Driving Mr. Yogi

by Harvey Araton

  Well, yes, he had to admit that they made the uniform “a little baggy” in deference to those parts of the body that cannot defy gravity. But Berra, who prided himself on working the treadmill, keeping off excess weight, was generally pleased with the sartorial statement he could still make wearing his famous number 8.

  Most of all, Berra was thrilled to be back in the clubhouse, pulling up his uniform pants, taking his sweet time, watching the familiar morning scene of players, coaches, and reporters shuffling about. In the coaches’ room, next door to Torre’s office and across the hall from the players’ sanctum, Berra felt pretty good about how the uniform would look on him when he finally stepped onto the field.

  Unlike some other baseball septuagenarians he could name, such as the former Dodgers and Red Sox manager Don Zimmer, who was sitting nearby, sipping a cup of hot coffee. “What the hell happened to you?” he asked Zim, whose pinstripes surged well beyond his waistline.

  But that first morning, despite savoring every step of the clubhouse routine, Berra didn’t linger too long inside, anxious as he was to get a whiff of the manicured field. Uniform on, belt fastened, and cleats tied, he walked up the dugout steps, stepped onto the dirt track, and moved toward the batting cage. Among the fans out early to watch the morning workout—a good portion of them in Berra’s age range, the loyal snowbirds—there were sounds of instant recognition. And suddenly there was a buzz in the crowd.

  “It’s not like the stands are full for a workout at that time of day,” said Rick Cerrone, the media relations director at the time, who happened to be in front of the dugout when Berra walked out. “But we’re the Yankees; people show up to see Jeter, Bernie Williams, and maybe the Boss. But all of a sudden, here comes number eight onto the field. You could hear the fans. It was if they were saying, He’s back! Yogi’s back. With all the popular players we had on that team, there was something magical about having Yogi walk out with us.”

  Berra the lovable ball buster was back, and he couldn’t spend enough time around the park. With Guidry agreeing to sacrifice some sleep to get him to the park early, Berra was one of the first to arrive in the clubhouse every morning, and he quickly developed a routine.

  He liked to hit the treadmill right away, so he could get in a workout before the players arrived. He didn’t want to get in their way. Then it was on to the massage table to have Steve Donohue, the assistant trainer, work on his neck and shoulders. From there he would help himself to the telephone on Donohue’s desk to call his guys around the country, Whitey and “Scooter” (Rizzuto) and Moose (Skowron), checking in like a gleeful kid reporting from sleepaway camp.

  When Torre arrived, Berra would unfailingly join him in the manager’s office for a breakfast of champions. With a history of family heart disease, Torre always watched what he ate, but he had become even more vigilant after being treated for prostate cancer in 1999. “Yogi would come in every morning and say, ‘What are we having today—the egg whites, the oatmeal, the pancakes?’” Torre said.

  After a low-fat feast, Berra worked the clubhouse and the complex, determined to develop relationships with the players who to that point he had mostly admired from afar, notwithstanding the games he had attended in 1999. He loved how fraternal they seemed. “Like the guys I played with,” he said. “They don’t fight. They just want to win.”

  From a distance, Guidry was amazed by the instant interaction, how quickly Berra and the players established a rapport. “They had a lot of veterans, guys from the eighties and nineties, throwback guys like David Cone, David Wells, Andy Pettitte, Scott Brosius,” Guidry said. “They were a lot like the older guys who enjoyed the camaraderie. When Yogi first came back, he would sit in the clubhouse or on the bench, and they would come around him, include him in their everyday affairs. They would give him the respect he deserved. It wasn’t just about them, the way it is now for a lot of the players.”

  When Berra interacted with them, Guidry gave him space, not wanting to intrude. He enjoyed watching Yogi work the room, thrilled not only by how the players were polite and welcoming but also by how much of a charge they seemed to get out of Berra. “And if you thought a lot of it was because he was just back, and it would have been enough to do it once or twice and then go about your business, it wasn’t like that at all,” Guidry said. “It was all spring. That’s how he was treated. They were all around him every day, and he was around them.”

