that.
And next to Gehrig, Berra might have been the most durable Yankee. He won his first MVP award in 1951. The next two came in 1954 and 1955, when he led the team in games played, missing all of 10 games over the two seasons, unheard of for a catcher.
It is intriguing to wonder how baseball destinies might have been transformed if Berra had never been signed by the Yankees and if somehow the St. Louis Cardinals, Dodgers or Giants had gotten their mitts on him -- which they all tried.
Would the Yankees have won as many championships? How would the Yankees-Dodgers rivalry unfolded if Berra had played at Ebbets Field (reversing places with Roy Campanella, a renowned catcher in his own right) and not the Bronx? Or imagine Berra batting behind Mays. Whole boroughs seize up at the idea.
UNFORGETTABLE PICTURES
It is impossible to re-imagine baseball without Berra at the center of some of its most iconic images:
(AP file photo)
It's Game 1 of the 1955 World Series, and there's Yogi, hopping mad when Jackie Robinson is called safe on a steal of home.
There's Yogi, forlorn by the left field wall (he played the outfield, too, as the years went on) as Bill Mazeroski of the Pirates ends the 1960 World Series with a home run.
October 8, 1956. That's Yogi rocketing out from behind the plate and into Don Larsen's arms. It's The Perfect Game. Legions of backyard Whiffle Ball players and Little Leaguers have dreamed about and mimicked celebrating the big moment just that way.
Berra was a perplexing baseball player. A left-handed hitter, he was notorious for chasing pitches far out of the strike zone, but he was among the most difficult to strike out. In 1950, while batting .322 in 656 plate appearances, he struck out just 12 times. Behind the plate, he was regularly among the best defensive catchers, and perhaps the most innovative. He was the first to place one finger outside the glove, a technique mimicked to this day.
Jimmy Cannon, the late sportswriter, said Berra was built like a bull penguin. When Larry MacPhail, the Yankee president from 1945 to 1947, first saw Berra, he was reminded of "the bottom man on an unemployed acrobatic team."
Publicly, Berra did not bristle when he was described as a lucky charm, nor at a line attributed to his longtime manager, Casey Stengel.
"He'd fall in a sewer and come up with a gold watch," Stengel remarked.
It is true that good things happened just about every time he put on a baseball uniform, but the tag demeaned his accomplishments. He played for both the Yankees and Mets, had long stints as a coach for each team that included three more championships, and captured a pennant with each as manager. But these triumphs did not seem to lift him in the eyes of critics who saw a manager comfortable with staying in the background and concluded his teams won despite him, not because of him.
His reward for taking the Yankees to Game 7 of the 1964 World Series against the St. Louis Cardinals: he was fired the next day. Brought back to manage in 1984 by George Steinbrenner, he was fired 16 games into the following season.
That led to the unthinkable -- a declaration from Berra that he would have nothing to do with his beloved team while Steinbrenner owned the Yankees. He was able to exact the sort of revenge players, managers and fans often dream of - effectively firing the owner. The estrangement lasted 14 years, which included the other-worldly sight of Berra in a non-New York uniform when he coached for the Houston Astros.
Steinbrenner had failed to follow the cautionary words of Joe Garagiola, a boyhood friend who many times said:
"Never underestimate Yogi."
YOGI AND JERSEY
He was a Zelig, showing up in improbable places with governors and presidents and popes but always returning to New Jersey -- his adopted home. In the 1940s, Berra played for the Newark Bears, then the Yankees' top farm team. He and his beloved wife Carmen first lived in Tenafly, then Woodcliff Lake, before moving to Montclair in 1959. And the Yogi Berra Museum and Learning Center in Little Falls, on Montclair State University's campus, has grown from a shrine to Berra's career into a center examining social issues in sports.
Appearing at New Jersey's first Hall of Fame Night at Giants Stadium are (l-r) Yogi Berra, Larry Doby; Phil Rizzuto.Kevin Whitmer | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com
For several years each October, Berra would gather with donors in the museum's small theater, with grandstand style seating, to watch a World Series game. It was a way for him to stay tethered to the public and for fans to commune with a part of Yankee nobility.
He never sought the limelight, typically deflecting fanfare with few words, sometimes summoning an old Yogi-ism in the way a crooner turns to an old hit. On his induction into the New Jersey Hall of Fame in 2008, Berra said, "Thank you for making this night necessary."
Berra found himself two years later on the same stage presenting Jack Nicholson with the same honor, bashfully accepting a kiss on the cheek, Hollywood style, from the movie star.
