Driving Mr. Yogi Read online

  Beyond his annual instructor’s role, Guidry had never coached, nor had he been eager to leave Lafayette for months on end for any particular job. He had taken this one because Mel Stottlemyre had recommended him and because Joe Torre had asked.

  Five years after being diagnosed and successfully treated for multiple myeloma, or cancer of the bone marrow, Stottlemyre was ready to go home to his beloved Washington State. He had always admired Guidry and noticed during past spring trainings how relaxed he was around the pitchers, how well he got along with them.

  Bonnie Guidry encouraged Ron to take the job if that’s what he wanted to do. So did Berra, who reminded him that he had hired one of Guidry’s heroes, Whitey Ford, as his first pitching coach in 1964 while Ford was still pitching.

  “Why’d you do that?” Guidry asked.

  “Why not?” Berra said. “Whitey was always learning little things that helped him be good. I figured he could teach those things, too. He was never afraid to speak his mind.”

  Guidry wondered how it worked when pitching coach Ford had to decide whether pitcher Ford should come out of a game. “We talked about it,” Berra said. “My first game as manager, Whitey pitched eleven innings. He felt good. Plus Rivera wasn’t born then.”

  Staff closer was one position Guidry didn’t have to worry about now, not with the great and seemingly ageless Mo Rivera around. But he did need a crash course in how a contemporary pitching coach went about his work. Being an old-school traditionalist, Guidry didn’t really get all the statistical analysis—why, for instance, a pitching coach had to know how to pitch hitter X when it was 74 degrees and partly sunny, as opposed to 50 degrees, overcast, and damp.

  Worse, Guidry was electronically challenged. “I don’t use a computer, and to be honest, I don’t need one to tell me who is good or that this guy hits me well over his career,” he said. “It seems like we’ve been brainwashed into getting so much information.”

  He found a sympathetic audience in Berra, who loved to tell Guidry and others how in his day, hitters would prepare for a game by taking a few swings—unlike today, when batting practice might turn into a half-day outing in the cage.

  Set in his ways, Guidry wound up preparing all of his reports by hand, a time-consuming chore, among others, that left him scrambling to make sure Berra was getting the attention he deserved.

  “When he first came back, I’d get up at six thirty every morning, bring him in [to the complex], and I’d be the one to drive him back [to his hotel],” Guidry said. “This went on for years.” But now the manager of Berra’s itinerary needed his own coaching staff to handle Yogi—a spring training chapter of the Friends of Yogi Inc. Not surprisingly, there was no shortage of volunteers.

  The main volunteer was former Yankees manager Carl “Stump” Merrill. As soon as word spread that Yogi Berra was staying at the hotel and that he was routinely in the lobby by 7:00 A.M. sharp, the autograph seekers would gather there every morning, pumped up and ready to pounce. Knowing Berra’s punctuality, Merrill would be right there with them, waiting to help his old friend navigate the fans and make his way outside to the car.

  “He’d accommodate them, even though they weren’t always polite,” Merrill said. “But the one thing that bothered him was if he thought they only wanted him to sign something so they could sell it. It’s early in the morning, and you think he’s just signing his name, but he would look at someone and say, ‘I signed for you yesterday.’ Oh, he remembers.”

  Across the road, just a couple of minutes away, Guidry could sleep better knowing that Merrill was with Berra at the hotel. Merrill, he knew, was as loyal to Berra as anyone. In fact, if it hadn’t been for Berra, Merrill might never have dressed in a big-league clubhouse.

  In June 1981, a strike shuttered the major leagues for fifty days, the first time in baseball history that players walked out during the season. Determined to make his people earn their keep, George Steinbrenner ordered his major-league coaches into the minors to scout and help mentor the organization’s prospects. Berra drew Nashville, where Merrill was the manager.

  Merrill was a former minor-league catcher with a degree in physical education from the University of Maine. He began working for the Yankees in 1978 at West Haven, Connecticut, in the Eastern League and moved south when the Yankees took control of the Southern League’s Nashville team in 1980.

  Suddenly, in mid-1981, the former catcher who had never made it out of Double-A ball had the most famous and decorated Yankees backstop asking him, “What do you want me to do?”