  Berra told Paul O’Neill how much O’Neill reminded him of Mickey Mantle, with his proclivity for taking out his frustrations on the water cooler or a wall. He took to calling Mariano Rivera “Skinny” and fascinated the best closer in baseball with tidbits about the earliest Latino ballplayers in the major leagues.

  He never tired of reminding Derek Jeter of his team’s failure to make the 1997 World Series. Had they won that series, Jeter’s Yankees would have been challenging Berra’s Yankees’ record of five straight titles between 1949 and 1953.

  When he wasn’t chiding Jeter about collective achievements, he might rag on him about a personal failure. Once he stopped by to tell him that he had looked terrible striking out on a high 3–2 pitch the night before.

  “Why did you swing at that?” Berra asked.

  “Well, you swung at those pitches,” Jeter replied.

  Berra, the epitome of the bad-ball hitter, thought about that for a moment and snapped, “Well, I hit those; you don’t.”

  A couple of nearby players cracked up, as did Jeter, who wasn’t often the welcoming target of the needle. But few had the ability to wield a zinger as good-naturedly as Berra.

  If there was one player in the 2000 camp who reminded Berra a bit of his free-swinging self, it was the young infielder from the Dominican Republic, Alfonso Soriano. Soriano’s selectivity was almost nonexistent. While the Yankees loved his power, especially for an infielder, they were alarmed by his strikeout totals—179 in 939 minor-league at bats.

  Berra had prided himself on being a free swinger who wasn’t a strikeout liability. Failing to put the ball in play was for him a source of embarrassment. In 1950, a season he did not win the MVP, he struck out 12 times in 597 at bats, an almost ludicrous figure for the kind of pitches he routinely attacked.

  One day Berra took it upon himself to strike up a conversation with Soriano, who spoke passable English. They were soon joined by Torre, who told Soriano that Berra was probably the best bad-ball hitter in baseball history. Torre suggested to Berra that he might want to explain his philosophy to the kid. Berra was happy to oblige, and the result sounded something like the script of his Aflac commercial.

  “Well, if you see it, hit it,” he said. “Sometimes you don’t see it. I’d let it go, and the next time I’d swing at it. I saw it better the next time.”

  Torre couldn’t tell if Soriano had any idea what Berra was talking about. “But if you thought about what Yogi was saying, it made perfect sense,” he said.

  If Berra loved being around the players, the feeling was mutual. “The whole place lit up,” David Cone said. “He just had that kind of energy. It’s hard to explain, but he just garnered so much respect—though he never walked around commanding it. Guys would just want to talk to him, ask him questions, trying to get him to say one of his Yogi-isms.

  “He loved the attention, loved talking baseball, and it felt like we had this good-luck charm, especially after the perfect game on his day. It gave all of us a sense of belonging, a sense of history, right in the middle of our little run. You know, here we were, trying to win three in a row, four out of five, and with Yogi there, it was sort of a confirmation. But it also kept us in check, because with as many rings as we had won, he was going to have more than twice that. A good notion to keep in mind: Yeah, we’re doing something special here, but look at what Yogi did. You know, keep it in perspective.”

  Early on, Torre told Berra that he could participate as much or as little as he wanted to. He could take a day off when he felt like it, play a round of golf.

 
“Yog, you don’t have to go with us for the night games,” Torre said.

  “What do you mean?” Berra complained. “I want to go.”

  Mostly, he was anxious to work with Jorge Posada, with whom he had chatted once or twice the previous season but didn’t really know. Posada, a twenty-fourth-round draft pick, hailed from Puerto Rico but had attended community college in Alabama. He was bright, affable, and somewhat sensitive to criticism. At the same time, he was amazed that his personal tutor was Yogi Berra.

  “I remember that spring training so well because we spent so much time together,” he said. “Yogi was always with the catchers, going through the drills, blocking balls, watching us, laughing with us. It was amazing—you could tell how much he was enjoying it. I mean, we’re thinking, This is Yogi Berra. We should be honored to be in his presence. But the way he acted, it almost was like it was the other way around.

