Driving Mr. Yogi Page 11

  The relay from Pee Wee Reese to Gil Hodges at first base doubled off McDougald. The Yankees mustered only one more hit after that, falling to their Brooklyn rivals for the only time in seven World Series the two teams played between 1941 and 1956. Zimmer never let Berra forget his role in bringing about Brooklyn’s finest hour.

  “If not for me, you’d have been a hero,” he told Berra.

  Berra had an effective comeback. “We got even the next year,” he said, referring to the 1956 World Series, which featured Don Larsen’s perfect game and two generally overlooked home runs by Berra to lead the Yankees to a 9–0 victory in another game seven.

  The way Berra and Zimmer carried on reminded Guidry of the old comedy team Abbott and Costello. “I ate that up, couldn’t get enough,” he said.

  In Guidry’s view, the best stories came from the days when New York could almost count on a subway series—seven times in a ten-year period that began in Berra’s first full season, 1947—six against Brooklyn and one against the New York Giants. Considering New York’s love affair with baseball, he could only imagine how intense that must have been.

  “No days off, but what I liked is that we didn’t have to travel—fifteen or twenty minutes, and we were there,” Berra told him, referring to the team’s bus ride to Ebbets Field—the slight time exaggeration beyond the point. (Even by subway, it took longer to travel from Yankee Stadium to Brooklyn.) “Everyone thinks we hated the Dodgers. We didn’t. We wanted to beat them, but we got along fine. We barnstormed in the off-season, did appearances together. We were friends off the field.”

  To prove his point, Berra described a photo on display in his museum. He is wearing street clothes, congratulating Podres in the Dodgers’ clubhouse after game seven. He especially wanted Guidry to know how much he admired Jackie Robinson, who in turn used to say that Berra was the Dodgers’ most feared Yankee. Berra also forged a friendship with Dodgers catcher Roy Campanella, visiting him during the off-season at his liquor store in Harlem.

  Hearing Berra and Zimmer reminisce and being something of a traditionalist himself, Guidry was left with a growing appreciation for when World Series games were played in the sunshine in about two hours’ time, when the front pages of ten New York newspapers screamed the latest results and radio was still the dominant electronic medium, leaving so much to the imagination. The city came to a virtual standstill, Berra told him. “That’s all everybody talked about,” he said.

  By October 2000, the now rare occurrence of a subway series had the New York media bathing in nostalgia, even as swaths of a city with large minority and immigrant populations wondered what the fuss was all about. Many could not identify with Willie (Mays), Mickey (Mantle), and the Duke (Snider). They knew nothing of the long-vanished Ebbets Field and Polo Grounds. But for those working the angle of postwar New York, Berra was the must-get interview. Reporters and television crews flocked to his museum to ask about Larsen, Robinson, and the rest.

  Berra was psyched, nagging Dave Kaplan, often his driving companion, to leave at 1:00 P.M. for a game scheduled to begin a few minutes after 7:00. “Let’s go now—it’s a good time,” he’d say, checking his watch. “We’ll beat the traffic.”

  Berra would arrive so early that he would pass through a near-empty clubhouse and head straight for Joe Torre’s office to turn on the lights before the manager had even stepped into the building. When his clubhouse schmoozing was done, he would head up to George Steinbrenner’s box to watch the game, though Berra inevitably preferred being off in a corner by himself—muttering under his breath when the Yankees failed to deliver a runner in scoring position—to rubbing elbows with the assortment of invited glitterati.

  He would typically slip out by the fifth or sixth inning, not because he was tired or bored but to beat the traffic and make it home in about twenty-five minutes, so that he could catch the last few innings in the quiet of his den, just as he had done for fourteen years. There, safely out of earshot of those who wouldn’t understand that he was just an old-school lifer and hopeless Yankees fan venting his frustration over what he was watching, he could complain to his heart’s content and swear that “if I was playing now I’d hit .400.” If Carmen or one of their sons was nearby, they’d nod a couple of times and pay him no mind.

