Baseball’s great . . . and colorful people . . . from an age gone by

The World Series is going on this week.  This year it is the St Louis Cardinals and the Boston Red Sox.  I was hoping that the Red Birds could pull it off, but it seems they just don’t have enough bat . . . and the Red Sox has any number of guys who can knock it out of the park.  Tuesday night the game was played in St Louis, the boyhood home of one of baseball’s all-time greatest players, manager, and personality . . . one Lawrence Peter Berra, affectionately known as “Yogi.”

He played pro-baseball from 1946 through 1965.  In 1964, he became the manager of the Yankees and over the next 22 years he would bounce around from the Yankee’s to the Mets, and spend his last three years in baseball as a coach for the Houston Astros.

The truth is that Yogi lived the dream . . . a first-generation American who got to spend his life in the big league!  Baseball does not have many awards that Yogi did not receive, including induction into the Hall of Fame.  But beyond all that, Yogi was just loved by the fans . . . even by those who were not baseball fans.  He was colorful, warm, charming, witty, quick, and clever, and he had a unique manner of expressing himself.  That manner of expressing himself has come to be known as “Yogiisms,” and there are a few books that record them.  The “Yogiisms” are said to very often take the form of either an apparently obvious tautology, or a paradoxical contradiction.  A few examples are:

. . . As a general comment about the game . . . “90% of the game is half mental.”

. . . On why he quit going to a favorite restaurant, he responded, “Nobody goes there anymore, it is too crowded.”

. . . And perhaps, his most famous might be, “It aint over, til it’s over.” Or . . . “it is déjà vu all over again.”

My favorite story about Yogi concerns him as a Manager looking at a rookie right-fielder.  Yogi yelled out to the kid, “Here comes a fly ball, let me see you catch it.”  He then hit a long fly ball into right field.  For whatever reason the kid missed it and the ball hit the ground nearby.  Yogi let out a grunt and yelled out, “Here comes a shiner, let me see you play it,” and proceeded to hit a line drive over 1st base, and surprising, as the rookie ran up to make the play, he missed the ball.  Really frustrated, Yogi handed the bat to his assistant and said, “I am gonna go to right field and show that rookie some stuff, you hit ‘em when I tell you” and he marched out to right field.  Arriving, he held out his hand and told the kid to give him his glove.  As Yogi put the glove on, he hollered to the assistant to hit a fly ball.  As the ball sailed into right field, Yogi was blinded by the sun and missed the catch.  He grumbled and shook his head, and hollered for the assistant to hit a grounder, and as Yogi made a play on the ball, it took a bad bounce and Yogi missed the play.  He turned to the kid, let out a growl, threw the glove to the ground and declared, “Kid, you got right field so messed up, they can’t nobody play it anymore.”

I still enjoy the game, but they don’t make ‘em like Yogi, The Babe, Dizzy Dean, Whitey Ford, and those guys.


Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.