IF HE hadn’t been good at baseball, Yogi Berra might still have been working in the shoe factory in St Louis. Or Ruggeri’s restaurant. Or that menswear store. He might have been president, except that he couldn’t be president, owing mostly to his way of breaking up the English a little bit, and hating to make a speech. He wouldn’t have been doing too good, because he didn’t like school, except for recess, and he didn’t like to work. His father kept telling him, “Bring that pay-cheque home!”, when all he wanted was to play ball.

Not basketball; he was too short for that. But all the rest—softball, soccer, hitting bottle caps with broomsticks and, way above the rest, baseball. There he turned out so talented at hitting and catching that he never had to worry much about nickels and dimes again. He just had fun playing ball all summer, from “when the first robin builds a nest…until the geese fly south.” Where else could you work three hours and get that kind of money? “You got to be very careful if you don’t know where you’re going, because you might not get there,” he said once. At 14, he definitely knew where he was going.

The stats said it all, or most of it. He appeared in 14 World Series and won ten of them; played 19 seasons in Major League Baseball from 1946-65; made the All-Star team in 15 straight seasons and was a World Series champion ten times, which added up to more times a champion than anybody else; was one of only four players to hit at least 300 career home runs while playing catcher; and as a catcher (like the wicket-keeper in cricket), threw out nearly half of opposition base-stealers, an amazing feat. In 1972 he was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame, which really wasn’t bad for an Italian-American boy from The Hill in St Louis who’d been told he would never make it into the major leagues.

What the stats didn’t show was his presence on the field. As a batter he looked like hell but no one competed more, especially in the clutch, the last innings of a game. He loved to hit any ball at all, fair or foul: “If I can see it, it’s a good ball.” As a catcher he’d perfected the threatening crouch, squat and ugly as a rock. Behind the mask he would be chatting away to annoy the hitter (“When you going fishing this year?”), or throwing dirt on their shoes; and the second the ball left the pitcher’s hand, he would be darting up zippy as a cat and flying through the air to tag every man he could before they reached base. He maybe couldn’t hit and think at the same time, but as a catcher his mind would be spinning like a computer to out-plot every opposing guy on the field. As he said, “Ninety per cent of the game is half mental.”

Eighteen of his seasons were with the New York Yankees in their glory days. (The other was with the Mets, across town.) At one point he was rated the Yankees’ best player next to the great Joe DiMaggio. (“Was DiMaggio fast?” he was asked once, and answered, “No, he just got there in time.”) Putting on the Yankee pinstripes was the best thing he ever did—or perhaps second-best, after catching a perfect game, where no runner reached base, in 1956, and jumping like a baby into the pitcher’s arms. The St Louis Cardinals had wanted him first, but offered him only $250 and, though he was poor, he was better than that. The Yankees gave him $500, so in 1943 he signed for them and learned, especially, how to catch. He loved New York, and could wax poetical about the evening shadows creeping across left field in Yankee Stadium: “It gets late early out there.”

Pearls of wisdom

His fame came as much from these remarks as from baseball. He really didn’t say everything he said, he said; some of the quips were made up by friends and sly reporters. He didn’t mean to do it, and wondered why his lovely wife Carmen would scold him when they popped up. Even crazier was the idea that he was some sort of sage, when “In baseball, you don’t know nothing.” The nickname “Yogi” came from the way he sat on the ground between innings in St Louis, with his legs crossed and sad-looking; he “never did no exercises”, yogic or whatever, and before games just took a vitamin pill, a Dunkin’ Donut and a coffee. If he’d meditated going up to the plate, he said, he would have played worse. All the same some folk claimed that his way with space (“When you come to a fork in the road, take it”), time (“What’s the time? You mean right now?”) and life in general (“If the world were perfect, it wouldn’t be”) were real pearls of wisdom.

What seemed wisest to him was to love his family and thank God for all the fun he had. He didn’t want more. His big house in Montclair, New Jersey was “nothing but rooms”; he happily drove a small Corvair rather than a Cadillac, and carefully made the bed every morning. As manager of the Mets, coach of the Houston Astros and, briefly, manager of the Yankees he was a pretty good handler of teams, though some said not enough of a leader. That wasn’t his style. His one bad patch in baseball—a 14-year cooling with the Yankees after he was fired as manager in 1985 by George Steinbrenner—was because he couldn’t stand to be put down by a tyrant.

That wasn’t what baseball was about. Baseball was just a wonderful thing to do. If he hadn’t woken up to it, he would still be sleeping. And if he had to come back to life again, “I’d like to be a ballplayer.”