Driving Mr. Yogi Read online

  It was another remarkable blow by an unremarkable Yankee. Like Bucky Dent in 1978, Boone would be forever tagged with a middle name that rhymed with ducking. Bucky Bleeping Dent, meet Aaron Bleeping Boone.

  Imagine that, Berra told Guidry when he returned to spring training the following spring, sitting around the coaches’ room across the hall from the clubhouse one February morning. He let everyone know that he had strolled over to Boone a few days before the home run to tell him how much he had liked his grandfather, Ray, a rival with the Cleveland Indians.

  Guidry couldn’t let the opportunity to roll his eyes in mock exasperation pass. “Goddamn, Yogi, you’re taking credit for that, too?” he asked.

  The truth was that Guidry was just superstitious enough to believe that Berra’s magic could be contagious—though only to a point. Just as they had in 2001, the Yankees lost the World Series in 2003 to a team that hadn’t even existed when Guidry was playing, much less Berra. Worse, the Florida Marlins had a payroll less than half that of New York. Yet they came into Yankee Stadium and wrapped up the series in six games behind the young right-handed power pitcher Josh Beckett.

  Still, there wasn’t quite the pall over the spring training complex in 2004 that one would have expected for a team that had failed in its annual mission to win it all. One reason was that George Steinbrenner’s health was declining and he was no longer a looming, imperious presence. Another was that the Yankees had beaten the Red Sox again—torn their hearts out, really—and that was no inconsequential achievement, given that the animosity between the teams seemed more intense than ever.

  Even Guidry, who had watched the ALCS from home in Louisiana, had to admit that he had never seen anything quite like the bench-clearing fiasco in game three that had resulted in the seventy-two-year-old Zimmer charging Martinez and being flung to the ground like an old beanbag. It was mortifying, and Zimmer was fortunate to have escaped serious injury.

  But if he was going to be honest about it, Guidry couldn’t imagine the rivalry any other way. After all, he had joined the Yankees when it was all fear, loathing, and fisticuffs. In his experience, just beating the Red Sox wasn’t enough. Crushing them was almost a sport in itself, and if it could be accomplished inside a deflated Fenway Park, all the better.

  In the months after Boone’s home run—and his unceremonious departure from the Yankees following an off-season injury sustained while playing basketball—tormenting the Red Sox was understandably a popular topic around the spring training complex. For guest instructors like Guidry and Goose Gossage, it was the perfect opportunity to fill the coaches’ room with tales of their own proudest hours—beginning with early September 1978, when they went into Boston four games behind the Sox after being down fourteen and swept them four straight by the aggregate score of 42–9.

  Berra remembered the so-called Fenway Massacre well, having had a great view of it from the dugout. But he enjoyed hearing Guidry recount the old war stories again with such devilish pride. He knew from his own playing experiences that ballplayers never tire of reliving them.

  “The fans are booing, they’re screaming, they’re calling us all kinds of names. We’re getting pelted with batteries and darts and ball bearings,” Guidry said. “It’s OK, no big deal: wear a helmet, wear a long-sleeved shirt, wear a jacket. We’re going to beat the dog shit out of them anyway.”

  In the third game of that series, Guidry pitched a two-hit shutout for his twenty-first victory, toying with what he called “the toughest lineup I’ve ever faced.” Three weeks later, pitching on short rest against the Sox in the one-game playoff for the pennant, he took a 4–2 lead into the seventh inning. He got the first out, gave up an opposite-field single to George Scott, and looked up to see his manager, Bob Lemon, on his way to the mound.

  Guidry had never been an outspoken man who would go out of his way to seek the limelight. Many players and reporters felt as though they didn’t know him at all. But inside the circle of trust, he could be the life of the party, a delightful storyteller, with his charming Cajun accent for spice and a demonstrative style that included sound effects for moments such as bat meeting ball.

  In the coaches’ room that spring, Guidry reminded everyone of how pissed he was when Lemon told him that he was bringing Gossage in with eight outs to go. Guidry thought he deserved the chance to get through the seventh inning. If it had been Billy Martin managing, Guidry might have said, “You need to get your ass off my mound so I can pitch.”