  The 2000 World Series itself was nothing remarkable, with the Yankees winning in five games for their third straight title and fourth in five years. Derek Jeter was the MVP. Perhaps the sweetest moment of the series was with two outs in the fifth inning of game four, when a diminished David Cone threw his last pitch as a Yankee after being summoned by Torre to face Mets slugger Mike Piazza.

  It had been only a year and change since his perfect game on Yogi Berra Day, but Cone was no longer in the rotation. He would forever be indebted to Torre for calling on him at all to replace the southpaw Denny Neagle, who was none too pleased to be yanked when he was one out away from a World Series victory.

  At thirty-seven, Cone was pitching mostly on fumes. The best he could muster against Piazza was a mideighties fastball. But the pitch had just enough tail to get inside Piazza’s big swing and cause him to pop up. Cone walked triumphantly off the mound and later would call the cameo “one of the great highlights of my career, without a doubt.”

  Having starred for the Mets in the eighties and the Yankees in the nineties, Cone had a better understanding than most players of what it meant to play in a subway series. “I was in the bullpen kind of like a kid looking through the glass at Shea wondering if I was going to get to play, almost wallowing in self-pity,” he said. “You know, I had always dreamed about that, a subway series. Even though we played each other during the regular season, a World Series was different.”

  He knew how much so because he was one of the Yankees who had made it his business the previous spring and during the season to have a running dialogue with the man who owned ten World Series rings. Berra wore only the one he earned in 1953—New York 4, Brooklyn 2—because it represented a record fifth straight championship.

  One day Cone asked him, “Didn’t you guys ever get tired of beating the Dodgers?”

  “Hell, no,” Berra said, repeating himself for emphasis and looking surprised that Cone would even ask such a thing.

  On the morning of September 11, 2001, Berra was on his way home after a workout on the treadmill and light weights at the gym. When he turned on the radio, he heard devastating news: planes had flown into the Twin Towers in New York. The Pentagon had also been hit. The nation was under attack.

  From the crest of a hill on Bloomfield Avenue at the Montclair-Verona border, through the windshield of his red Jaguar, Berra now knew why smoke was darkening the sky over lower Manhattan, about fifteen miles to the east.

  “How could these people do this to such innocent people?” he asked Carmen when he arrived home and watched in horror as the towers fell.

  She didn’t have an answer. No one did. The horror of 9/11 hit home for Berra, who had golfed with one of the World Trade Center victims at a local club. He had family connections to a few others who were lost. He openly wept at a funeral when he saw the young children there, senselessly shorn of a parent. He wished he could do something; he wanted to help. When a call came a few weeks later from the office of the mayor, Rudy Giuliani, he got his chance.

  In an effort to restore the city’s image and reignite the tourism industry, Giuliani reached out to several New York icons—Robert De Niro, Woody Allen, Billy Crystal, and his all-time favorite baseball player—to appear in a series of public-service commercials. The spots played on incongruity, with Berra cast as the conductor of the New York Philharmonic, all gussied up and gesticulating wildly before turning to the camera to ask, “Who in the heck is this guy Phil Harmonic?”

  In the weeks after the attack, Berra was among the many athletes and celebrities who quietly accommodated numerous requests for photos, autographs, and even phone messages to widows and children. He took to wearing an American flag on the lapel of his sp
orts jacket. When old baseball friends from around the country—Guidry included—checked in to say they were feeling New York’s pain, Berra wound up consoling them, sharing the sense of togetherness that had spread throughout the region. The Yankees, he assured them, were helping. They were going to play, and they were going to win.

  In a matter of weeks, the baseball playoffs again came to the city, but with an altered subtext of how America identified with the Yankees. This time they were not the payroll-bloated bullies. They were victims, or representatives of victims, wearing caps that honored fallen firemen and police officers.

  But when they dropped the first two games of the American League Division Series to the Oakland A’s at Yankee Stadium, it looked as if the much-needed diversion of postseason baseball would be short-lived. Heading out west for game three, Torre reached back for a little spiritual help from the man he perceived as a good-luck charm. He asked Berra for a different cap—one with his trademark saying, IT AIN’T OVER ’TIL IT’S OVER—that was marketed and sold by his sons.

