Driving Mr. Yogi

by Harvey Araton

  As much as he loved the Yankees and baseball, in that order, Guidry hated to waste a sunny, sultry Louisiana day lounging indoors. As an avid outdoorsman, he could never manufacture enough chores to do on his tractor around his sprawling property. For a few years, he ran baseball clinics for local children on a small diamond he had carved out of his own land—until it dawned on him that too many of the kids were there only because their parents wanted them to be and not because they actually loved to play baseball.

  But whatever he was doing outside, Guidry would inevitably poke his head in the house, check the score with Bonnie, and time his return for the last half-hour or so of the game.

  “I was always doing something throughout the day, staying busy,” he said, punctuating each sentence, as he often did, by making good use of the plastic cup that served as his spittoon. “Bonnie has probably watched more games than I have,” he added. “She’ll be in the house, the TV on, and then I’ll come back in, and we’ll watch the end together.”

  That, of course, was subject to change once the playoffs commenced, when the intensity level rose to a kick-the-coffee-table level and the plaintive cries of “Jesus Christ!” would send his wife scurrying to watch in another room.

  “She doesn’t get nervous in the same way as me,” he admitted. “Only when something bad happens to the pitcher, and then it’s always somebody else’s fault. Then she gets irate because it’s charged to the pitcher.”

  Such was the life of a former pitcher’s wife. Guidry, by contrast, only cared about which team in the end got the W. “I get upset because I get a feeling of what should be done, and I worry that the guy’s not going to do it and the outcome’s going to be horrible,” he said.

  July 18, 1999, wasn’t supposed to be about the outcome or anything that happened in the game—at least not when 41,930 fans filed into Yankee Stadium for an interleague affair against the lowly Montreal Expos. That day, the main attraction was Yogi Berra. Yogi had already had the honor of throwing out the first pitch on Opening Day, but now he was back for his own special day to commemorate his return to the fold.

  The Yankees had been promoting the event for weeks, plastering the newspapers with ads showing the 1984 Sports Illustrated photo taken from behind. This time, the implication was that Berra was back and wasn’t going anywhere for a long, long time.

  A decade into blissful retirement, Guidry still felt like part of the Yankees as well, given his spring training duties, his regular participation in Old-Timers’ Day, and his lifelong habit of watching the Yankees on television from the comfort of his couch a few thousand miles away.

  Thankfully for Guidry, the world had come a long way from when he and his mother had relished the few regular-season games televised nationally and when he had dashed home from school—like any New York City kid—to catch the last few innings of a weekday World Series game. By 1999, his almighty satellite dish was pulling in most Yankees games telecast on the MSG (Madison Square Garden) Network or WPIX (channel 11) in New York.

  Best invention ever, as far as Guidry was concerned. Southwestern Louisiana might as well have been the north Jersey suburbs.

  Just like Berra, Guidry had welcomed the birth of the Torre/Jeter era, watching on television as the Yankees won it all in 1996 for the first time since Guidry’s dream season of 1978. After losing to Cleveland in the American League Division Series the following year, they played at a torrid pace in 1998, claiming 114 regular-season victories, followed by 11 more in the postseason, and sweeping the San Diego Padres in the World Series.

  Yes, it was great to be a Yankee again, and especially today, Yogi Berra Day at Yankee Stadium. Guidry settled onto the couch with a cold drink in his hand and Bonnie alongside him. He remarked that the speech alone—if what Berra was about to give could be classified as such—might be the best thing he would see all season.

  He had no idea.

  In New York City, the day was steaming hot, destined to reach a high of 98 degrees, as a languid mass of humid air that might have been transported from the Louisiana bayous settled over the Bronx. But Berra stayed cool, taking part in a fundraising promotion for his new museum. For the trip from New Jersey to the famous ballpark, he and his family shared a New York Waterway boat with ticket-buying fans. Along the way, they detoured to a Manhattan dock to take aboard the Yankees-loving mayor of New York City, Rudy Giuliani. The mayor had grown up in Brooklyn and Garden City, an Italian boy who especially idolized Berra.