Clearly, Yogi Berra was his own brand, presaging today's age of the athlete as pitchman. Over the years, his face showed up on Yoo-Hoo containers and in endorsements for Prest-O-Lite Battery, Entenmann's, and Stove Top stuffing, and dozens of other products. He was a movie critic at one point, more than once a parade grand marshal, and a reluctant guest of honor perhaps hundreds of times. High-end advertising copy writers strained to capture Berra's universal truths.
An entire generation knows him as a sidekick to the Aflac duck, when Berra quipped, "They give you cash, which is just as good as money."
He was also part of a generation of ballplayers whose careers were punctuated by military tours. His boat was among the first to land on Omaha beach on D-Day 1944. A "rocketboat man," he had one of the most dangerous jobs in the Navy that day - to fire and to draw fire, enabling the Allies to isolate enemy clusters.
Yogi Berra during his time as a "rocketboat man."(File photo)
In one of his last interviews, in October of 2013, Berra told The Star-Ledger's Mark Di Ionno that "it was like the 4th of July out there. You couldn't stick your head up or it would get blown off."
Recalling the day, he spoke with blunt honesty, and an uncommon disregard for danger or pressure.
"I didn't even think about death," he said. "I figured if you got hit with a bullet, you wouldn't know it. So I just did what I was supposed to do."
For a man who lived with no pretensions, intrigue nonetheless followed him, beginning with the name itself. Box scores from his early Yankee days have him as Larry, suggesting "Yogi" was not pinned on him until after he had come to New York. In reality, it was tagged on him by a sandlot teammate who took a look at Berra sitting cross-legged on the field and thought he resembled a Hindu Yogi.
Even then, it seems, those around him sensed a certain native intelligence, someone serenely comfortable with himself. At home, too, his family adopted the name, probably unaware that a legend was blossoming in its midst.
THE BEGINNING
The first of the Berras to stand on American shores was Pietro Berra, who arrived on Ellis Island in 1909. He was 23 and had not yet sent for Paolina, who had remained back in Malvaglio, Italy, a small town near Milan. Finally they settled in St. Louis and raised four sons and a daughter in a home on Elizabeth Street on "the Hill," a largely Italian section of the city.
Lawrence Peter Berra was born May 12, 1925, the youngest of the boys. (He did have a nickname from the beginning - Lawdie - only because his mother had difficulty saying Larry).
Baseball was an alien thing to his parents, but it was all around them. Across the street lived the Garagiolas, who knew the Berras from back home. Their son, Joe, would vie with Berra for the attention of pro scouts and became one of Berra's lifelong friends. On the same block lived Jack Buck, who eventually built his own legend as a Cardinals broadcaster.
Yankee fans paint their chests honoring legendary Yankee great Yogi Berra when he returned to Yankee Stadium in the Bronx in 1999.(Star-Ledger file photo)
Berra's parents accepted the counsel of a priest who urged them to let their son play, and somewhere along the line Berra became instilled with a resolve and pride that would resurface many times over the years.
When Branch Rickey, then the general manager of the St. Louis Cardinals, offered him $250, Berra refused. At 16, Berra wanted $500, the same Rickey had offered to Garagiola. In his 2009 biography of Berra, Allen Barra wrote that Rickey was convinced Berra was too clumsy to amount to more than a Triple-A player, an appraisal contrary to what every sandlot and schoolyard player on the Hill, including Garagiola, knew.
"Yogi wasn't better than me," Garagiola told Barra. "He was much better."
"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.'"
Wised up a year later, Rickey, who was now in Brooklyn, sent Berra an invitation to join the Dodgers, but by then, Berra belonged to the Yankees. Later, as it became clear the Yankees had something special, they fought off advances on Berra, including from the Giants, who offered the Yankees $50,000 for his contract.
In his first minor league stop, in 1943 with the Norfolk Tars, Berra's abilities - though crude at first - were obvious, not to mention his fervor for the game. So eager to play, he once got behind the plate having forgotten to put on his catching mask.
In a game between the Tars and the local Air Force base team, Berra first met Phil Rizzuto, who had already won a championship with the Yankees, and came with his own nickname - Scooter.
They hit it off, perhaps in part because Rizzuto had also been undervalued. At 5-foot-6, he, too, was a curious specimen for a professional athlete. They were reunited three years later when Berra made his debut with the Yankees.
In his first Major League game on Sept. 22, 1946, Berra, wearing a nondescript 38 and batting eighth, showed his strange sense of plate discipline. In his second at-bat he took a fastball from the Philadelphia Athletics' Jesse Flores for strike one. He lunged at the next pitch - a curve well off the plate - and drove it into the bleachers for his first home run. The following day he hit his second homer.
