Driving Mr. Yogi

by Harvey Araton

  Berra shrugged. That’s all it was.

  Swisher had to admit that he tended at times to analyze “every little thing in the swing rather than just doing what you have to do, and that’s make contact with the baseball.”

  “Yeah, I was a pretty simple hitter,” Berra said. “All this breaking down the swing stuff—never did none of that.”

  As it turned out, in 2010 Swisher went on to post career highs in hits (163), batting average (.288), and slugging percentage (.511) while hitting 29 home runs and driving in 89. He insisted that Berra’s tip helped, especially during slumps, although Guidry said that in the grand scheme of things, whether it helped or not didn’t really matter.

  “Whether Yogi had anything to do with the season Swisher had—who knows?” he said. “That’s immaterial.” All Guidry knew while watching the episode unfold—from Berra’s first comment to the look on his face when Swisher returned to the dugout to continue the conversation—was that Guidry was left with a triumphant sense of mission accomplished.

  “From Swisher’s point of view, he sat down and talked to Yogi and then went right up there and hit the ball to the damn wall,” Guidry said. “That’s what made the moment so special—something immediate came out of it. And that’s all that really mattered—Swisher accepted what Yogi told him, and the way it turned out, he didn’t waste his time. And in Yogi’s mind, he felt, OK, it justifies me being here. Everybody loves having him anyway, but I know for a fact that he’s not thinking that. What he’s thinking is that he was still able to contribute something.”

  With an assist from Guidry, that is, and with classic Berra brevity, he acknowledged as much when he was asked about the session with Swisher. “Gator made me,” he said.

  Months later, Guidry sat in the dugout at Yankee Stadium, catching up with his pal Goose Gossage on Old-Timers’ Day, an occasion they enthusiastically looked forward to every season, taking pride in its enduring tradition.

  “I mean, if you take Old-Timers’ Day out of the picture, if you don’t celebrate the past and these great relationships and what the game stands for, why the hell are we all here in the first place?” Guidry said. “It’s about what it means to wear a Yankees cap, a uniform, and the fact is that we still have it. We’re the only ones, and you have to ask yourself, ‘Why is that? Why not the Dodgers? They’re a great franchise. Why not Boston? They’ve got a lot of great old-timers. Why do we keep this tradition and no one else does?’”

  Calling Old-Timers’ Day his “favorite day of the year,” Swisher said that as a relative newcomer and someone who had experienced major-league baseball on the West Coast (Oakland) and in the Midwest (Chicago), the answer was obvious. “That breaks down from the top,” he said. “There’s nothing else in baseball like that, and that started with George Steinbrenner.”

  Although Steinbrenner had indisputably restored the Yankees’ sense of manifest destiny, the truth is that the tradition of Old-Timers’ Day predated Steinbrenner by decades, the first official one being staged in 1946. And while he continued it after all the imitators gave up, the event remained subject to the Boss’s competitive and occasionally imperious quirks.

  One regrettable change he made was abandoning the long-standing routine of having the former players dress in the clubhouse, assigning one old-timer to each active dressing stall to share with a current player. “Let me tell you, there was nothing better as an active player than to sit in the clubhouse and watch those guys—Mickey and Whitey and the rest of them—come in and start telling their stories,” Gossage said.

  Whoever was assigned to his space—Gossage recalled hosting the old right-hander Ralph Terry from the great early-sixties teams at least twice—he would say, “Hey, it’s all yours today.” All Gossage wanted was to be a fly on the wall, soak it all in. But when the Yankees blew a game one Old-Timers’ Day, Steinbrenner decided the crowd in the clubhouse had been a distraction and had the old-timers moved into their own room the following year.

  That left the dugout as the best place for the generations to meet and mingle. But in 2010, when Guidry and Gossage looked around during the annual reenactment of two or three innings, they were startled by how few active players had left the comfort of the clubhouse to fraternize with the old-timers.

  “I was like, ‘Where the hell are these guys?’” Gossage said. “When we played, we’d all be out there. It was expected, but no one had to actually tell you or ask. You wanted to be out there. To be honest, I was kind of shocked.”

