RIP Yogi Berra, 90

I don't have anything to add other than I pretty much love every post on this thread. What a great live he lived.

 

Great teammate, invaluable player, and a quiet hero.
Never got into trouble, and a gem of a guy to everyone.

 

When I think of guys who personified the Yankees, I think of Scooter and Yogi. RIP.

 

He still has to outlive two grandkids (yes, grandkids) of former President John Tyler (b. 1790), who are still kicking.

Can you imagine having a granddad who was alive when George Washington was president?

 

I wrote something about a current catcher reaching a milestone earlier this year and started researching the greats to get some perspective. I really didn't know how great Berra was until then.

To my generation he was mainly just the old guy who said funny stuff and I knew he was a really good player, but didn't realize he's close to the Gehrig and Mantle level on the Yankees pantheon.

 

Wait, wait, wait ... um, what? Tyler died in 1862! Cripes. This made me look it up and, his son, Lyon Gardiner Tyler (who was born when John Tyler was 63), fathered a child at age 71. Holy crap.

 

That's quite a stretch. Berra played 7 games in 1946 then was a rookie the same season as Jackie Robinson.

By the time Berra got good enougb a couple years later that anyone would have cared what he thought of the matter, black players were well established in the majors anyway.

He obviously didn't exert any great influence on the Yankee organization to start bringing in black players, since they were among the last teams in the AL to do it.

There's certainly no indication Berra ever did anything to impede the integration of baseball but it's a stretch to think he had much of anything to do with advancing it.

 

Bill Veeck wrote several times that Berra's reputation as a comic/ goofy personality was in large part a creation of the NYC media, in active or maybe just circumstantial cahoots with Casey Stengel, who used Berra as a lead character/ straight man in many of his old-baseball-man folktales, often interchanging Berra with wild-and-crazy Dodgers from the early days like Babe Herman.

Veeck's point was that Yogis reputation as a goofy idiot-savant type really undercut his reputation as a great player in his own right.

Veeck also predicted that Berra, once separated from Stengel, would lose most of his comic mojo, which did turn out to be true.

Once he became a full-time manager, Yogi pretty much dried up as a source of goofy one-liners, although he did get a decent one off once in a while.

 

I think it's in reference to how Berra was welcoming to Elston Howard, who was integrating the Yankees, when a lot of players may not have been so nice. Which is a bit surprising, not for the color aspect, but because they played the same position, and it was an era when veterans weren't always kind to rookies.

 

Going to echo this one. A lot of Berra's fame as a quipster seemed to come from after-the-fact stories by Mantle and Joe Garagiola. And I agree, I think a lot of Berra's greatness is forgotten because of his image as this lovable old coot in pinstripes.

 

In the 40s and 50s when the legend of Yogi was really made, you didn't have bloggers and tweeters and 24-hour video coverage of every player on every team -- a lot of individual players images were pretty much made by how they were described by other players (like Mantle) or their manager, especially a media superstar like Casey Stengel. So it was entirely possible for much of Yogi Berra's image to be spun out of what Casey Stengel or Mantle told reporters he heard him say.