Driving Mr. Yogi Read online

  “Shit,” Guidry said, “you want me to go up and in on George Brett on the first pitch?”

  “Yeah, that’s right,” Berra said. “And then he’ll look at you, like, You’re coming up and in on me? You give him a look right back: Don’t take it personal, pal. I’m just figuring out a way to get you out.”

  Berra smiled, impishly. “Then you give him a slider away.”

  The next day, Guidry pitched a three-hit shutout against the Royals. As he had been told, Guidry went inside right away on Brett, who went hitless. “I’m thinking, hmmm, we got something here,” he said.

  He was fascinated by how matter-of-factly the advice rolled off Berra’s tongue, as if he’d dropped a quarter into a slot for a candy bar. Berra was not an eloquent man, and not very talkative either. But when he did have his say, he was direct, each word having a purpose.

  The more they spoke, the more Guidry realized that Yogi Berra’s reputation as a man who made language a misadventure was just window-dressing. “You can’t be like Yogi and have no smarts,” Guidry said. “Life doesn’t work like that. What I was finding out there was that Yogi was really smart when it came to something he cared about. Now, did he care about gardening, about food critics? No, he didn’t. So when, with everyday people, he doesn’t have anything to talk about, maybe people think he’s not intelligent. But when it’s a bunch of baseball players and it’s about the game, he could talk to them all night. And there’s nobody smarter.”

  There was, he learned, a glorious simplicity to Berra’s logic, and also a limit. Guidry could ask a thousand questions, and Berra’s answers would all be variations on his time-honored philosophy: Don’t think too much. In so many words, he would advise Guidry just to figure out what a guy couldn’t hit—fastball rising in the zone, slider in on the hands or breaking down and away—and throw it. You get a hitter who can’t hit a breaking ball, why the hell are you going to throw him a fastball? Make him learn to hit that pitch, and when he does, try the other one.

  “It’s a game of back and forth, back and forth,” Berra would tell him, over and over. To twenty-first-century sabermetricians, this might sound like pop psychology for Little Leaguers. But consider the context: in a place where a young pitcher felt the gaze of Steinbrenner upon him whenever he wound up, and therefore the weight of his career upon his back, Berra’s uncomplicated approach was profoundly reassuring. It made even more sense when Guidry began mowing down major-league hitters with surprising regularity.

  “I threw two pitches, fastball and slider, so it was fifty-fifty,” he said. “Well, Yogi’s thing was to knock off fifty percent of the guessing game, not for the hitter but for me.” On the way to winning sixteen games against seven defeats in 1977, Guidry became the X factor in a one-hundred-win season that was barely good enough to hold off the Red Sox and Orioles in the American League East.

  But there was more to learn from the neighboring legend during that stormy season when the Bronx was literally burning, when Mount St. Steinbrenner was continually erupting, when Billy Martin and Reggie Jackson were frequently squabbling. Ron Guidry was evolving into a full-fledged Yankee. How to act like one while surviving inside the team’s increasingly chaotic universe was the next item on the agenda.

  Things came to a head on June 18, 1977, in a game against the Red Sox at Fenway Park. Although Guidry had been a Yankee for less than two years, he had already come to expect the unexpected at the sight of the Yankees’ divisional rivals.

  On this Saturday afternoon, in front of a national television audience, the Yankees were getting their heads handed to them by the potent Red Sox lineup. In the sixth inning of an ultimate 10–4 defeat, Boston’s Jim Rice looped a ball into short right field. Reggie Jackson, playing deep for the right-handed slugger with good power to the opposite field, came in to field the ball after it had landed in the grass. He had misjudged its depth—or so he would later claim.

  In Martin’s steadfast opinion, Rice had wound up on second base only because Jackson had loafed on the play. To Martin, an average talent who had succeeded as a player because he wouldn’t take no for an answer, not hustling was an unpardonable major-league sin. No fan of Jackson’s to begin with, Martin decided he had seen enough of his pitcher and his right fielder. Before he went out to the mound to remove his starter, Mike Torrez, he told reserve outfielder Paul Blair to pick up his glove and get out to right field.

  Jackson was incredulous when he saw Blair coming his way. He had never been removed from the field during a game before, and he believed that Martin, frustrated by how the game was going, was taking it out on him. Much worse, Jackson also believed that Martin’s general treatment of him was in no small part racially based—an opinion he articulated to reporters soon after.

  In the dugout, Guidry, sitting next to Martin’s trusted pitching coach, Art Fowler, watched the potential train wreck unfold. With his stock rising fast, Guidry had become something of the class pet, required by Fowler to sit by his side between starts. That gave him a front-row seat for the spectacle about to take place.