  He wondered if all the comings and goings of modern baseball, the revolving-door rosters, were taking their toll even on the Yankees. Guidry had considered that possibility himself. But at least Swisher was out there, clowning with everyone, along with the core four—Jeter, Posada, Pettitte, and the incomparable Mo Rivera.

  “Gator, I want to see what you got left,” Rivera said.

  Guidry laughed, and Gossage butted in to defend Guidry’s—and his own—honor by insisting that Guidry had enough to get through one lousy inning—which was all the modern-day closer needed to work in any given game to become an all-time legend.

  The first time Guidry laid eyes on Mariano Rivera, he thought he was looking at a Latino version of his younger self. It was 1993, on a back field of the Yankees’ old spring training complex in Fort Lauderdale, the area reserved for fresh-faced kids trying to climb their way up the minor-league ladder.

  “We used to call it Iwo Jima, because when we first started out, it was just an infield with sand in the back of it,” Guidry said, meaning there was no outfield grass. “When we practiced, we actually used to have to watch out for snakes.”

  The complex had been upgraded and landscaped by the time Rivera signed with the Yankees for $3,000 as an undrafted player out of Panama City in 1990. The son of a fishing boat captain, Rivera spoke no English and had never heard of Ron Guidry, much less Yogi Berra.

  “I played baseball, but I didn’t know anything about the game in America,” he said. “I knew about soccer. Even when I was already two/three years in the organization, I didn’t know anything. I knew the game. I saw the players and all that stuff, on TV. But that was it.”

  The year Rivera showed up on Guidry’s radar, he was mostly concerned with preserving a career, rehabbing from surgery in August 1992 to repair damage to the ulnar collateral ligament in his right elbow. That November, he was left unprotected by the Yankees in the draft to stock the two new expansion teams, the Florida Marlins and Colorado Rockies. Both passed on him. When Rivera reported to Fort Lauderdale the following spring, Guidry was asked to take a look at the young right-hander, who was coming off elbow surgery.

  Guidry went to the back fields, asked around for Rivera, settled behind the batting cage to watch him throw, and fell in love at first sight. Here was this rail-thin minor-leaguer with a relaxed, easy motion and a fastball that exploded into the catcher’s glove, belying the near-hypnotic fluidity of his delivery.

  “You could see the pop and the movement, and I’m saying, ‘How long ago was the surgery, less than a year?’” Guidry said. “Then I find out he’s not that young, already twenty-three, and I say, ‘Hmm, I think I’ve heard this story before.’”

  When Rivera was finished throwing, Guidry introduced himself, and they sat on a tarp by the side of the field. He had been told that Rivera’s English wasn’t good, but there was something about the way he listened, his earnest expression, that made Guidry believe that communication was not going to be much of a problem.

  “OK, you just had an injury, you’re not going to be doing very much this year, so make sure you take time to heal it,” Guidry told him. “Just do a little easy throwing, nothing strenuous. Please don’t let them talk you into hurrying up and trying to come back. You got a great arm; you’re probably not going anywhere.”

  Nobody knew better than Guidry that certainty did not exist for a young pitcher in the organization, not in those pre-championship days and with Steinbrenner agitating for instant gratification
. But Guidry sensed that the Yankees might have something special in this deeply religious man. He hoped they would keep the faith.

  “There are guys that you can just watch and know that they’re going to be special if given the opportunity,” he said. “And Mo with a baseball in his hand was like Rembrandt with a paintbrush.”

  When he noticed Steinbrenner lurking in the area one day while Rivera was throwing batting practice, Guidry offered his two cents, reminding the Boss of how impatient he had been with another young flamethrower and late bloomer.

  “Mr. Steinbrenner,” he said, “when you start making trades, do not include this kid. If you lose him, you’ll never win.”

  Steinbrenner nodded, thanked Guidry for the insight, and two years later tried to trade Rivera and Jorge Posada to the Cincinnati Reds for David Wells. Fortunately for him, the offer was refused. In 1997, Rivera inherited the closer’s role from John Wetteland. He then became the greatest closer that baseball has ever known.