  Joining Yogi were Carmen, their three sons, their grandchildren, and Yogi’s only surviving sibling—his sister, Josie, who still lived in the same brick bungalow in the blue-collar neighborhood that Berra had grown up in. It was hard to believe that after so many years, she had never before stepped foot in Yankee Stadium. In effect, this was the day Dale Berra had sold to his father the previous winter when he had pleaded Steinbrenner’s case.

  When the “Good Ship Berra” reached the South Bronx shrine, the heavy air was laden with nostalgia and karma, beginning with the coincidental fact that it was Joe Torre’s fifty-ninth birthday. Then there was the always welcome sight of a certain former Berra battery mate.

  Rather than have him reenact the Opening Day ceremony of throwing out the first pitch, the Yankees decided to have Berra take up his more natural position at home plate and catch it. In what would turn out to be a ceremonial stroke of genius, the Yankees flew Don Larsen in from his home in San Diego to re-create the perfect-game battery from game five of the 1956 World Series.

  Also on the guest list were Berra’s pals Joe Garagiola, Phil Rizzuto, Whitey Ford, Bobby Richardson, and Gil McDougald. For the occasion, a large number 8 was painted on the grass behind the plate. Berra rode onto the field and into view of the fans in a cream-colored 1957 Thunderbird convertible. Circling the dirt track around the field, Berra waved to the crowd as Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World” blasted through the loudspeakers.

  From the dugout, where she was providing broadcast updates, Suzyn Waldman looked on in tears, thinking, I helped do this. She was also mindful that she had done it not only for Berra but also for her friend, the Boss.

  In the Yankees bullpen, David Cone warmed up for the start but was distracted by the sudden eruption of cheers. “I’d never had a warm-up like that, so happy-go-lucky, carefree,” he recalled. “I wasn’t even concentrating on my pitches, just watching Yogi riding around, laughing and waving at him when he came around the warning track. I had this tremendous feeling of being part of the Yankees family, of the tradition.”

  Cone knew Berra only in the way most players who had never dressed in the same clubhouse knew him. They went out of their way to meet him. As a member of the late-1980s Mets, Cone had walked across the field to introduce himself one day in Houston when Berra was coaching for the Astros. “If you’ve grown up loving and playing baseball and you see Yogi Berra on the field, how could you not?” Cone said.

  Back at home plate, basking and broiling in the oppressive sun, broadcaster Michael Kay was already perspiring heavily in his suit as he prepared to emcee the ceremony, getting goose bumps himself when Berra stepped out of the Thunderbird. Kay was thinking he was in for one of the great day-night doubleheaders of all time, courtesy of a couple of Jersey icons: Berra and Bruce Springsteen, in concert that night across the river at the Continental Airlines Arena.

  To begin, Derek Jeter—who at twenty-five was already the on-field face of the Yankees—presented Carmen Berra with a bouquet of flowers. Then it was Yogi’s turn.

  Forty years earlier, in 1959, a very different Yankees organization had staged the first Yogi Berra Day, highlighted by a presentation of fishing equipment by Ted Williams. Steinbrenner made sure that this one would be different. Berra received replicas of his ten championship rings, a trip to Italy for Carmen and him, a $100,000 donation to his museum, and the original 1951 championship banner—the third of five straight Yankees championships, coinciding with Berra’s first MVP season.

  Predict
ably, Berra’s speech lasted about as long as it took for a young greyhound like Jeter to run out a slow ground ball. “I knew I’d get emotional talking,” said Berra, who generally tried to avoid public displays of emotion. “I had to keep it short and thank the fans.”

  Naturally, he created a Yogi-ism for the occasion, thanking everyone for making him feel at home, because Yankee Stadium to him was home. “You’re great,” he told the fans, who responded by chanting his name.

  Finally, the Yankees took the field, and it was time for Larsen and Berra to do their thing. Cone was at the mound, next to Larsen, waiting for Berra and the Yankees’ starting catcher, Joe Girardi, to get their act together. Having never met Larsen, Cone made small talk, inquiring, “Are you going to jump into Yogi’s arms again?”

  Larsen laughed. “Kid, you got it wrong,” he said. “He jumped into my arms.” Cone stood corrected, making a mental note of how casually Larsen made the point, like a droll old-time Hollywood actor.

