Yogi’s backup caught few games, and plenty of flak

Maybe Charlie Silvera would have been an everyday catcher for the St. Louis Browns or the Washington Senators, or any of the other lower-division teams dwarfed by the dynastic New York Yankees of the late 1940s and early ‘50s.

Or, at the very least, maybe he would have been part of a platoon.

But Charlie Silvera didn’t play for a lowly, wannabe contender.

Silvera played for the mighty Yankees, which meant that he was a backup to Yogi Berra. Which meant, of course, that he rarely played at all.

“Yogi caught every . . . damn game,” Silvera, 82, says from his home in Millbrae, not far from the San Francisco airport. “You know, we had doubleheaders in those days, but he was a horse. He played every damn game.”

And Silvera, all but tethered to the bench, mostly sat and watched as the workaholic Berra forged a career that landed him in the Hall of Fame.

Silvera, over 10 major league seasons, appeared in only 227 games. He racked up a paltry 482 at-bats, less than a typical season’s worth for Berra. In 1950, he didn’t bat until June 17, two months into the season. And though his lifetime batting average was .282, the San Francisco native hit only one home run.

“July 4, 1951,” Silvera says. “I still have the ball.”

Opposing players ribbed him mercilessly, calling him, among other names, “Jesse James, the payroll bandit.” They asked if his paychecks came gift-wrapped. Adds Silvera, laughing, “They’d say, ‘Do you use anything on the bench to keep your fanny from getting sore?’ I had a lot of fun with it.”

He jokes about his career because perhaps no benchwarmer in the history of baseball enjoyed a more interesting 10-year run than Silvera, who played for teams that won a record five consecutive World Series championships from 1949 to ’53. The Yankees reached the World Series in seven of Silvera’s eight full seasons in New York, six times emerging victorious.

He says he played with nine Hall of Famers. He roomed with six, among them Berra, Joe DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle. And before Game 5 of the 1956 World Series, it was Silvera who warmed up Don Larsen in the bullpen, though like everyone else in Yankee Stadium that day the catcher says he had no inkling that Larsen was about to pitch the only perfect game in World Series history.

He appeared in only one World Series game, going 0 for 2 at Yankee Stadium in a 1-0 Game 2 loss to the Brooklyn Dodgers on Oct. 6, 1949, but that’s more than most people can say. Silvera won’t argue if you call him lucky.

“I’d have to agree,” he says. “I was in the right spot at the right time, but I did my job. I never got in trouble, kept my nose clean, did my work. I was on time, never missed a bus or a train or a plane or whatever. . . .

“But I was fortunate. You couldn’t script my career any better.”

Silvera, still involved in baseball as a Chicago Cubs scout 65 years after signing with the Yankees, owns keepsakes from eight World Series. He was awarded championship rings celebrating the ‘49, ‘50, ’51 and ’52 titles, opted for a silver cigarette case in ‘53, was presented with a belt buckle commemorating the Yankees’ American League pennant in ’55 and won another ring in ’56. He added a sixth championship ring as a scout for the Florida Marlins in 1997.

He says most of the loot is stashed away, noting that he has no idea what it’s all worth and adding, “I hope I don’t ever have to find out.”

A grandfather who will celebrate his 59th wedding anniversary Oct. 31, he has worked in baseball virtually nonstop since 1942 and still wears the first ring he won as a Yankee. “That’s when I did most of my playing, in ‘49,” says Silvera, who batted .315 in a career-high 130 at-bats in 1949, his first full major league season. “Yogi’s thumb was broken and I played about the last six weeks of the season. He came back right before the Series. I played the second game and that was it. I never even got to pinch-hit after that.”

But he never bellyached.

“I got a World Series check in ‘49,” he says, noting that the extra dollars bumped his annual income from $7,500 to more than $13,000, “and the next year I got another. After a while, I thought, ‘Well, this isn’t bad.’ And the Yankees, when they dealt somebody, they dealt them to second-division clubs. Yeah, they were big league teams, but they weren’t the Yankees. So I figured, ‘Let’s hang around.’ ”

He rode the gravy train as far as he could but in 1955, after Elston Howard joined the Yankees, Silvera was demoted to third string. After the 1956 season, in which Silvera appeared in only seven games, he was traded to the Cubs.

Early in the ’57 season, an ankle injury ended his career.

“The reason I had problems when I joined the Cubs is because I hadn’t played in years and my talent had diminished,” says Silvera, who batted .208 in 26 games with the Cubs, five more than he had played in during his last two seasons with the Yankees. “You have to play to stay in shape, but that’s the way it was.”

And Silvera says he wouldn’t change a minute of it.

“No way,” he says. “I got more recognition for playing behind Yogi than if I’d played every day for another team. You’re not going to hear me complain.”

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jerome.crowe@latimes.com