  Wait a minute, Merrill thought. Yogi Berra is asking me to supervise him?

  “Do whatever you want,” Merrill said.

  “No,” Berra said. “Give me something specific.”

  And that was when Merrill began to understand the existential splendor of Yogi Berra, whom he would come to call Lawrence or Sir Lawrence in comic tribute to his utter lack of pretense and sense of importance.

  “He rode buses with us all night,” Merrill said. “You think he had to do that? He was incredible.”

  One day Merrill told him, “Why don’t you hit some rollers to that lefty kid over there at first base?”

  Berra did as he was told and later remarked to Merrill, “That kid looks pretty good with the glove.” Berra knew a prospect when he saw one. It was Don Mattingly, who at the time was considered expendable by a chronically shortsighted organization always on the prowl for immediate assistance at the major-league level.

  The Yankees feared that Mattingly would never be strong enough to hold down first base, a power position. Berra was adamant with the brass that when the kid grew stronger, he would have the ability to pull the ball into the friendly right-field porch at Yankee Stadium. When Mattingly became a full-time player under Berra in 1984, he hit .343 with 23 homers and 110 runs batted in. When Mattingly later went on to manage the Dodgers in Los Angeles in 2011, he wore number 8 in tribute to the man who had helped him become a Yankee.

  Back in 1981, Merrill learned quickly to appreciate Berra’s keen baseball instincts. They became fast friends, and before the 1985 season, Berra asked Merrill to be his first-base coach. Elated, the career minor-leaguer hit the big time, only to watch his friend get unceremoniously canned in Chicago in April and take his storied bus ride with the team to the airport.

  “I can still see him standing up and wishing everyone well, with Dale [Berra] sitting right there. Who else does that?” Merrill said, moved by Berra’s composure and class.

  Merrill lasted only a couple more days himself. In Billy Martin’s first game back as manager, the young shortstop Bobby Meacham hit what would have been a three-run home run in Texas—had he not passed Willie Randolph after rounding first. The Yankees lost. Naturally, in the world according to Steinbrenner and Martin, it was Merrill’s fault. He returned to the minors to manage at Columbus.

  At least Merrill had a job and a title—“organizational lifer.” Riding the tides of Yankees change, he coached again with the big team under Lou Piniella, even managing it during the lean years, 1990–1991. In retirement back home in Maine, he would wait for the call every winter inviting him to spring training. He relished the opportunity to pitch in and catch up with his old friend Yogi, whose return to the team had cheered Merrill like no other news.

  In the clubhouse, fresh off a good walk on the treadmill, Berra liked to tease Merrill for his ample girth. On the bench, they would reminisce about their days together in Nashville.

  “I could never understand why you wanted to sit on those damn buses with us all night,” Merrill told him.

  “What the heck else was there to do in Nashville?” Berra said.

  Merrill knew it was futile to bring up country-and-western music or the fact that Nashville was one of the more entertaining cities in the south. Berra was all business, and his business was baseball.

  “He’d be sitting there with guys standing along the rail, and he can barely see the field,” Merrill said. “But suddenly he’d
say, ‘That kid turned the wrong way on the ball,’ or ‘This guy’s got good command.’ You think he’s just sitting there minding his own business, but it’s amazing what he would see.”

  In the early years of Berra’s return to spring training, he and Merrill both stayed at Steinbrenner’s hotel. When Steinbrenner sold the place, Guidry invited Berra to come bunk with him in his apartment, an offer he would periodically repeat. “I got the extra bedroom, Yog,” he said. “This way we’re in the same place.”

  “It’s OK. I’ll stay at another hotel,” Berra said.

  He preferred his independence, especially for when Carmen came into town, and he figured that he was already imposing on Guidry enough. He moved to a nearby Marriott Residence Inn, as did Merrill, with Guidry’s blessing.

  Berra and Merrill would stay on the same floor, Berra typically in room 108—“He’s got to have an eight in the room number if it’s available,” Merrill said—with Merrill and his wife, Winnie, right across the hall.