  Meanwhile, Berra and Girardi were about to walk to the plate. “I remember in the clubhouse how excited everyone was about the day, that we were all going to be part of Yogi’s day,” Girardi said. He had already caught the first pitch Berra had floated to the plate on Opening Day—when Cone was also the Yankees’ starter—and had rushed to the mound to hand him the ball, saying, “This is a great thrill.” But now that Girardi was sharing the actual catcher’s space with Berra, he felt as if he had stepped into a history book.

  He remembered the smaller glove—about the size of the mitt Berra had used back in the day—he had occasionally trained with and had stored away inside the clubhouse. “You want me to go get the little glove for you, Yogi?” Girardi asked, figuring the prop might be nice for the throwback nature of the occasion.

  “No,” Berra told him. “I want to use yours.”

  Girardi handed it to him, making one ambitious request: “Put a blessing on it,” he said.

  When the Yankees scored five runs off the Expos’ Javier Vázquez in the second inning—home runs by Derek Jeter and Ricky Ledee doing most of the damage—the suspense seemingly drained from the day. After Cone struck out the side in the top of the third, the skies darkened, and a thunderstorm briefly threatened to end the game before it was official.

  Cone was thirty-six—the number he happened to wear on the back of his jersey. At that age especially, there was the risk that his shoulder would tighten up during the rain delay, particularly with the Yankees due to bat first when the game resumed. But then came an assist from Mother Nature. Not long after the thirty-three-minute delay, the sun was back out, and it was hotter and more humid than before, helping Cone to stay loose.

  In fact, when he took the mound for the top of the fourth—having set down all nine hitters up to that point—he felt stronger than when he had started the game. His velocity—though not comparable to that in his more youthful days with the Mets—actually improved as the game progressed. With pinpoint control of his fastball and a biting slider, Cone had the Expos lunging all day, hitting weak flies to the outfield, if they made any contact at all.

  None of what he had seen so far surprised Felipe Alou, the Expos’ veteran manager. Alou had played with the Yankees during the early 1970s, when the franchise was in disarray under the sorry ownership of CBS and about to be sold to Steinbrenner. He knew there was no team in baseball that staged big events like the Yankees. He understood what Yogi Berra Day represented and why it had to be held. And he worried that his young, inexperienced team would be distracted by the sight of all the Yankees legends.

  From a tactical standpoint, what was worse was the lineup card Alou had walked to home plate prior to the game. Not one of his hitters had faced Cone before. He watched as the crafty right-hander befuddled them, one after another, and felt helpless to do anything about it.

  Having decided to watch the game with his large family, Berra looked on from suite 332. Meanwhile, Larsen watched from Steinbrenner’s private box. As it turned out, they were the only invited guests who didn’t pick up and leave after a few innings.

  “There were plans to leave early, but I told everyone, ‘I’m staying, you can go,’” Berra said. “After the fifth, I wasn’t going anywhere.” In the box with her grandparents and other relatives, Berra’s granddaughter Lindsay sent her boyfriend on his way. He had a flight to catch to North Carolina. “You’re on your own,” she told him.

  Walk out on a perfect game? A Berra wouldn’t think of it. Even with four innings to go, and the odds stacked against Cone making it last into the ninth, Yogi was steadfast. There was, after all, some precedent for grand things happening in this ballpark. It had only been a little over a year since David Wells had thrown a perfect game against the Minnesota Twins—the first in Yankee Stadium since Larsen’s.

  No, Berra wasn’t going home just yet, not on this day, his day. He thought Cone “could use a little luck,” and who else was more capable of providing it than the man most baseball people considered—with all due respect to the memory of Lou Gehrig—the luckiest man on the face of the earth?

  Knowing from firsthand experience how difficult it was to get all the way to twenty-seven outs without a hit or a walk, Berra normally didn’t entertain the possibility until at least the end of the seventh inning. “If you get by the seventh, then you start thinking about it,” he said. “You only need six more outs.”

  Cone’s mastery of the Expos only grew as the innings rolled by. Rare was the called ball, accounting for a mere twenty of the eighty-eight pitches he wound up throwing.

