Lorenzo Pietro “Yogi” Berra ranks as one of the most curious cases in sports: a Hall of Fame baseball player better known to today’s fans as the most quotable American since Mark Twain or as a foil for the Aflac duck, take your pick.
That fact obviously got under the skin of Allen Barra, who attempts to set the record straight in his biography, “Yogi Berra: Eternal Yankee.”
The author pushes two arguments. The first: that Berra, a 15-time all-star with three Most Valuable Player awards, who led the Yankees to 10 World Series championships, is the greatest catcher who ever lived. The second: that the man’s malapropisms and overall persona of goofy affability has left him criminally underrated by even aficionados of the game.
Of course, the charm of such famous head-scratcher quotes as “Ninety percent of baseball is mental, the other half is physical,” can’t help but keep people from overlooking a .285 lifetime batting average at the sport’s toughest position.
As Barra notes in the introduction, “His life and career are a virtual cutaway view of the game of baseball in the 20th century. And yet, the question persists. Do we take Yogi Berra seriously enough? And the answer, I think, is no.”
But he leaves readers with a far deeper appreciation of the craft and cunning that Berra, now 84, brought to the game. His research is thorough, nearly to a fault.
He does an outstanding job limning Berra’s early life in St. Louis. The son of Italian immigrants, Berra left school in the eighth grade. Nifty trivia: The bullish-built Berra was a gifted boxer in his youth and served in the Navy during the D-Day invasion.
Bogging the narrative down at times is minutiae about contract negotiations that all but Yankees die-hards — or the writers of the next Berra bio — will wish to skim over.
Still, the author is on record as wanting to create the most thorough account of the Yogi Berra story to date. He has done that through meticulous dissection of the source material and the engaging storytelling that also served him well in “The Last Coach: A Life of Paul Bear Bryant.”
The heart of the book courses through the 1950s, when Berra anchored a team of superstars: Mickey Mantle, Whitey Ford, Phil Rizzuto. Crusty old manager Casey Stengel thought enough of his even-keeled catcher’s ability to handle young players that Berra served as the assistant manager.
Barra gives us a virtual play-by-play of Don Larsen’s perfect game in the 1956 World Series that is marvelous in its detail and insight, and we also see the unraveling of the Yankee dynasty that culminated in the 1964 World Series loss to the St. Louis Cardinals and National League-style “small ball,” a style that emphasized clutch hitting and savvy base running. (Which in fact were among Berra’s gifts.)
And we see Berra in his post-player years, where he managed the Mets and the Yankees, famously running afoul of George Steinbrenner in the latter job.
No Berra bio would be complete without a look at the numerous “Yogi-isms” we all know — or think we know — whether we follow baseball or not. Despite his claim that “I really didn’t say all the things I said,” The New Yorker magazine in a 1991 story noted that “Hardly anybody would quarrel . . . that Winston Churchill has been replaced by Yogi Berra as the favorite source of quotations.”
Whether you’re a Yankees fan or not — and Allen Barra grew up a Giants fan — this book is nearly as good as a day at the ballpark. It’s a worthy study of a great player who also ranks as a good man.
William Porter: 303-954-1877 or wporter@denverpost.com
NONFICTION
Yogi Berra: Eternal Yankee
by Allen Barra
$27.95
The Bronx sage
At the end of the book there’s a clever appendix, titled “Yogi Berra and the Great Minds: A Comparative Study,” where the author juxtaposes a quote from a famous public thinker with a Yogi-ism. Among the gems:
“This is the best of all possible worlds.” — Voltaire”Even if the world were perfect, it wouldn’t be.”— Berra
“It is human to err; and the only final and deadly error, among all our errors, is denying that we have ever erred.”
— G.K. Chesterton
“We made too many wrong mistakes.”— Berra”The distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”— Albert Einstein
“We may be lost but we’re making good time.”— Berra