  Having Merrill with Berra allowed Guidry to fulfill his more demanding duties as pitching coach. Many mornings, Merrill took over as the designated driver. And while Guidry got his pitchers ready for the games, Berra and Merrill wouldn’t waste good weather sitting around the cramped clubhouse or in the dugout. While the players took batting practice, they would walk the outfield warning track, foul pole to foul pole.

  “OK, Lawrence, how many we doing today?” Merrill would ask, knowing that Berra would likely choose his favorite number. They would finish the first leg, and Merrill would say, “OK, that’s one.”

  Berra would look at him with a sly grin and say, “You mean two?”

  With baseballs flying everywhere, Merrill liked to think of himself as the lookout, since Berra—in his imagined protective bubble—was typically oblivious to the possibility of being struck. “Some people would have said it was the blind leading the blind,” Merrill said. “But who was I kidding? The way his life had gone, he could have walked back and forth all by himself, and every ball would somehow miss him.”

  Merrill was reminded of an old quote that he thought came from the wisecracking ex-Yankee and Ball Four author, Jim Bouton: “Yankees die in plane crash; Berra misses flight.”

  Berra had another volunteer minder in Steve Donohue, the Yankees’ assistant trainer and the man personally charged with keeping Berra’s neck and shoulders from stiffening up.

  “Where you guys going for dinner tonight?” he would ask early in the day, knowing Berra was not one for last-minute scheduling.

  “The Rusty Pelican,” Berra would say.

  “What time?” Donohue knew full well that Berra liked his vodka and dinner at the early-bird hour. Asking was in keeping with the preferred routine.

  “Five o’clock.”

  “Just you and Gator?”

  “Yeah, me and Gator.”

  Donohue would call in the reservation, doing his part in the clockwork organization that Guidry had created to make sure every one of Berra’s bases was covered.

  There were even occasions when Donohue got the chance to be the driver, mostly on a Sunday morning when Guidry had another commitment and Merrill was off with his wife. “That’s when I got called in from the bullpen,” he said.

  Donohue and Berra also went back a long way—coincidentally, as far back as Merrill and Berra did, to Nashville in 1981. On his way up to the majors, Donohue was the trainer for the Nashville Sounds that year. When Berra came in from New York, they had adjoining hotel rooms.

  “He was like all the rest of us,” Donohue said. “We used to talk about it—why the hell is this guy sitting with us on the bus for hours? The Southern League was a rough travel league. But being on the bus with us just seemed to make him happy.”

  On Sunday, Berra wasn’t happy until he attended Mass. One Saturday in Tampa, he called Donohue to ask what time they would be going the next day. Donohue said, “Yogi, I’ve got to get to the ballpark tomorrow to work. What if I find us one for about seven?”

  The earlier the better, as far as Berra was concerned. Donohue called back to say he had located a 7:30 Mass on North Himes Avenue. “The good news is that the church is named Saint Lawrence,” he said.

  Berra was impressed. “No kidding,” he said. “I never saw a church named after Saint Lawrence.”

  They went the next morning. Berra was thrilled, never saying a word about the Mass being in Spanish.

  ***

  Of all the Yankees who held Berra near and dear, Joe Torre did the best imitation of him, hands down. Torre, Merrill, and Donohue all inevitably worked an imitation into just about any discussion. Donohue would even occasionally go so far as to converse with Berra in Yogi-speak. Even Guidry gave it a shot, though his Cajun accent did Berra no justice.

  But Torre had the knack, the natural ability to lower his voice, contort his face, and bring Berra’s sweet grumpiness to life. “Maybe because we’re both Italian,” he said.

  On the subject of his everlasting fondness for Berra, however, Torre was loath to cite their common ethnicity. “I’m not Tommy Lasorda,” he said, referring to the former Dodgers manager, who was quick to play the paisano card. “I got to know Yogi when he was coaching for the Mets and I’d come in with the Braves, playing first base. I’d tease him about this or that, and sometimes he took me serious. But it was easy as a player to get close to him because he let you in. What you saw was what you got.”

  For Torre, that particular term of endearment was never more self-evident than when he had a friend from Hawaii visiting him during spring training. He and the friend were sitting in the manager’s office, shooting the breeze, when Torre thought he heard Berra’s familiar voice outside in the hall.