  Could this really be happening? Down on the field, with the heat index rising, Girardi looked up at the zeros on the scoreboard in the eighth inning and hoped he wasn’t hallucinating. “I remember saying to myself, ‘You have got to be kidding me,’” he said. “What explanation could there have possibly been other than Yogi and Larsen had graced us with their presence?”

  Cone, meanwhile, dismissed the thought of upstaging Berra’s day. The more correct interpretation, dawning on him after the sixth inning, was that if he could somehow pull off the implausible feat, he would actually be enhancing it. “The feeling of history started to build as the game went along, and at one point I was almost overwhelmed, thinking, you know, Wow, this could happen on this of all days,” he said.

  Berra was hoping, even praying, while unavoidably dwelling on his own close calls over a baseball lifetime, including one that got away. Would he ever stop blaming himself for the no-hitter Bill Bevens almost threw for the Yankees in the 1947 World Series against the Dodgers?

  Pinch-running with one out in the ninth inning, Al Gionfriddo took off for second. The rookie Berra threw high, giving Gionfriddo the stolen base. After an intentional walk to Pete Reiser, Cookie Lavagetto hit a game-winning double—the Dodgers’ only hit off Bevens.

  It was much easier to live with the memory of dropping Ted Williams’s twisting pop foul with two outs in the ninth on September 28, 1951, handing the best pure hitter in baseball another opportunity to ruin Allie Reynolds’s no-hit bid. Williams hit the next pitch in nearly the same spot. Berra held on. Is it a reach to say that an angel of fortune spared him the cruelty of fate and a rare moment of infamy?

  Berra had watched Mickey Mantle save Larsen’s gem with a running catch that ranked on his all-time list of greatest catches. Based on all his experience, he suspected that Cone was sooner or later also going to need an assist from at least one of his teammates.

  That moment came with one out in the eighth inning, when Jose Vidro hit a grounder up the middle ticketed for center field. Vidro had been one of the few Expos hitters to get ahead of Cone in the count. Loath to surrender the perfect game on a walk, Cone decided to gamble and challenge Vidro, a line-drive hitter.

  “I got the better part of the middle of the plate, and he hit it up the middle,” Cone said. “I thought, There it goes.”

  Because Vidro was a switch hitter batting left, Yankees second baseman Chuck Knoblauch needed to protect the hol
e between first and second. To make the play, he had to get the best jump possible. He did, making a backhanded grab, turning and planting his feet for the throw. Now came an even bigger challenge for Knoblauch, who that season had developed a hitch in his throwing motion, a debilitating handicap that would soon require a shift to the outfield.

  With the speedy Vidro dashing toward the bag, Knoblauch had no time to think, only to react. Somehow, he held it together, defied the psychological demons, and kept it simple, Berra-style. He fired a strike to Tino Martinez at first for the twenty-third out.

  Berra was beside himself now, more nervous watching a ballgame than he had been in years. In the ninth inning, Cone fanned Chris Widger on three pitches for his tenth strikeout of the game. Ryan McGuire, a left-handed hitter, pinch-hit for the right-handed Shane Andrews. He lofted a lazy fly ball into short right field.

  On came Ledee, circling a little too tentatively. Cone worried that he hadn’t picked it up in the late afternoon haze. Berra, who had endured his share of unsteady moments in the same Yankee Stadium sun field, also could see that Ledee wasn’t sure of himself.

  He made the catch, using two hands. Berra exhaled. “When the kid caught the ball in the sun after not seeing it, I thought that could be the break,” he said.

  The twenty-seventh and last batter, shortstop Orlando Cabrera, swung at the first pitch and missed. He took the second for a ball. Then Cone unleashed a fastball, and Cabrera popped it up behind third. Cone’s hands were already on the top of his cap, a sign of disbelief, as he watched the ball settle into Scott Brosius’s glove.

  In an instant, the weight of his achievement dropped him to his knees and onto the grass in front of the mound. Here came Girardi, wrapping Cone up before the others piled on, just like Berra and Larsen. Up in Steinbrenner’s box, the tears Berra had managed to stave off during the pregame festivities now rolled down his cheeks.