  Martin, who wouldn’t back down from a tornado, had trusted Guidry to be honest about his arm. But Martin had been forced to resign in late July after his infamous comment, “One’s a born liar, the other’s convicted,” referring first to Reggie Jackson and then to George Steinbrenner (for pleading guilty in 1974 to making illegal contributions to Richard Nixon’s reelection campaign).

  Lemon was not above deferring to Guidry either, but not that day with so much at stake. He took the ball while Guidry cussed a blue streak.

  “I saved the damn game, didn’t I?” Gossage interjected, reminding Guidry how he’d gotten Carl Yastrzemski to pop up for the last out—a showdown he had actually imagined and relished while falling asleep the night before.

  “Yeah, we won the game, but you nearly gave everyone a stroke,” Guidry said. “Two runs in the next inning and guys on base in the ninth.”

  Guidry turned to Berra. “Right, Yogi?”

  Berra smiled and shot him a “whatever you say, Gator” nod. He enjoyed the raucous banter; it was like watching his sons arm-wrestle for his attention.

  The truth was that Berra, thrilled as he was when the Yankees pulled out the 2003 ALCS, was saddened by what he had seen in Boston in game three. The sight of Zimmer tumbling onto the grass was especially troubling. No matter how intense, the game should never have come to that.

  “You can’t get caught up in it like the fans do,” he said. “The fans make it life-and-death. We liked playing in that atmosphere. It was fun. But we didn’t hate them; they were good guys—[Bobby] Doerr, [Johnny] Pesky, [Ted] Williams.”

  In fact, when Doerr got his two thousandth hit in a game against the Yankees in 1951—the third active player at the time to reach that milestone—Berra called time-out to get the ball. He gave it to Doerr, who retired prematurely two months later with a bad back and treasured that ball into his nineties.

  Above all, and from their earliest dinners out, Guidry knew better than anyone how much Berra respected Williams—how in their post-playing days they became close, how Berra sent his oldest son to Williams’s baseball camp in New Hampshire, how a wheelchair-bound Williams came to Berra’s museum to help launch it. Berra was almost in awe of Williams, who won the Triple Crown in Berra’s rookie season and, taking one look at his squat body behind the plate, cracked, “Who in hell are the Yankees trying to fool with this guy?”

  As a former pitcher from a later generation, Guidry was less interested in Williams’s wisecracks than he was in hearing about how the Yankees tried to get Williams out.

  Guidry: “What’d you throw him?”

  Berra: “You just threw some pitches away and let him hit a lousy single. He wasn’t a fast runner, so even if he hits the ball the other way—especially in Fenway, it’s off the wall—you can hold him to a single.”

  Guidry: “What else?”

  Berra: “You really focused on getting everybody in front of him out so he doesn’t drive in any runs.”

  Guidry: “That’s it?”

  Berra: “No matter what, he’s gonna hit. You try to talk to him and get him off his game.”

  Guidry: “What did you say?”

  Berra: “‘Done any fishing lately? Been to any good restaurants?’”

  Guidry: “What would he say?”

  Berra: “‘Shut up, you little Dago, I’m trying to hit.’”

  Guidry: “Did you ever get him to respond?”

  Berra: “Oh, yeah. One time we threw him a called strike, and he kept telling me the pitch was
an inch outside.”

  Guidry: “What did you say?”

  Berra: “‘If I had those good pitches to swing at, I’d be a rich guy like you.’”

  Guidry: “Who was better, Williams or DiMaggio?”

  Berra: “Oh, Joe D.”

  Guidry: “Why was that?”

  Berra: “Williams was the best hitter I ever saw. Joe was the best player and, you know . . .”

  Guidry: “What?”

  Berra: “Well, we always won.”

  If Guidry and Gossage relished 1978 and Jeter and Rivera savored 2003, Berra had 1949. Long before Bucky Dent and Aaron Boone, the Red Sox managed to lose the race that season to a Yankees team that was plagued by injuries and forced to play without an aging DiMaggio for a spell in September due to a bout with pneumonia.

