Who is now the Greatest Living Yankee?

For 16 years, Yogi Berra wore that honor, and he wore it well, and humbly. He would show up in spring training and patter around the clubhouse, a little old man amid the modern-day behemoths.

Berra, who died Tuesday at the age of 90, seemed most comfortable with the Guidrys and Gossages, spring advisers from more recent glorious eras. Presumably, most of the new breed, crowded into narrow aisles of lockers, had some clue that this was the very same Lawrence Peter Berra who once terrorized pitchers from April to October, swinging at anything that moved.

(I have a friend, Big Al, who likes to torment me in midwinter with a totally unsolicited email that asks, “Just how great was Yogalah, anyway?” Sometimes, just to be cruel, Big Al reminds me that Berra hit eight of his 12 World Series homers against my Brooklyn Dodgers.)

On no other North American sports franchise is there the same cachet to the hypothetical ranking of Greatest Living. Undoubtedly fans and writers perform the same mental exercise for the Montreal Canadiens or the Boston Celtics or the Dallas Cowboys, but the Yankees lead the league in monuments and plaques and retired numbers and special “days,” some of it blatantly extraneous, to sell tickets and memorabilia.