The next season, Berra received his first championship ring and added a footnote in October by hitting the first pinch-hit home run ever in a World Series. Even as his role on the powerful Yankees grew, there were skeptics in the press who doubted that someone with his build could be successful in the big leagues. One writer likened him to an "ape." Others said he didn't look like a Yankee. When he found himself in 1948 shaking hands with Babe Ruth, it still seemed improbable that before long he would join Ruth in the pantheon of great Yankees.
COMING OF AGE
Quickly, though, he began setting a new standard for his position. He drove in 98 runs in 1948, and 91 the next year. During the spring of 1950, his defiant side surfaced when he held out for more pay. Stengel, his manager, argued his case to Yankees general manager George Weiss, and Berra wound up with a $5,000 raise, bringing his salary to $17,500.
The Yankees were quickly rewarded with 30 home runs and 124 runs driven in, and in 1951, Berra became the MVP. He also caught his first two no-hitters, both pitched by Allie Reynolds. (Berra almost cost Reynolds the second against the Red Sox when he dropped a Ted Williams' pop-up with two outs in the 9th. As if ordained, Williams followed by popping up again, and this one Berra grabbed.
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By then, Berra was a married man. While on a road trip in St. Louis in 1947, he had lunch at Biggie's, a steakhouse, and was love-struck by a 19-year-old waitress named Carmen Short. She mistook him for someone else - a married man - and resisted his overtures. He persisted, and they were married Jan. 26, 1948.
As his family grew, Berra, like most of the players of the day, traded on his fame to work anonymous jobs in the offseason. One winter, he worked in the hardware section of Sears Roebuck. Another, he became the head waiter in a restaurant, and one winter, he and Rizzuto worked in a menswear store in. Years later they opened Rizzuto-Berra Lanes, a bowling alley, in Clifton.
Meantime, the Yankees were quickly becoming a dynasty, even as a young Mantle replaced DiMaggio as the marquee centerfielder. Berra was the constant as the Yankees won five consecutive championships from 1949 to 1953, with a reputation that was beginning to cross continents.
Yogi Berra greets baseball legend Ted Williams as he arrives for the dedication of the Yogi Berra Museum at Montclair State Universit in 1998.(Star-Ledger file photo)
When the Yankees visited Tokyo in 1955, they were greeted with a ticker-tape parade. The biggest ovations were for Berra, who was becoming known for the cockeyed phrasing, and a commodity.
Madison Avenue placed him in all sorts of ad campaigns, including a few awkward ones that had him extolling the virtues of Camel cigarettes in one, and in another chatting it up with a cat for Puss 'N Boots pet food. (Strangely, the cat was voiced by Berra's teammate and close friend, Whitey Ford.)
When he became the face of Yoo-Hoo soft drinks, a woman asked him if Yoo-Hoo was hyphenated. His response:
"No ma'am, it isn't even carbonated."
PERFECTION
Meanwhile, Berra kept hitting - knocking in more than 100 each season, from 1953 to 1957. And the Yankee kept making trips to the World Series (with a rare miss in 1954), where Berra kept adding to the record book. Over those four years, he batted .379 in the Series, and long before Moneyball gave on-base percentage its cache, his was .473 in that stretch.
Over time, his heroics have been oddly obscured by the Larsen perfect game in 1956. The Yankees were up, 2-0, when Brooklyn sent up Dale Mitchell, a lefty batter, to pinch-hit with two outs in the ninth. A perfect game was on the line when the count went to 1 and 2.
Over the years, neither Berra nor Larsen could remember if the next pitch, delivered high and outside and perhaps out of the strike zone, was thrown there by design. Berra snatched it for a called third strike, and before Mitchell could turn to argue with the umpire, Berra was airborne, leaping toward his pitcher. In that flash, they made an odd pair, Larsen, tall with a spaghetti build, and Berra in full gear, clinging to him.
The two men were reunited hundreds of times over the years for commemorations, the last time at Berra's museum in October 2012, to answer the same questions over and over and relive the moment. But rarely did anyone ask Berra about the rest of the Series, probably his finest. The Overlooked Man hit .360, drove in 10, and clobbered three homers -- a grand slam in the second game and a pair of two-run homers in Game 7.
The Yankees of the late 50's, with Mantle and Billy Martin, then a part-time infielder, could be a combustible bunch. Even Berra, whose normal routine put him on a straight line between Yankee Stadium, over the George Washington Bridge and then home, could not always escape the tumult. He was part of a birthday celebration for Martin in 1957 at the Copacabana nightclub in Manhattan with several Yankees, when a group of men began harassing the singer Sammy Davis Jr. with racial insults. A brawl developed when Hank Bauer and Martin tried to intervene, but Berra got swept up in the headlines. The club fined him $1,000.