  Torre had the “NYPD” logo stitched into the side of the cap and wore it to every batting practice and pregame press conference for the remainder of October—and into November. The Yankees honored the prophet Berra and the fighting spirit of the city with a stirring comeback against the A’s.

  Mike Mussina had the assignment of starting game three and keeping the Yankees alive. This was Mussina’s first season with the club; he wore number 35 and would never forget his introduction to Berra after he was helped into his new jersey at the press conference to formally announce his signing.

  “You got my number,” Berra told Mussina.

  Mussina, a Stanford man and New York Times crossword puzzle connoisseur, knew his famous baseball numbers. But Yogi Berra—35? He was dumbfounded.

  “I wore thirty-five my rookie year, 1947,” Berra told him.

  This was one piece of trivia that Mussina didn’t know.

  “Wow, really?” he said, already feeling better about his decision to become a Yankee.

  In Oakland, Mussina was locked in a pitchers’ duel with Barry Zito, leading 1–0 in the bottom of the seventh inning. With two outs and Jeremy Giambi on first base, Terrence Long hit a drive into the right-field corner. It appeared that Giambi, not a fast runner, would score easily when the right fielder, Shane Spencer, missed the cutoff man with his throw. But Derek Jeter, sprinting across the diamond in the vicinity of the first-base line, suddenly had the ball cradled in his midsection and somehow shoveled it to catcher Jorge Posada, who tagged a stunned Giambi as he tried to jump over the tag instead of sliding around it.

  Jeter’s intervention was instantly hailed as one of the great improvisational plays in postseason history, but he refused credit for his intuitive positioning. He said the idea of stationing the shortstop near the first-base line on balls hit to deep right field was Don Zimmer’s. Berra was right: Yankees young and old were pitching in.

  Jeter’s play preserved the victory and was the pivotal moment of the best-of-five series. The Yankees proceeded to take out the Seattle Mariners—winners of 116 games during the regular season—in the best-of-seven championship series in five games.

  But it was their ninth-inning rallies against the Arizona Diamondbacks—astonishing because they occurred on consecutive World Series nights—that would do more to create a joyous soundtrack in a heartbroken city than anything else. Their resolve was pitch-perfect in the aftermath of 9/11, and so riveting were games four and five that even Berra didn’t dare leave Yankee Stadium early.

  “I don’t remember the stadium ever being so loud—the building was shaking,” he said when Guidry—who of course was watching in Louisiana—asked the following spring what those nights were like.

  For the sake of the city’s psyche, if not rabid Yankees fans, it was almost as if the series ended when Alfonso Soriano singled in Chuck Knoblauch in the twelfth inning of game five. When play shifted back to Arizona, the Yankees were blown out in game six and lost game seven excruciatingly, with Mariano Rivera on the mound, three outs away from a fourth straight World Series victory.

  That it happened far away in the middle of a desert, and with the gaping wound in lower Manhattan still smoking, made it easy for Berra to put the loss in perspective. As far as he was concerned, the Yankees had risen to the occasion, done what they had needed to do.

  In the years to follow, it would become a pattern—a newsreel of breathtaking postseason games but no World Series victory for a franchise that insisted that no season could be considered a success without a championship. But there was always their storied past to draw on, always someone from another decade to bring back, to keep the fans feeling nostalgic and to send a subliminal message to the new, ringless Yankees: the same ceremonial salute will be waiting for you someday if you give us the championships we crave.

  Ron Guidry’s day in the Yankee Stadium sun occurred on August 23, 2003. When he realized that the ceremony was not just to retire his number but also to grant him permanent residency in Monument Park, the most hallowed of Yankee Stadium neighborhoods, with his good friend Yogi and all the other franchise greats, he began to cry.

  Bonnie Guidry always believed the Yankees would retire her husband’s number, if only because they had never let anyone else wear it after he retired. But when the call came with the news that the organization wanted to do more, she decided to let it be a surprise. She swore her three children to secrecy, and somehow they managed to keep quiet.

  Guidry walked into the stadium that day thinking the ceremony would be a routine acknowledgment that he had done with number 49 what Pete Sheehy had told him to do: “Make it famous.”