  The Red Sox, who the previous season had lost the pennant to Cleveland in a one-game playoff, appeared to be on a mission. Mel Parnell, their ace, had a 25-win season. Ellis Kinder won 23. Williams drove in 159 runs, a monster sum that was equaled by a teammate, infielder Vern Stephens.

  Having taken sole possession of first place from the Yankees just days before by rallying from a 6–3 deficit, the Red Sox pulled into New York on October 1 for the season-ending two-game series, needing one win to clinch. DiMaggio returned to the lineup on a day the Yankees celebrated his career with one of their gift-laden ceremonies, after which DiMaggio thanked everyone, including “the good Lord for making me a Yankee.” His most famous quotation gave the young Berra goose bumps.

  But the Red Sox proceeded to knock Allie Reynolds out in the third inning, grabbing the same 4–0 lead behind Parnell that Martinez would be given in 2003. Parnell’s didn’t last even as long as Martinez’s. Playing with a sore hand, Berra knocked in a run with a double as the Yankees tied the game in the fifth. They won it in the eighth on the sixth home run of the season by Johnny Lindell, a journeyman outfielder and onetime pitcher who hit .242 that year.

  Johnny Bleeping Lindell!

  With the rivals deadlocked on the final day of the season, the Yankees were facing Kinder. They managed to carry a 1–0 lead into the eighth inning behind Vic Raschi. That inning, they exploded for four runs and held on to win 5–3, though not before DiMaggio bizarrely removed himself from the game after failing to catch a long drive by Doerr that went for a triple. The series attracted almost 140,000 fans to Yankee Stadium. The year before Guidry was born, Casey Stengel won his first pennant as Yankees manager, and Berra’s sense of manifest destiny was shaped.

  “All they had to do was win one of two games,” he told Guidry, breaking down Boston’s misery to simple math. “They didn’t.”

  Or couldn’t. And the most unbelievable part of it all was that Williams could muster just one hit in the series and failed to drive in a single run. All in the spirit of good, clean competition, Berra had much more to talk about when Teddy Ballgame came to the plate in 1950.

  When it finally happened, it felt like a dream, almost surreal, like watching an episode of The Twilight Zone. One minute the Yankees were almost mocking the Red Sox in the 2004 American League Championship Series, blowing them out three games to none. The next minute the Red Sox were running away with game seven, and Yankee Stadium was as shell-shocked as it ever had been.

  “Guess they were due,” a chagrined Berra grumbled on the way home that night after watching Boston’s Johnny Damon smack two home runs, one a grand slam, in a 10–3 punctuation mark to the first victorious comeback from an 0–3 deficit in baseball’s postseason history. From the Yankees’ end, payback after so many years was a bitch.

  Down in Louisiana, Guidry tried to rationalize what he had seen by raising the possibility that there was more to determining the outcome of a season than runs, hits, and errors. “The good Lord has a way of evening things out,” he said. “So you know it’s not going to last forever.” But even with the world turned upside down, Guidry found himself rooting for the Red Sox in the World Series against the St. Louis Cardinals.

  “As much as you have the same feeling that they have for you, when you get to the World Series, I don’t pull for the National League. I pull for the American League, even though it was the Red Sox,” he said. “Because what you learn as you’re going through your career is that people think the National League is better. Well, why are they the better league when the American League has won so many more titles [63–44 after 2011]. You actually get ticked off about the stuff.”

  Berra happened to like Terry Francona, Boston’s rookie manager, whose father, Tito, had played against him in the fifties and sixties. But he took the Yankees collapse hard and wasn’t thrilled about his hometown Cardinals getting swept by the Sox.

  Back in Tampa the following spring, he told Guidry over dinner that watching the Red Sox beat the Yankees four straight after being down 0–3 and behind in the ninth inning of game four was “like a bad accident where you don’t really see it coming, then it hits you, and you wonder what the hell happened.”

  “Well, yeah,” Guidry said. “But they earned it.”