By the late 1950s, with Elston Howard emerging as their catcher of the future, the Yankees began phasing Berra out of the position, playing him increasingly in left field, perhaps the most difficult place to play in the old Yankee Stadium.
Dealing with the harsh sun field, Berra said simply:
"It gets late early out there."
There was even a passing rumor that the Yankees were contemplating trading Berra for the Cardinal great, Stan Musial. In 1960 Berra almost clinched another title for the Yankees in 1960 with a three-run blast in the sixth inning of Game 7, but the Pirates rallied and won it on Mazeroski's blow in the ninth.
Soon, Berra was a part-time player, though still able to ignite his club. In 1961, he hit 22 home runs. And in 162, he caught all 22 innings of a seven-hour game against the Tigers. That fall, he captured his last World Series ring as a player
THE MANAGER
Berra was 38 when he played his final game for the Yankees, in the 1963 World Series. Eighteen days later he was introduced as the club's new manager. But the transition was not smooth.
In mid-August, the Yankees were swept in a four-game series in Chicago. On the bus ride to the airport, Berra became incensed when he heard Phil Linz, a utility infielder, playing the harmonica. The manager told him to stop, but Linz persisted. The event has persisted in Yankee lore as The Harmonica Incident and has invited more interpretations than a Rorschach Test. Some say Mantle egged Linz on or that Berra knocked the harmonica out of Linz's hands, or that the manager was really infuriated when the team burst out laughing.
Certainly the episode did little to build the confidence of the Yankees general manager, Ralph Houk, who was already questioning if Berra had control of the team. Nothing apparently could alter the perception, even after the Yankees made a mad dash to yet another pennant, winning 23 of their last 30.
The Yankees took the Cardinals to Game 7 of the 1964 World Series before losing. Three days later the Yankees fired Berra, and replaced him with the manager who had just defeated him, Johnny Keane, an arrangement Houk likely had devised well before the series.
Wounded, Berra went crosstown to coach first base with the still-fledgling Mets. He even played in a few games -- more a stunt than anything else -- before retiring for good as certainly the greatest catcher the game had seen to that point. He left with a .285 lifetime batting average, 358 homers and 1,430 runs batted in.
Burdened with an aging Mantle and a changing roster, the Yankees sank into fallow times, while the Mets budding farm system promised rewards. Without ego, before each game, Berra would take up a fungo bat and chop balls to Mets infielders for their daily drills. He received an 11th World Series ring when the Miracle Mets of 1969 won it all.
With the Mets, Berra developed a bond with Gil Hodges, the Mets' manager and his old rival with the Dodgers. When Hodges died suddenly of a heart attack at the end of spring training in 1972, the Mets turned to Berra.
As described in Allen Barra's biography of him, Berra, ever humble, agreed quickly to a one-year contract with the Mets, saying, "Gil's death was hard on me, and I just wanted to help out."
A second turn at managing was almost as rocky as the first. The Mets of 1972 were depleted by injury, and their headline acquisition of a 41-year-old Willie Mays from the Giants ended up creating a problem for Berra. Time and again, Mays would leave the ballpark without so much as a word to his manager, forcing Berra to fine him.
Former Mets manager Yogi Berra and former Mets catcher Gary Carter meet on the field for a post game ceremony after the last regular season baseball game ever played in Shea Stadium against the Florida Marlins on September 28, 2008.(Jim McIsaac | Getty Images)
Then came 1973, a miracle year in its own way. Late in August the Mets were sitting in last place, 12 games under .500. From there they began a stretch that resembled the rumble to the finish of the 1964 Yankees, with Berra composed and unruffled at the center.
The unassailable truth he offered this time around -- you're not out of it until you're out of it, or some such thing, grew quickly into another Yogi aphorism: "It ain't over till it's over."
The Mets marched through September into the National League Championship Series to take on the strongly favored Cincinnati Reds. Here, too, Berra provided his club with a reserve of tranquility. When a fight between the Mets' Bud Harrelson and Pete Rose incited Shea Stadium fans in left field to throw bottles and debris, Berra, accompanied by Tom Seaver, Rusty Staub and Cleon Jones, went to calm them.
"Keep quiet," Berra said, reminding them that the Mets were ahead, 9-2, and in risk of a forfeit if play could not resume.
Making it to the World Series, the Mets were ahead, three games to two against the Oakland A's, in the World Series, leading Berra to a perhaps fateful decision. He chose his two best pitchers -- Seaver and Jon Matlack -- to work on three days rest, rather than resting Seaver in the sixth game, and having him for Game 7. The Mets lost both games, and, fairly or not, the blame rested with Berra.