  “He made you feel that way. He was in uniform, first one out there every morning. He’d come out and say, ‘It’s too hot to block balls today, no blocking balls.’ Or we’d have everyone out there—pitchers, infielders—and we’d be going through the drills, and all of a sudden he’d say, ‘The catchers are done today; go home.’ He didn’t believe in overdoing it like some of the younger coaches. He was so much fun. He took care of us. Not every day but a few days. He understood what it was like to go through that stuff.”

  Berra worked with all the catchers in camp, but he watched Posada intently. During idle moments, he sat with Posada, telling stories of his early days as a struggling catcher.

  “I was terrible,” he said. “My throws sailed; my footwork was bad. The pitchers didn’t like pitching to me.”

  “What changed?” Posada asked.

  “Bill Dickey,” he said, assuming Posada had heard of the Hall of Fame catcher and career-long Yankee. Dickey had come out of retirement in 1949 to tutor Berra—or, as Berra explained at the time, “to learn me his experience.”

  Dickey taught Berra tricks of the trade—how to handle foul balls and pop flies, block the plate, balance himself to throw out base stealers, and be the extension of the manager on the field. His mentorship helped Berra mature from a good-hitting catcher who was a liability behind the plate into a fellow Hall of Famer.

  Now it was Berra’s turn to pass along what Dickey had taught him. In a sense, he had also “unretired” to take on the job of making Posada want to catch, of making him believe he could contribute behind the plate as much as he could while standing alongside it with a bat in his hands. That is what Dickey had done for Berra, and he was eternally grateful.

  “One thing I saw, Posada was overly concerned with the runners—he’d call too many fastballs,” Berra said. “I told him his main responsibility was getting the hitter. I told him how to cheat when catching a breaking ball, move into the pitch. Too many guys don’t do that too good.”

  Berra also advised Posada to know his pitchers—“which ones you can yell at, which ones you baby a bit. They’re all different.” He told Posada how he would take a few steps toward the mound and scream at Vic Raschi, “Come on, Onion Head, throw the damn ball.” As time passed, he got a kick out of how hard-nosed Posada was with the Cuban right-hander Orlando “El Duque” Hernandez. It reminded him of his own obdurate approach with Raschi, who pitched better when he was mad.

  Seeking to give Posada whatever edge he could, Berra asked him if he would consider trying a catcher’s mitt similar to one Berra had used—featuring a fishnet webbing, which he always believed enabled him to see the pitched ball better and helped with squeezing foul tips. It was the kind of mitt he had used to catch Don Larsen’s perfect game (later bronzed and put on display at the Yogi Berra Museum).

  Posada was taken aback but flattered by Berra’s offer. He gave Yogi one of his mitts, which Berra brought to a craftsman named John Golomb, who was known as “the Glove Doctor.” Golomb replaced Posada’s webbing with one similar to that in Berra’s old mitt.

  Posada gave it a try. He didn’t feel comfortable but was reluctant to tell Berra for fear of hurting his feelings.

  “I didn’t care,” Berra said. “The catcher’s equipment has gotten a little different—it’s all lightweight and fiberglass stuff.”

  Berra had no ego invested in the offer. It was just another idea to help Posada relax behind the plate. Better yet, it helped Posada build a sense of trust in Yogi. He could plainly see how much Berra wanted to make him a better catcher. And according to Posada, he succeeded.

  “Having him right there, talking about what he thought we should do, keeping my hand closer to my glove, helped me a lot,” Posada said. “But maybe the most important thing he helped me with was with his view of the game, knowing how hard it is but that you really needed to keep a positive attitude every day—that was very big for me. It wasn’t like he gave long speeches. It was the little things he said, very simple things, but you never forget how many rings this guy has or that he’s a Hall of Famer. Honestly, after a couple of weeks, it felt like he had been there forever.”

  In many ways, he had. Now everyone could see him and hear him and touch him. Berra quickly became the living link between championship generations, a man who early in his career had been photographed with the dying Babe Ruth and now was mentoring players in the twenty-first century.

