The death of Yogi Berra was announced on 23 September, after the Baseball Hall of Famer and legendary New York Yankee passed away in his sleep late on 22 September at his New Jersey home – 69 years to the day after his Major League Baseball debut. Yogi Berra was 90 years old.
Born on 12 May 1925 in St. Louis, Missouri, to Italian immigrants who had settled in The Hill, Lawrence Peter Berra grew up alongside Joe Garagiola, on a street which was also home to Jack Buck early in his career as the play-by-play announcer for the St. Louis Cardinals. Berra began playing baseball as a teenager, in the local American Legion leagues, and was given his famous nickname by Jack Maguire, who thought Berra resembled a yogi when waiting to bat.
Passing up the Cardinals, who favoured Garagiola, the New York Yankees quickly made an offer for Berra, and he signed in 1943 before serving in the US Navy during World War II. Berra was a gunner’s mate, aboard the USS Bayfield during D-Day, and he was sent to both Omaha Beach and Utah Beach.
After a minor league stint with the Newark Bears, where he began an enduring relationship under the tutelage of Bill Dickey, Berra played his first game for the New York Yankees on 22 September 1946. In eighteen seasons with the Yankees, playing alongside fellow future Hall of Famers Joe DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle, Berra established a reputation as a power hitter and one of the sport’s greatest catchers. He was a 10-time World Series champion, an 18-time All-Star, and a 3-time American League Most Valuable Player, in 1951, 1954, and 1955. He maintained a career batting average of .285, while scoring a total of 358 home runs and 1,430 runs batted in.
Retiring in 1963, Berra became manager of the Yankees the following season. But after losing the World Series in seven games to the St. Louis Cardinals, he was fired and joined the New York Mets as a coach, briefly returning to the field across 1965. He became manager of the Mets in 1972, and reached another World Series, before rejoining the Yankees, as a coach, in 1976. After another short spell as Yankees manager between 1984 and 1985, and a final stay as a coach of the Houston Astros, he left the sport professionally in 1989.
Elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1972, in the same year the Yankees retired the number 8 worn previously by both Berra and Dickey. In 1999, ‘Yogi Berra Day’ at Yankee Stadium marked the restoration of Berra’s bond with the Yankees, after a feud borne by the impersonal manner of his sacking at the hands of George Steinbrenner back in 1985. Don Larsen threw the ceremonial first pitch, commemorating his perfect game in the 1956 World Series: the only perfect game in MLB postseason history, and which culminated in a Berra catch.
Yogi Berra spent the later years of his life devoted to the Yogi Berra Museum and Learning Center, established in 1998 on the campus of Montclair State University in New Jersey. His wife, Carmen – who he married on 26 January 1949, and with whom he had three sons – died in March last year from complications following a stroke. The Yogi Berra Museum were responsible for announcing yesterday Berra’s death.
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Beyond all of the professional accolades, Yogi Berra remains equally well known for his ‘Yogi-isms’: terse and humorous quotes, which often relied on malapropism and paradox. Here are a selection of his best:
‘It ain’t over till it’s over’
‘Baseball is 90% mental – the other half is physical’
‘He hits from both sides of the plate: he’s amphibious’
‘It’s like deja-vu all over again’
‘I always thought that record would stand until it was broken’
‘You can observe a lot by watching’
‘If you don’t know where you’re going, you might end up someplace else’
‘When you come to a fork in the road, take it’
‘The future ain’t what it used to be’
‘Nobody goes there anymore, it’s too crowded’
‘If the world was perfect, it wouldn’t be’
‘Always go to other people’s funerals, otherwise they won’t go to yours’
‘I really didn’t say most of the things I said’