After the Mets fired him in 1975, Berra soon returned to the Yankees as a coach, just in time for a revival and two more World Series rings. When Reggie Jackson and the manager, Billy Martin, nearly came to blows in the Fenway Park dugout, it was Berra, struggling to restrain Martin, who played the peacemaker.
YOGI & GEORGE
When Billy Martin was let go (a third time) by George Steinbrenner, Berra was brought back in 1984, 20 years after he had last managed the Yankees. He took a fractured clubhouse and quietly rallied them, even as the owner routinely and publicly criticized him.
On learning of another pot shot from Steinbrenner, Berra would sit back in his desk chair and in his customary husky voice, say, "What are you going to do. He's the owner."
On team flights, Berra would sit in the first row, nursing a glass of wine or vodka, with his dear friend, Rizutto, who provided a familiar shoulder to lean on. But resentment toward the owner was building.
Steinbrenner promised Berra he would manage at least through the 1985 season, but the vow didn't last the first month of the year. With the team off to a 6-10 start, Steinbrenner dismissed him without so much as a phone call, instead sending an emissary with the message.
Players were at their lockers in the visiting clubhouse in Chicago when word came to them through a media release. Don Baylor kicked over a trash can. Other players cursed openly. Berra's son, Dale, who played for him that year, walked into his father's office and emerged crying.
Quickly, Berra, a symbol of Yankee pinstripes for decades, foreswore ever stepping foot in Yankee Stadium as long as Steinbrenner remained owner. A friend, John McMulllen, who owned the Devils as well as the Astros, brought him to Houston as a coach. Berra, now 61, was back leading infield practice, though for the first without an NY on his cap. He was dressed instead in Tequila Sunrise colors. Yogi Berra as Texan did not quite work (though he again found himself on a winner when the Astros won the National West in 1986).
The divorce from Steinbrenner lasted until 1999, and it took a pilgrimage by Steinbrenner to Berra's museum to make things right.
"There's probably never been a Yankee that I can think of that probably was said more times to, 'well you can't do that,' who then turned around and did it," said Steinbrenner, as if he had learned the hard way.
From then on, Berra was a mainstay. For several years he appeared at spring training as a guest instructor, and often, during games, both in Florida and New York, he would sit with Steinbrenner in the owner's box. In July of 1999, Steinbrenner honored him with Yogi Berra Day, and again providence seemed to intervene. David Cone pitched a perfect game for the Yankees that day.
When Steinbrenner died five years ago, Berra appeared at the museum, shaken by the death of someone he now called a friend. He recounted the firing, and then, choking up, the reconciliation.
"He said, 'I'm sorry for what I did,'" Berra said. "I started to cry when he said that. He said it was the worst mistake he made in his life."
Derek Jeter and Yogi Berra sit in the dugout before the intra-squad game at New York Yankees Spring Training at Legends Field in Tampa in 2007. (John Munson | NJ Advance Media)
Over the last several years, Berra had an easy rapport with the players. After watching Derek Jeter strike out on a high 3-2 pitch with the bases loaded, Berra approached him the next day, tempering his critique with the universal banter of ballplayers.
"Geez, you looked terrible on that pitch," Berra told Jeter. "What the hell are you swinging at a 3-2 pitch up there for?"
"Well, you swung at 'em," Jeter said.
Berra's response: "I hit it, you don't."
Tino Martinez, while playing, said he relished the give-and-take with Berra.
"He wants to talk to you, teach you about hitting, talk to you about the game," Martinez said at the time. "He wants you to win championships."
Few people have remained part of the popular culture for so long. In 2003, Ben Gazzara portrayed him off-Broadway in a one man show, Nobody Don't Like Yogi. It was also in 2013 when he was played on Broadway in Bronx Bombers by Peter Scolari.
Without trying, Berra influenced scholarly thought. A paper, The Jurisprudence of Yogi Berra, published in 1997 by Edward Cooper, a University of Michigan law professor, drew correlations between Yogiism and legal principles.
"In baseball, you don't know nothing." Cooper equated that to the necessary absence of preconception and bias in law.
The idea behind, "you observe a lot by watching," is embodied in California civil code, which holds that "the law helps the vigilant," Cooper wrote.
Berra shone in the spotlight which he never sought. And for all the words attributed to him, he was a man too modest to say too much. At his Hall of Fame induction in Cooperstown in 1972, when his fans would likely have sat for hours listening to him, he expressed simple gratitude.
"I want to thank baseball," he said that day. "It has given me more than I could ever hope for. And I hope that when I'm through with this game, I will put something back."
The acceptance speech of one of the world's most quoted men lasted 45 seconds.
