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Talking baseball with Yogi Berra

March
2

It’s March 2 and the best moment of spring training has come and gone.

Tyler Kepner of the Times, Anthony McCarron of the Daily News and myself were standing in the clubhouse talking about catchers when Yogi Berra walked by. We asked Yogi how old he was when he moved to the outfield.

Twenty minutes later, all the writers were in a semi-circle around Yogi and he was telling some great stories.

Yogi said that he feels his greatest accomplishment was striking out only 12 times in 597 at-bats in 1950. He had a .383 OBP that season and caught 148 of the 155 games the Yankees played. He said he regularly used to catch both ends of the Sunday doubleheader.

“Casey used to come up to me in the eighth inning of the second game and ask me if I wanted to come out,” he said. “I said, ‘I might as well finish the game now.’ ”

Yogi talked about playing left field in Game 7 of the 1960 World Series and watching Bill Mazeroski’s home run sail over his head.

“I thought it was going to hit the wall,” he said.

“You’re still waiting,” said George King of the Post.

“Tell me about it,” Yogi replied.

According to Yogi, the Yankees should have won that game. But Jim Coates failed to cover first base in the top of the eighth inning and Roberto Clemente reached on an infield single. “It should have been the third out,” he said. “Then Hal Smith hit a three-run homer.”

Yogi told us about mentoring Craig Biggio when he was with the Houston Astros and how much he’s looking forward to playing in the pro-am at the Arnold Palmer Invitational in Orlando in a few weeks. He’d like to play with Tiger Woods (”a good kid,” Yogi says) but he likes to play too early in the morning.

I asked Yogi what he thought of the young catchers in camp. “They’re good,” he said. “They’re all so big.”

Yogi will be 82 in May and he’s sharp as a tack. Ron Guidry stopped by as our conversation was breaking up. He’s cooking dinner for Yogi tonight and claims he’s going to make frogs legs.

“Oh, boy,” Yogi said. “I don’t know about that.”

God bless him, the man is a American treasure.

UPDATE: Forgot to mention this before. Ed Price of the Ledger asked Yogi what he thought about Yankee Stadium coming down. “I never played there,” Yogi said. “It’s a different stadium.”

As for Shea Stadium, Yogi laughed. “They had rats as big as horses there,” he said.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 2nd, 2008 at 1:07 pm by Peter Abraham.
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11 Responses to “Talking baseball with Yogi Berra”

  1. Yanks26

    All I can say is priceless. This will definitely make up for some of the downtime in spring training.

  2. Rebecca--Optimist Prime--Mission 2708

    I think an ‘American Treasure’ is an understatement.

  3. MikeEff-Shelley at First

    that made my day, thanks

  4. Say it ain't so

    Yogi could have done stand-up comedy if that whole baseball thing never worked out for him :P

  5. Rebecca--Optimist Prime--Mission 2708

    ooh, they’re wearing pinstripes today

  6. Ashley

    Yogi is the best!!
    Thanks for sharing his story!!

  7. Nettles Punched Bill Lee

    Great Story.

    Yogi has stories for days, and I love that!

    Such a wealth of information.

  8. Little Chip

    Yogi is my all time favorite Yankee. I love the guy!

  9. Cajun Yankee

    I didn’t grow up watching the players from Yogi’s era, but it’s good to see such a Yankee Legend and an American Icon still living and in great health.

    Love to hear the old war stories from the great ones, even though the stories probably change a little bit and get better as time passes on. The Yogiisms are a classic as well.

    I can just taste those frog legs Guidry cooked up. He should have an annual crawfish boil for the players/media every ST. Got to get your hands on some of those Pete.

    Geaux Yankees!

  10. Spidur

    Awesome stuff, Pete. Thanks for sharing!

  11. Jim Russell

    It was pretty funny to read Kepner’s almost word-for-word rewrite of the same story a bit later:

    http://bats.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/02/still-yogi-after-all-these-years/

    Let’s see if McCarron follows suit.

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Peter AbrahamPeter Abraham is the Yankees beat writer for The Journal News and LoHud.com. E-mail me at pabraham@lohud.com

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