  Here came Jackson jogging in, smoke billowing from his ears, heading straight for Martin, who had already returned to the dugout and positioned himself in the corner right where Jackson would be descending the steps. But before Jackson arrived, the Yankees’ coaching police, in the persons of Berra and Howard, were moving into lockdown position—“like a movie scene, where the actors get up according to the script without saying a word,” Guidry said.

  With Martin champing at the bit to take on Jackson, Berra and Howard had to move tactically and in tandem—two great catchers, Guidry noted, trained to foresee the possibilities of the game from the best seat in the ballpark.

  “That’s what was so amazing,” Guidry said, “those two guys actually knew something was going to happen soon as Billy said, ‘Blair, get your glove.’ They both stood up. They had the smarts to know that this doesn’t look good, something’s going to happen here, I need to be ready. Nobody else did, just them. Me, I’m just sitting there on my butt, never even thought about getting up.”

  Actually, the thought did cross Guidry’s mind as Jackson ran in from right field that maybe it was time for a physical altercation between Jackson and Martin. The two had been verbally sparring from the beginning of 1977, Jackson’s first season in New York. Maybe punches were inevitable—and preferable for everyone involved.

  “At that moment, if you asked me, I would’ve said that we should have just let the sons of bitches go,” he said. “Here are two guys that don’t get along with each other, that’s obvious. And now this has happened and Reggie’s like, You challenged my honor, you slapped me in the face, let’s take it out back and handle it.”

  The truth was that Howard was not much more enamored of Jackson than Martin was. Howard was the first African American to play for the Yankees, debuting in 1955, or eight long years after Jackie Robinson broke the color line. However belatedly, Howard had integrated baseball’s most powerful franchise with a proud and quiet dignity. Given that, he didn’t understand or appreciate Jackson’s habit of calling attention to himself.

  Nor did Berra, who loved to tell the story of how his good friend “Ellie” had once deflated Jackson after Reggie had asked Berra and Howard how he would have fit in on the great Yankees teams of the fifties and sixties. “Fifth outfielder,” deadpanned Howard, which Berra thought was comically brilliant.

  If Berra had no patience for Jackson’s shtick, he did have an abiding respect for his big stick. As a longtime clubhouse kibitzer, he also enjoyed how Jackson unintentionally made himself the butt of his associates’ teasing, even long after he retired. For example, when he was asked to throw out the ceremonial first pitch of the 2008 season at Yankee Stadium, Jackson asked Berra to accompany him to the mound. Berra didn’t really want to but reluctantly agreed.

  In the dugout, he muttered, “Why the hell does he want me out there with him?”

  Standing nearby, Derek Jeter cracked, “Yog, it�
��s because he doesn’t want to get booed.”

  Whatever their personal feelings that day in the visitors’ dugout at Fenway Park, Berra and Howard had their priorities straight—first and foremost, they were Yankees. And they had a game to play and a pennant to win. They intuitively knew that Martin or Jackson—or both—could do serious damage to the other, not to mention the ball club. Martin was much older and smaller but was a notorious brawler who was known for landing punches on his own players and living to brag about it. Outweighed by sixty pounds, he wasn’t backing off as Jackson hopped down the steps and got right in his chest.

  “You never wanted me on this team in the first place,” Jackson said.

  “I ought to kick your ass,” Martin replied.

  “Billy was real furious,” Berra said. “There was no telling what he was going to do.”

  Meanwhile, Ray Negron—a young clubhouse assistant and a protégé of Steinbrenner’s—tried to cut off the television audience by putting a towel over the camera closest to the dugout. But nothing of physical consequence really happened, mainly because Berra and Howard were on the job, reacting on muscle memory in the way they had once backed up first base to keep an errant throw by an infielder from rolling into the dugout.

  As strong as Jackson was, there was no chance he was going to escape Howard’s grip, Guidry said. Not that time or later that season when the Yankees were celebrating winning the American League pennant and Jackson got a little too carried away, spraying a bottle of champagne into Howard’s eyes. Howard picked him up like a large potted plant and evicted him from his space.

  As for Berra, he was much stronger than anyone imagined, Guidry said. Martin struggled to break free from Berra’s grip, nearly falling onto the bench, but to no avail. “Once that little guy gets his monkey claws on you, you ain’t goin’ nowhere,” Guidry said, vouching for Berra’s ability, even well into his seventies, to hold a person in place with a firm grip of the shoulder or wrist.

  “My point is, you learned that this guy was physical,” Guidry said. “You realized that Billy, tough a guy as he was, wasn’t getting away from Yogi, same as Reggie with Ellie. And by doing what they did, in a moment when the rest of us just sat there and watched, you realize now how smart they were and what might have happened had they not been.”

  Across the years, Berra and Guidry would share a laugh whenever the near brawl came up—not that Berra was inclined to expound on his role in stopping it. That wasn’t his style, and at least with Guidry, what was the point?

