Yogi Berra was the Hall of Fame baseball player-coach-manager who, as catcher and clutch hitter, anchored the New York Yankees during their championships of the 1940s and '50s. The son of Italian immigrants, Lawrence Peter Berra grew up in St. Louis and began playing baseball seriously when he was 17. After an interruption in his career for military service (he served in the U.S. Navy and was part of an amphibious crew at D-Day), he joined the Yankees in 1946 and played there until 1965. As a player he holds several World Series records, including the most titles (10) and most World Series played (14). As a manager he took the Yankees to the World Series (1964) and the N.Y. Mets to the World Series (1973). He then coached and managed the Yankees again (1976-85), and finished his baseball career as a coach with the Houston Astros (1986-89). One of the greatest catchers ever, Berra was also a charismatic and friendly ambassador for the game, with a talent for humorous remarks. His confused-sounding "Yogi-isms" are legendary: "It ain't over 'til it's over" and "It's deja vu all over again" and "When you come to the fork in the road, take it" are just a few.
Extra credit:
He got the name Yogi -- as in Hindu monk -- when he was a teen, after fellow base-baller Bobby Hoffman saw him sitting cross-legged on the ground.
Yogi Berra, considered one of the best catchers in major league history, died of natural causes at the age of 90 Tuesday. The Yankees legend and Hall of Famer may be better known for the way he creatively butchered the English language, with what became known as Yogi-isms.
Here are 35:
1. “It ain’t over till it’s over.”
2. “It’s deja vu all over again.”
3. “I usually take a two-hour nap from 1 to 4.”
4. “Never answer an anonymous letter.”
5. “We made too many wrong mistakes.”
6. “You can observe a lot by watching.”
7. “The future ain’t what it used to be.”
8. “If you don’t know where you are going, you might wind up someplace else.”
9. “It gets late early out here.”
10. “If the people don’t want to come out to the ballpark, nobody’s going to stop them.”
11. “Baseball is 90 percent mental. The other half is physical.”
12. “Pair up in threes.”
13. “Why buy good luggage, you only use it when you travel.”
14. “Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.”
15. “All pitchers are liars or crybabies.”
16. “A nickel ain’t worth a dime anymore.”
17. “Bill Dickey is learning me his experience.”
18. “He hits from both sides of the plate. He’s amphibious.”
19. “I always thought that record would stand until it was broken.”
20. “I can see how he (Sandy Koufax) won 25 games. What I don’t understand is how he lost five.”
21. “I don’t know if they were men or women fans running naked across the field. They had bags over their heads.”
22. “I’m a lucky guy and I’m happy to be with the Yankees. And I want to thank everyone for making this night necessary.”
23. “I’m not going to buy my kids an encyclopedia. Let them walk to school like I did.”
24. “In baseball, you don’t know nothing.”
25. “I never blame myself when I’m not hitting. I just blame the bat and if it keeps up, I change bats. After all, if I know it isn’t my fault that I’m not hitting, how can I get mad at myself?”
26. “I never said most of the things I said.”
27. “It ain’t the heat, it’s the humility.”
28. “I think Little League is wonderful. It keeps the kids out of the house.”
29. “I wish everybody had the drive he (Joe DiMaggio) had. He never did anything wrong on the field. I’d never seen him dive for a ball, everything was a chest-high catch, and he never walked off the field.”
30. “So I’m ugly. I never saw anyone hit with his face.”
31. “Take it with a grin of salt.”
32. (On the 1973 Mets) “We were overwhelming underdogs.”
33. “The towels were so thick there I could hardly close my suitcase.”
34. “You should always go to other people’s funerals, otherwise, they won’t come to yours.”
35. “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”
And, one of my favorites: "90% of short putts don't go in."
And, yet another, when asked if he was a Catholic, stated, "I am a Roman Catholic".
Hope he is doing OK. I would bet on it.
Some more facts concerning this great human:
at age 18 before he enlisted in the Navy. When the Americans landed at Normandy, he was part of the top-secret mission, stationed on a 36-foot landing craft support (LCS) just off Omaha beach. The boat was more like a floating bathtub; Berra, along with five other enlisted men and one officer, manned 24 rockets and three machine guns. Their job, according to Barra, “was to spray rockets on the beach before troop landings.” Berra and his mates stayed there for 12 days. “I didn’t know enough to be scared,” he remembered. He later saw time in Tunisia and Italy and received a Purple Heart for action he saw in assault on Marseille, France. Berra was never one to talk about himself, and many of his future teammates had no idea he’d served his country, let alone participated in one of the century’s most critical battles.
When he came home, Berra played for the Yankees’ Newark farm team, got called up to the big club at the end of the 1946 season and set about becoming a legend in ’47, although few realized it. The Yankees hid him in the outfield for 24 games, and when they put him behind the plate, they could only hope that their clumsy young catcher wouldn’t get killed or run out of the ballpark. He hit bottom during the World Series, when Jackie Robinson and the Brooklyn Dodgers stole seven bases in the first four games. Yogi played right field after that, and the Yanks won in seven.
Berra’s transformation as a receiver began in 1949, when new manager Casey Stengel brought in Hall of Fame catcher Bill Dickey to mentor Yogi. By the time Dickey was finished, as Yogi put it, “learning me everything he knows,” it was clear that his pupil would soon displace him as the Yankees’ greatest catcher. As Stengel put it, “Mr. Berra is a rather peculiar fellow of very remarkable abilities.”
Stengel also put an end to the ape talk. “No more of this stuff about him keeping house in a tree or swinging from limb to limb like those apes,” he said. “And stop feeding him peanuts.”
Still, Berra was an irresistible target, and everyone seemed to be taking cheap shots at his looks. “On the polite and professional Yankees,” wrote Ernest Havemann, “Yogi looks as out of place as a tractor in a Cadillac plant.” Red Sox pitcher Mike Ryba called him the captain of the “All-America Ugly Team.” Yogi let Ryba know that he “would never win any beauty contest himself,” and then he went out and swung the bat with a vengeance. “It don’t matter if you’re ugly in this racket,” he said. “All you gotta do is hit the ball, and I never saw nobody hit one with his face.”
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