PHOTOGRAPH BY BERNARD HOFFMAN / THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION / GETTY IMAGES

For decades, any mention of his name made you smile. Yogi Berra was great and sweet, a bent, short, famous old guy with a gap-toothed smile. Raising an arm again to our cheering while he made his way to the plate or the mound for another pregame ceremonial moment, with Whitey and Moose and Phil and the rest awaiting him, he tapped the syrupy strain of affection that tastes also of Elvis and Goofy and Chekhov. When we sat down again, somebody in the next seat would be saying, “When you get to a fork in the road, take it,” or “It gets late early out there,” or some other Yogi-ism that would keep the candied moment going. Berra, who died yesterday, played for the Yankees for eighteen seasons and the Mets for one, compiling a .285 batting average, with three hundred and fifty-eight home runs and fourteen hundred and thirty runs batted in. His postseason marks were equally impressive—seventy-one hits, thirty-nine R.B.I.s, and twelve homers—but even these figures feel legendary in sum and slightly distance us from the kind of player and man he was. There is a hovering temptation, for instance, to dismiss his World Series figures a little, because they depend so much on the Yankees’ repeated presence in the classic. But this is patronizing and unfair. Given his chances, Yogi hit them out of sight. The Times’s splendid obituary, by Bruce Weber, does the right thing. It carefully compares Berra’s over-all lifetime stats as a catcher to those of a prior Hall of Fame Yankees catcher, Bill Dickey, and shows, I think, that Yogi was the better backstop. It also brings in Johnny Bench, and clarifies our thinking about the best catcher ever.

I can almost bring Yogi back in memory, up at the plate, powerfully round and thick and bearish in his work-smudged pinstripes, with his head (in a cap, not a helmet) tipped a little, as if to give him more height while he stares out at the pitcher. The pitch is up, out of the strike zone, but Berra slashes at it anyway—it’s up by his eyes, because the force of his swing has dropped him down—and he drives it distantly. He runs hard, startling you again with his speed and strength, and rounds first base at full speed, leaning sideways like a racing car, then pulls up in a shower of dirt and scrambles back to the bag. I’m on my feet, yelling and laughing with everyone else. Yogi, Yogi—there's no one else like him. The laughter isn’t sweet; it’s all wonder.

I think of him behind the plate as well: a thinking bookend, a stump in charge. When he straightens up and steps forward, pointing to an infielder or giving his pitcher an extra breath or two, his pads and mask make him even stubbier. His return flips to the mounded pitcher and his powerful pegs to second against a base-stealer always have a little uphill tilt.

I remember Yogi one morning in 1946, when he played center field for the Yanks in their first home opener after the war. (He’d been in the Navy and won a Purple Heart for his service in Europe, and he had got back the summer before to play his first few games as a major leaguer.) Back from my war, too, I was in the stands that day and, like everyone else there, exulted in the idea of years' more baseball to come. I can’t recall who won, but believe that Yogi had a rough time of it out there, even falling down once. The Yankees would figure out the right place for him in time; you could see that.

The Yanks played in eight World Series between 1949 and 1957, facing the Brooklyn Dodgers five times and the New York Giants once in that span: fourteen home-town teams for us, a regular thing. This divided but glorious possessiveness is hard to imagine, a time of baseball by radio, with the late news spilling out of bars and taxis as you walked by, and names—Peewee, Willie, Eddie, Allie, Mickey, Sandy, Yogi—that you heard almost more often than those of folks in the family. Games and pitches and at-bats dim and disappear, replaced by photographs and ever-available televised clichés: Yogi nose to nose with the umpire Bill Summers after Jackie Robinson has stolen home, skidding under his tag in the 1955 World Series; Yogi jumping into Allie Reynolds’s arms after he dropped Ted Williams’s foul fly ball, then caught the next one, almost in the exact same spot, to save Reynolds’s no-hitter. He ran out for another leaping hug-up after Don Larsen’s World Series perfecto, in 1956, this time adding a leg wrap.

Berra retired as a player in 1963 but became the Yankees’ manager in 1964, acquiring a sudden seriousness that we weren’t prepared for. (The Yankees went 99–63.) He was fired after losing the World Series that year to the Cardinals, whose manager, Johnny Keane, weirdly also lost his job.* Then, in another Bronxian twist, Keane was named as Yogi’s replacement. Berra went over to the Mets as a coach and became their manager from 1972 to 1975. Back at the Yankee helm in 1984, he got to manage one of his sons, Dale Berra, an infielder. After just sixteen games, he got canned, in spite of a guarantee of a three-year tenure, another victim of the owner’s overbearing impatience. Berra did not set foot in Yankee Stadium for the next fourteen years, despite many Georgian pleadings, supplying character and silence where both were in short supply. He opened a museum near his home, in Montclair, and went on with his long, happy marriage to Carmen. (She died in 2014.) We smiled and missed him, and made him into a funny saint.

*An earlier version of this sentence misidentified when George Steinbrenner became the owner of the Yankees.