  Never one to overanalyze anything or rhapsodize about the glories of spring training, the essence of renewal, Berra allowed the players to contemplate the meaning of it all. Asked later how it had felt to be back, he said, “Sure, I was glad to be there. It was good being around everyone, Joe and all the coaches.” He paused for a moment, then added, “Besides, it beat the cold back home.”

  Spring training, where repetition reigns, had always been the ideal environment for Berra. Long before he became one of baseball’s grand elders, he was a man of time-honored routines, set in his ways. “If the doctor tells him to take a pill at nine A.M., the bottle is open at five of nine,” Carmen Berra said.

  But there was one Berra habit that Carmen always hated. That was his cigarette smoking and, worse, his fondness for chewing tobacco. Baseball players had forever been stuffing it into their cheeks, despite medical warnings, some gruesome cancer cases, and impassioned pleas to cease and desist from the likes of the outspoken Joe Garagiola, Berra’s childhood friend and himself a reformed chewer.

  Carmen convinced Yogi to stop smoking and chewing after he retired from baseball. He took up Dentyne gum as a substitute, especially as he aged and experienced cotton mouth from various medications. But back in the spring training environment, back with the guys, boys would be boys. And since Guidry was still a dedicated user of Skoal, a popular brand of chewing tobacco, and typically carried a small container in his back uniform pants pocket, Berra figured, what the heck, how much could a little bit before each game hurt? No more, he thought, than the three ounces of vodka he rewarded himself with every evening during dinner.

  In his first spring back with the team, he developed one of his classic routines. On the bench as the game got under way, he would signal Guidry with a little nudge of the shoulder—his way of asking him to reach into his pocket, open the container, and hand him a small chew.

  One day, when the game was being beamed back to New York on cable, the television camera happened to swing around to the dugout just as Guidry was handing Berra a wad that he packed into his cheek. Watching at home, knowing full well that Guidry wasn’t handing Berra a stick of Dentyne, Carmen nearly jumped out of her seat. Later in the day, she was on the phone to her husband and Guidry, giving them both a piece of her mind. “After that,” Guidry said, “I was always looking out for the cameras.”

  Guidry had never realized the extent of Berra’s need for repetition and precision until that first spring training back, when Berra began peppering him with questions. In Berra-speak, he needed to know everything he didn’t need to know.

  “Like if he heard they had brought in a kid from the minor-league camp across the street
and he wasn’t on the roster list,” Guidry said. “He needed to know the players, all of them. If he had the sheet with the names in his hand, well, he just saw a number seventy-two walk by in the clubhouse, so how come there’s no seventy-two on the list? ‘Yog, I don’t know. They got twenty-five or thirty major-league guys in camp and another thirty or so young guys. You’re not gonna know every single guy.’

  “But he had to know every single guy. He’d say, ‘I saw this tall kid yesterday. I watched him throw the other day, left-handed kid. I like him.’ And I’d say, ‘Which kid? Give me a name.’ So he gives me the name, and I say, ‘Yogi, he’s right-handed.’ And he says, ‘No, not that kid. The left-handed kid.’ I say, ‘What’s his name?’ He says, ‘I don’t know. That’s why they need to put the damn name on the list so I can tell him by the number.’”

  Guidry quickly learned that lateness around Berra was not an option. When he offered Berra a ride to the complex after their first dinner out at the Bahama Breeze, he didn’t quite realize that he had committed himself for the rest of the spring. “But once you did something, well, it had to be format, part of the regimen,” he said. “When he does it one day, it’s going to be that way for the next thousand days.”

  Berra could have rented a car, driven himself, but as he said, “Gator knew his way around. I couldn’t tell you anything or anywhere. They had all these highways and traffic by the complex, a big change from Fort Lauderdale. Everything was real close in the old place.”

  Every morning, Guidry pulled up in his truck, typically a few minutes early in accordance with Berra Standard Time. Unfailingly, Berra was outside before Guidry rolled to a stop, often shaking an admirer’s hand or having a photo snapped. But one morning, Guidry was delayed, pausing in the parking lot of his apartment complex to assist a damsel in distress.