Yogi Berra wasn't quite 18 years old when he left St. Louis to play professional baseball in 1943. He never really lived here again, though you wouldn't know it to hear people talk. Yogi became an American icon. When sports fans here explain their hometown to others, if he's not in the first paragraph, it doesn't take long to get to him.
Lawrence Peter Berra, known to his family and friends as "Lawdie" and to the world as "Yogi," died Tuesday at 90 near his longtime home in Montclair, N.J. Though you wouldn't know it here, he'd lived in New Jersey for his entire adult life, since coming home from World War II in 1946 to play for the Newark Bears and then, for the next 17 years, the New York Yankees.
The Yankees won the American League pennant 14 times in those 17 years and the World Series 10 times. No other player ever played for more championship teams, nor came to bat more often in more World Series. In his heyday, no catcher ever combined offense and defense as well.
Did we mention he was from St. Louis? That he grew the fourth-born son of Pietro and Paulina Berra, Milanese immigrants? That he ran with Joe Garagiola, whose stories of growing up with Yogi helped launch a broadcasting career following his time as an MLB catcher? That he never went to high school and, had it not been for his almost freakish abilities (for he was short and squat and didn't look like much of an athlete), might have spent his life driving a truck or laying brick?
Nobody looked like Yogi did, nor talked like him either. Reading the long list of "Yogi-isms," you could get the idea he was glib. But if you waited for him to be "Yogi Berra," you'd be disappointed. He was more like a guy from the corner who'd throw something into the conversation every now and then, and now and then it would be strange.
You could get the idea, talking to him, that he wasn't very bright, but his instincts and shrewdness as a catcher and in seven years as a manager belied that. And the things he said usually made an odd sort of sense. You know what? It really isn't over till it's over.
He was smart enough to realize that his public image, though entirely different from who he was, worked for him. Books and businesses and endorsements came his way and he made a very nice living.
Maybe it was another quotable Missouri native, Casey Stengel of Kansas City, who managed most of those great Yankee teams that Berra played on, who put it best: Upon taking over as manager of the Yankees in 1949, Casey said of his catcher, "Mr. Berra is a very strange fellow of very remarkable abilities."
This editorial appeared on St. Louis Post-Dispatch and was distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.