  Former teammates were on hand to present him with a variety of gifts—including a tractor that rolled down the warning track in right field. Reggie Jackson handed him the framed 49 jersey. And then a drape with the interlocking “NY” logo fell away, and Guidry realized that the bronze plaque that had been hidden behind it was for him. His face turned pale. He bowed his head and wiped away tears.

  “Really, I would have been happy if they had just given me my jersey and said nobody’s wearing it no more,” he said. “But when I saw the plaque, it was like, Jesus Christ. It never dawned on me, the ultimate compliment. That’s when it really hit me that I was going to be out there with Yogi and everyone.”

  After the legends Berra, Ford, Rizzuto, and Mattingly gathered around him for a photo, Guidry told reporters that he never believed he had done enough “to deserve what happened to me today.” Most scoffed at the thought, knowing that his 154–67 record between 1977 and 1985 reflected a lengthy period of dominance that compared, at least on a percentage basis, to the six years of Sandy Koufax’s career in which he went 129–47, which eventually won him election to the Hall of Fame.

  “Heck, Gator won twenty-five games one year and helped us win two championships,” Berra said. “He was pretty darn good, pitched real good in the postseason, too. He was as good a fielder as any pitcher I ever saw.”

  Guidry, Berra pointed out, was such a crowd pleaser that he started the trend of two-strike clapping at the stadium in anticipation of the strikeout. In other words, in Berra’s opinion, he didn’t have to apologize for his ticket to Monument Park.

  The Hall of Fame was another matter, though. As a member of the Veterans Committee, Berra had helped his good friend Phil Rizzuto get elected in 1994. The committee voted on players whose eligibility for the normal nominating process—in which sportswriters and other media members presided over elections—had long since expired. Berra was so elated when the veterans voted Rizzuto in, he called the Scooter at home and told him, simply: “You’re in.” He also believed that Rizzuto deserved the honor. But as a general rule, he didn’t enjoy commenting on players’ credentials, not wanting to sound critical of anyone—even sportswriters, who were often convenient targets for a verbal thrashing. (He happened to have one in the family—his granddaughter Lindsay, who had begun reporting for ESPN T
he Magazine in 1999.)

  So on the subject of whether Guidry deserved to make the Hall of Fame someday, Berra was content to say that he would have had a better chance if he had reached the majors sooner than he did. “He would’ve had a lot more wins,” he reasoned. “That’s a lot of what the writers decide on.”

  Guidry never gave much thought to what might have been, only what was, and in 2003 that was more than good enough for him. Eight years later, in the summer of 2011, his voice still choked with emotion as he recalled how Berra had patted him gently on the shoulder that day, telling him how much he deserved the honor but advising him to keep his speech short, because “no one wants to hear you go on and on.”

  In the ensuing years, the gesture would mean even more as their relationship continued to grow. Guidry loved the idea of them being together in Monument Park forever. “He’s out there. I’m out there,” Guidry said. “It just can’t get any better than that.”

  More than anyone in New York, Berra knew that even when things looked bleakest for the Yankees against the Red Sox, it just meant the inevitable suffering of New England was going to be worse. In fact, he was willing to guarantee it.

  “Relax,” he told Bernie Williams in 1999 before another October showdown between the American League powers that would rile up the northeastern seaboard. “We’ve played these guys for eighty years. They can’t beat us.”

  But on October 16, 2003, the Sox were so close to defeating the Yankees in game seven of the American League Championship Series, they could practically feel the victory champagne stinging their eyes. With a 5–2 lead after seven and a half innings and their best pitcher, Pedro Martinez, on the mound, the Boston grounds crew was feeling mighty slick about audaciously painting the World Series logo on the Fenway Park grass hours before the Sox chased their former ace Roger Clemens from the mound.

  They should have known better. Soon Sox manager Grady Little—cast as a twenty-first-century Zimmer—was making a fateful trip to the mound and allowing a tiring Martinez to remain in the game. A barrage of hits later, the game was tied. Three innings after that, Aaron Boone—a Yankee since late July—hit a pennant-winning home run into the left-field seats.