  “You want to meet Yogi?” Torre asked.

  The friend nodded enthusiastically.

  “Yogi?” Torre called out. Berra appeared in the doorway, au naturel, not so much as a towel around his waist. He stepped into the room and proceeded to strike up a polite conversation.

  “The thing was that Yogi had stepped close to shake my friend’s hand, and so now he’s standing right in front of the guy, who’s sitting down and not knowing where the hell to look,” Torre said.

  Trying not to burst out laughing, Torre playfully kept the conversation going for as long as he could to extend his friend’s discomfort. The guy was continuing to look this way and that way, anywhere but straight in front of him. Torre knew one thing: Berra was not going to excuse himself out of embarrassment. “He has no inhibitions, none whatsoever,” Torre said.

  This was further illustrated when Berra, Don Zimmer, and Don Mattingly were in the car one day with Torre at the wheel, en route to an away exhibition game. For games that weren’t too far from Tampa, Torre and some of the coaches would drive to the games after getting dressed at home.

  Along a typical Florida state-route stretch of restaurants and convenience stores, Berra suddenly announced that he had to pee. Torre pulled into the parking lot of a 7-Eleven.

  “This OK?” he asked.

  “Sure, why not?” Berra said.

  He got out and didn’t think twice about walking into the place, cleats and all, in his famous pinstriped number 8, Mattingly and Zimmer right behind. “Where’s the bathroom?” Berra asked a kid behind the counter, while the jaws of the patrons dropped to the floor.

  “Imagine them going home to tell someone, ‘Yogi Berra came into the 7-Eleven to take a leak,’” Torre said, still amused by the scene years later. “But, you know, that was all he cared about. He had to go.”

  With his wife and young daughter joining him in spring training, Torre seldom hung out with the guys, but he knew that part of his job was to circle the date that Berra would be landing in Tampa on his calendar and to prop Berra’s golf clubs up against the back wall of his office when they arrived a few days before the man himself. He made sure there was a fresh supply of Ketel One stored safely in the bottom drawer of his desk, as Guidry had recommended, and he reserved a seat next
to him in the dugout for Berra. With Zimmer on the other side and Guidry flanking Berra, exhibition games were seldom as tedious as they’d once been.

  In his twelve years with the Yankees, Torre never missed a chance to support or comfort Berra. An emotional man not ashamed to cry in tender moments with his team, Torre was right at Berra’s side when Phil Rizzuto died in August 2007 and Berra was summoned by reporters to the dugout for an interview.

  Rizzuto had been Berra’s closest friend on the Yankees, his “little big brother.” They had worked together in the off-season as salesmen in a Newark clothing shop. They had opened a bowling alley—Rizzuto-Berra Lanes in Clifton, New Jersey. Rizzuto was godfather to the Berras’ firstborn, Larry.

  In the final months of Rizzuto’s life, his whereabouts were largely unknown. But Cora Rizzuto gave Berra full visitation privileges to the Green Hill nursing home. Several times a week, he watched movies with his pal, played bingo, even shared an occasional afternoon nip.

  Seeing Berra seize up, ready to sob and create a video that would surely go viral on the Internet when someone asked about those visits, Torre put his arm around Yogi and massaged his shoulder. Berra held it together and spoke beautifully about his dear friend, the Scooter.

  Ron Guidry’s time as pitching coach lasted only two years. In 2008, when Torre was replaced as manager by Joe Girardi, general manager Brian Cashman felt that Guidry had been Torre’s hire and wanted Girardi to have a fresh start with his own staff. Guidry suspected the change was coming and accepted it without rancor.

  He had enjoyed his time back on the road and in New York, getting to spend more time with his son Brandon, who lives in the city, and, of course, seeing Berra at the stadium. The Yankees failed to reach the World Series in 2006 and 2007, and the coaches took much of the blame—although it was also true that Guidry did not have a championship staff to work with. It was a mix of the aging (Randy Johnson, Mike Mussina, Andy Pettitte) and the inadequate (Kei Igawa, Sidney Ponson). The putative ace was the Taiwanese right-hander Chien-Ming Wang.