  There was no other contemporary Yankee that Guidry was closer to than Rivera, no player he respected and appreciated more. He related to Rivera’s minimalist nature, how he had become one of the most understated superstars in the history of American team sports, a power pitcher who intimidated without threatening hitters or showing them up.

  His mesmerizing aura was based purely on performance in an era of wanton—and often rewarding—pomposity. When Rivera dispensed criticism or support for teammates, they always listened, because his words were never used frivolously. When he became the star of an advertising campaign for Canali, a high-end Italian clothing company, he did not suffer the fraternal clubhouse abuse he predicted he would. Even Swisher, the leading candidate for comic antagonist, gave him a pass.

  Deeply religious and family oriented, Rivera was popular with younger teammates and retired legends alike. They all respected his space, the way he carried himself and wore his pinstripes.

  “Mo is very special to me,” Guidry said. “I mean, he reminded me so much of myself when I first saw him.”

  It wasn’t just his velocity in relation to his physique, or that he was in his midtwenties when he reached the majors, or that Steinbrenner had tried to get rid of him. It was the way he conditioned himself, how beautifully he fielded his position, how much he made pitching synonymous with athleticism, as had Guidry.

  “I remember him in his twenties, when everyone else was twenty yards behind him when he was running,” Guidry said. Eighteen years Rivera’s senior, Guidry would tease him, “One of these days, you’re going to be just like I am—old.” And while in 2010 Rivera was still an extraordinarily dominant closer beyond age forty, Guidry watched him closely in spring training. He was taking it easier, shaking his head as the young kids blew by him. “You told me this would happen,” Rivera told Guidry. “Yeah, I remember.”

  Back home in Louisiana, on the couch in front of his flat-screen TV, Guidry watched a grounder scoot under Rivera’s glove one day, a play he would once have made effortlessly. Guidry dialed Steve Donohue’s cell phone and left a message for the assistant trainer. “Tell Mo I’m calling every time that happens from now on,” he said. “Tell him that’s what happens when you get old.”

  Guidry knew that Rivera would take it the right way, laughing it off for the good-natured gibe that it was. More than teammates, Guidry and Rivera were members of a grand social order. The core Yankees—Rivera, Jeter, Pettitte, and Posada—all belonged to that order, as did Bernie Williams, who adored Berra, along with others from the nineties nucleus. They marveled and were moved by the Berra-Guidry relationship and recognized the reciprocal nature of the generational bonding.

  “I’m pretty sure there was a time when Yogi took care of Gator, you know what I mean?” Jeter said, guessing correctly.

  When Brian Cashman, the longtime general manager who started as a front office intern in 1986, was asked which of the contemporary players reminded him most of Guidry and Berra, he cited one player, unhesitatingly. “In our clubhouse, the one guy who is most like them is Mo, because he sees the game the same way, as a family structure,” Cashman said. “Those guys are rare, far from the norm. They believe that taking care of one another and treating people the right way no matter how much success they’ve had is part of the job.”

  The more bats he broke with his classic split-fingered fastball, the more Rivera caught up on his Yankees history. He watched the videos, filled in the blanks of his Central American childhood. He became a regular stop on Berra’s clubhouse roaming, fascinated by the story behind Yogi’s fourteen-year absence and reemergence. Unless he was pressed, Rivera didn’t say a whole lot, but there was little he didn’t see.

  He took special note of the relationship between Berra and Guidry, watching them come and go over the years. “That is real love, something very special,” he said.

  From their first conversation on the back fields of Fort Lauderdale, Rivera’s friendship with Guidry also evolved as a subtext to Guidry and Berra’s relationship. Early every spring, when pitchers strengthen their arms with long tossing drills, Rivera typically chose Guidry as his partner, even as Guidry pushed sixty and his stamina began to fade. “I wouldn’t tell that son of a gun that I had to ice my arm every day,” Guidry said, stubborn to the point of pain.

  On the average day, he was good for about twenty long tosses right into Rivera’s chest before fatigue would set in. But Guidry’s throws lost steam, and fewer went where he wanted them to go. “So what would Mo do?” Guidry said. “He’d take a couple of steps forward to make it easier for me.”