  “Yeah, maybe they were overdue,” Berra agreed.

  Guidry could see that Berra was struggling with the altered American League landscape and the concept of the Red Sox as champions and the Yankees as chokers.

  “Look at it this way,” Guidry told him. “There’s nothing against them now the next time they lose, because they actually won. There’s no ghost of Babe Ruth, no more curse. You won? Fine, I’m happy for you. Let Babe rest. He has nothing to do with this thing anymore.”

  Berra nodded. He liked the idea. Finally and forever, the Babe could rest.

  Yogi Berra could always count on Ron Guidry to be on time and to carry his bags.

  (Edward Linsmier / New York Times)

  Close friends, side by side in the Yankees’ dugout, taking in a spring training game.

  (Barton Silverman / New York Times)

  Yogi starring in his celebrated “affliction” (actually Aflac) commercial.

  (Courtesy of the Yogi Berra Museum & Learning Center)

  Yogi and Carmen Berra, the picture of 1950s American suburban bliss.

  (Courtesy of the Yogi Berra Museum & Learning Center)

  Ron and Bonnie Guidry, hometown sweethearts from Cajun country in Louisiana.

  (Danielle Guidry)

  After registering an out at the plate, the catlike Berra wheels, looking for another.

  (Courtesy of the Yogi Berra Museum & Learning Center)

  Ron Guidry as “Louisiana Lightning,” pitching for the Yankees.

  (Associated Press)

  Berra shares a laugh with George Steinbrenner on the night the Boss begged his forgiveness at Berra's museum in New Jersey.

  (Arthur Krasinsky)

  Catcher Joe Girardi asked for a blessing on his glove on Yogi Berra Day. David Cone promptly threw a perfect game as Berra and Don Larsen looked on.

  (Courtesy of the Yogi Berra Museum & Learning Center)

  The custom-made “Driving Mr. Yogi” cap that Guidry—Berra’s selfdescribed valet—wore with pride.

  (Edward Linsmier / New York Times)

  Berra had a cap of his own, inscribed “Driven by Gator.”

  (Courtesy of the Yogi Berra Museum & Learning Center)

  Joe Torre begged Berra to hand out 1996 championship rings to the Yankees and fussed over him when he finally returned to the team in 2000.

  (Courtesy of the Yogi Berra Museum & Learning Center)

  Berra was one of the few people with enough clout to penetrate Derek Jeter’s defenses and form an affectionate, playful relationship with the shortstop.

  (John Munson / Star Ledger / Corbis)

  In his first spring training back with the Yankees, Berra wanted to “learn” Jorge Posada his experience, as Bill Dickey once did for him.

  (Courtesy of the Yogi Berra Museum & Learning Center)

  Berra helped Nick Swisher with his stroke, and Swisher gave his surrogate grandfather a hand with his uniform shirt bu
ttons.

  (New York Yankees)

  Ron Guidry found a likeminded Yankee in the great closer Mariano Rivera.

  (Steve Nesius / Reuters / Corbis)

  When Guidry cooked his famous frog legs, Berra wanted the kitchen cleared so the master chef could focus.

  (Lily Hawryluk)

  A small serving of Guidry’s specialty—not enough to satisfy Berra's hearty appetite for them.

  (Lily Hawryluk)

  Before having to retire his clubs, Berra had golfed with the greats of the game—shown here with Arnold Palmer—and a few presidents, too.

  (Bob Hope Classic Picture Library)

  Berra and Guidry at spring training 2011, when Yogi asked for Gator’s permission not to suit up anymore.

  (Barton Silverman / New York Times)

  At an autograph show in Cooperstown, New York, July 2011, Guidry made sure that Berra got his rest on an oppressively hot afternoon.

  (Herbert Rein)

  Saying goodbye, until next year.

  (Edward Linsmier / New York Times)

  8. It Takes a Clubhouse

  Ron Guidry needed help. By 2006, he had taken on the full-time position of Yankees pitching coach in addition to his duties as Yogi Berra’s social director, and there was only so much time in a spring training day.