A Blacksmith More Than a Wordsmith

Hemingway did it. So did Charles Dickens. Homer. Dostoevski. Cervantes. Noel Coward.

So why shouldn’t Lawrence Peter Berra write a book of his very own? After all, this literary light has given us almost as many words to live by as Ben Franklin himself. Homespun adages such as:

“It ain’t over till it’s over,” and, “Baseball is 90% mental and the other half is physical,” or, “Nobody goes there anymore because it’s too crowded,” or, “It ain’t as far as it is.”

He is a man who will have as many aphorisms in Bartlett’s “Familiar Quotations” as Will Rogers, a man who says of left field in Yankee Stadium, “It gets late early out there,” who accepts a tribute by saying, “Thanks for making this night necessary,” and who once explained that, because he hit from both sides of the plate, his teammate Mickey Mantle was “amphibious.”

In the words of a colleague, Yogi Berra may be the first man in history to have written a book without ever reading one.

Yogi Berra is an American original. How many people do you know right off who became cartoon characters on Saturday morning serials? How many people does the mere mention of their names bring a smile to the face of the listener? In the words of another teammate, Phil Rizzuto, “You don’t even have to like him to love him.”

Everybody likes Yogi Berra. He is America’s Teddy Bear. You can’t go to a baseball banquet without hearing 10 Yogi Berra stories. He is practically a cottage industry for after-dinner speakers.

An unlikelier-looking athlete never strode onto a playing field. He would have to grow three inches merely to be considered squat. When he was still in Navy uniform in World War II--his LST landed troops on Normandy--Yogi showed up in the New York Yankee clubhouse one day and someone looked dubiously at him and opined, “He don’t look like a ballplayer,” and the clubhouse man amended, “He don’t even look like a sailor.”

With a bat in his hands, he looked like 14 pennants and 10 World Series championships. He was the most damaging .285 hitter in the annals of baseball. No one ever remembers Yogi Berra making an out in a crucial situation.

Like Babe Ruth, he had a genius for playing the game that transcended his personal configuration. In the field, he looked a little like a bear on roller skates. He had the mournful look of a guy who has been out in the rain all night. He didn’t walk, he kind of stumbled along in this splay-footed gait. He had these long arms of a guy who spent his life swinging on vines. He had a regulation bat but in Yogi’s arms it gave the impression he was swinging this telephone pole with a label on it. His ears should have had lights on them.

He never swung at a strike in his life. With that extension he had over the plate, he didn’t have to. Most managers, when they go to the mound with a dangerous hitter at the plate, they say, “Don’t give him anything good to hit.” With Yogi, they said, “Don’t give him anything bad to hit.” Yogi hit anything that didn’t hit him first. Yogi hit more home runs on ball four than any batter in history.

The origins of his nickname are lost in antiquity but I believe it was his chum, Joe Garagiola, who put it best.

“What the hell else would you call him?” he demanded.

Garagiola also said: “Yogi doesn’t say funny things. Yogi says things funny.”

His voice went along with the rest of him, a deep, bass rumble that sounded a little like a mine cave-in.

Nothing bothered Yogi--not the ninth inning of the seventh game of the World Series with the bases loaded, not the shot and shell of D-day, not the malapropisms attributed to him. Yogi shrugged off pressure.

Bench jockeys gave him a hard time when he first came up.

“Who peels the bananas for it?” they shouted as Yogi first took his splay-footed stance at home plate. “Does it talk?”

Yogi was philosophical. “They don’t yell at .220 hitters,” he said sunnily. “I must of been hurting them.”

He was. He played in an astonishing 75 World Series games and got a hit in almost every one of them--71 in all, most hits of any player who ever played in the World Series. One out of six of those was a home run. Ten of the hits were doubles.

He had this reputation as a hitter they made into a catcher because there was no place else they could play him. But he was a more-than-acceptable outfielder. The truth is, he was a Hall of Fame catcher. He caught the only no-hitter ever thrown in World Series history and he caught a one-hitter--Bill Bevens’--in the 1947 Series. He caught two no-hitters in a single season.

There was very little he couldn’t do in baseball. The co-author of his book, Tom Horton, recalls that his father, a physician at the Mayo clinic, once tested Yogi and found he had the reflexes of a puma. He was far quicker at pouncing on a curveball than a lot of guys around the league built like upside-down triangles.

He is one of the few managers to have won pennants in both leagues, with the New York Yankees in 1964, the New York Mets in 1973. Inexplicably, he got fired for his troubles. His teams got in seven-game World Series against superior teams both times.

He was curiously gentle for such a bull of a man, with an instinct for decency. When a sponsor, in a camp move, made him a movie critic, and someone wanted him to see an X-rated flick, Yogi declined. He went to see “Airport” instead.

“I see enough people with their clothes off,” Yogi growled.

Yogi is in baseball--he’s a coach for the Houston Astros--for the same reason leopards are in trees. He feels comfortable there. He belongs there.

His book, “Yogi--It Ain’t Over . . . “ (McGraw Hill), is, like its subject, warmhearted, funny, and an in-depth look at an American institution. Yogi thinks he was lucky there was baseball. Baseball is lucky there was Yogi Berra.