  Just as Guidry took care of Berra on the golf course, Rivera made sure Guidry was not embarrassed on the ball field. He did it without having to be asked, because as Guidry said, “There are unspoken things, part of the camaraderie and trust.”

  And while Guidry wasn’t planning to be around spring training when he was eighty, he could imagine himself back at Yankee Stadium on some future Old-Timers’ Day, old and rickety, but still spry enough to climb the dugout steps and wave his cap once more to the crowd.

  Which younger Yankees legend would be perfectly positioned to watch out for him as he planted a foot on that first step? Who would remind him to go slow, as Guidry had done for Berra, standing guard in the years after his return? He couldn’t think of any man he would rather have save him from a fall than Mariano Rivera.

  Yogi had paid Nick Swisher a well-timed favor in giving the small but consequential batting tip. Now it was Swisher’s turn to return it. Unfortunately, he nearly overslept.

  On the morning of June 6, 2011, Swisher blinked open his eyes in the bedroom of his Manhattan high-rise apartment in a state of disorientation that comes with jet lag. Having plopped his head on the pillow about six hours earlier after a cross-country flight from Southern California, Swisher wasn’t quite sure what day it was, what planet he was on, or why he was awake in the first place.

  But the clock he was staring at read 9:25, and somehow that set off an alarm in his head. “Oh, shit,” he said. “Yogi’s gonna kick my ass!”

  Swisher jumped out of bed and yelled for his wife, actress JoAnna Garcia, to come to his aid. He suddenly remembered that the limo he had arranged for would be arriving in five minutes.

  “Honey,” he asked his wife of six months, “can you lay out my clothes for me? I got a car coming. I can’t miss Yogi’s thing.”

  Swisher made a beeline for the shower, not even bothering to lather up.

  What goes around comes around. Swisher had agreed to appear at Berra’s 2011 charity golf tournament weeks earlier, despite the fact that it was on the morning after the Yankees had completed a West Coast swing with a Sunday afternoon game against the Angels in Anaheim and a long flight home.

  Monday was a day off for the Yankees before the start of a series against the Red Sox at Yankee Stadium, an opportunity to sleep in, spend a lazy day in front of the television, and have a quiet dinner. But when Berra had made the rounds in the clubhouse, handing out invi
tations to the event as he customarily did, Swisher had promised to attend, no ifs, ands, or buts. “See, it wasn’t about me, it was about him,” Swisher said. “He took the time to come into the clubhouse and personally ask.”

  How do you say no to your appointed surrogate grandfather? In the months after Berra had told him to move up in the batter’s box, Swisher had stepped up and shown Berra how much his friendship meant.

  Swisher had flown his father in from West Virginia to play a round of golf and to formally introduce him to Berra at Yogi’s 2010 tournament. He had invited Yogi and Carmen to his wedding in Palm Beach, Florida, in early December (the Berras couldn’t attend), and months later he had asked Berra to be his presenter when he’d received an award at the annual Thurman Munson Awards Dinner in Manhattan.

  There was no shortage of familiar names and faces at Berra’s 2011 outing, enough to make it what Rudy Giuliani, one of the first to arrive, called “the best golf outing of the year with the best guy in sports.” In his first year of retirement, Andy Pettitte flew up from Texas. Joe Torre showed up with his arm in a sling after surgery and rode around in a cart, catching up with the likes of Ralph Branca, Mike Torrez, Ron Blomberg, Rick Cerone, David Cone, Bud Harrelson, Mickey Rivers, and a few athletes from other sports who lived in the area.

  Guidry, of course, blew in from Louisiana, entering with a flourish of sarcasm, demanding to know if his portly ex-teammate, Cerone the catcher, had ever been acquainted with a salad. But as much as Guidry could be the life of the party, he kept an eye out for Berra. When the call from the loudspeaker came for the golfers to descend from the breakfast terrace to the putting green, Guidry made sure he was waiting by the stairs to help Berra down. The Florida rules were in effect in New Jersey, too.

  That was also about the time that Swisher burst in, apologizing to anyone who would listen for being late. Berra was so thrilled that he’d come, he didn’t so much as tap his watch.