  “We all were there; we all saw it,” Guidry said. “But the big thing is that Yogi and Ellie, they knew it wasn’t just us. You had millions of people sitting at home watching it around the country. And when you look back, you have to ask yourself, ‘Is that how you really would have wanted the world to see how we are?’”

  To the young Ron Guidry, it was a career lesson that he would never forget: how a Yankee acts and comes through in the clutch.

  Despite all the chaos that year, the Yankees went on to beat Brett and the Royals in the 1977 American League Championship Series (ALCS). Then they trounced the Dodgers in the World Series, which climaxed with three Jackson home runs in game six.

  But 1978 would prove to be Guidry’s year to shine. He was virtually unhittable, Koufax reincarnated. With total command of his slider, he won his first 13 decisions, compiled a 25–3 record with a 1.74 earned run average (ERA), and had 9 shutouts and an 18-strikeout game against the Angels on June 17.

  He was the unanimous winner of the American League Cy Young Award and runner-up to Jim Rice for MVP. It was one of the greatest pitching seasons in baseball history, and yet early in the season, Guidry still wanted to pick Berra’s brain.

  He didn’t approach Berra every day, just now and then, until one day Berra gave Guidry a look that told him enough was enough. The exact time and nature of the question are lost in the blur of years, but it was somewhere along the way to Guidry’s first thirteen wins.

  How many times did he have to be told what he already knew? Wasn’t it always the same advice?

  Look, kid, you did it. You figured it out. I can’t help you no more.

  “Well, there comes a time where you know that you got to stop asking questions,” Guidry said. “I mean, he wasn’t upset, he wasn’t mad, he was just being Yogi. But the way that he answered it, I got the impression that he was saying, You’re ten and oh, twelve and oh, whatever, what the hell more do you want? At least that’s what I got from it, just the way I felt.”

  Mostly, Guidry felt obliged to Berra, and would for the rest of his days. He would always credit Sparky Lyle for the slider and Dick Tidrow for helping him with pure pitching mechanics. But no one, he said, ever made the mental part of the game as easy as Berra.

  Don’t think too much. “Probably the best advice anyone ever gave me,” he said.

  The Yankees won another World Series, beating the Dodgers again in 1978, but as the years passed, the team would more and more be defined by organizational chaos and change. Managers would come and go, come back and go again. With few exceptions, the pitching staff revolved like the front door at Macy’s. Thurman Munson’s death in the pilot’s seat of his private plane in August 1979 cast a years-long pall over the franchise.

  For Guidry, bridging the decades and generations, there was always comfort in the reliability of Berra nearby—sitting in his underwear, puffing on a cigarette or chewing tobacco—when the latest Yankee-land news broke. Berra was always a clubhouse newshound, and when he returned as a coach in 1976, he took to calling Marty Appel daily for about ten minutes’ worth of inside dope. With Steinbrenner running things, there was never a shortage.

  Although Berra was no longer his philosophical guru, Guidry still considered him more mentor than friend. “You know, I can’t get too close to him as a coach,” he said. “You can talk, but you can’t develop a real close relationship, because he might have to drop a hammer on you one day. But as a coach on our club, he wasn’t a man you had to walk by and bow to all the time.”

  If not one of the guys, Berra—with a finger on the pulse of a team that was always on edge about one thing or another—served as a shrewd liaison for the manager. On plane rides, he would work his way to the back, where the core veterans—Guidry, Piniella, Goose Gossage—were holding court. He’d share a round and let them be.

  In 1984, Berra’s life as a Yankee turned dramatically when Steinbrenner made him manager, reveling in the appointment of a legend and then proceeding to torture him as he did all the others.

  In early April, after opening the season in Kansas City, Berra began to realize what he had gotten himself into. Guidry would never forget Berra’s ashen face when the Boss ordered the young shortstop Bobby Meacham to the minors after he’d committed a two-out error in a 7–6 loss to the Rangers in the fourth game of the season. The often incomprehensible pressures of the job only mounted from there.

  What stuck in Guidry’s craw was how Berra was constantly measured by Steinbrenner, the media, and fans against Martin, as if Berra and Martin were working with the same quality of players. By that standard, Berra was in a no-win situation from day one.

  So much of the irascible core talent of the championship teams— Rivers, Jackson, Nettles, Chris Chambliss, Munson, and Hunter—was long gone. Worse for Guidry was the misery of a sore-armed season—10–11 with a 4.51 ERA—that kept him from possibly making a difference for the man who had helped him so much.

  “Now we’re trying to patchwork it, signing old players who have names but can’t do the job anymore,” Guidry said. “And then we had just gone through that era of winning all the time, and so there are expectations that you have to do that every year.

  “But if Yogi had had what Billy had, he would have done the same job. We played hard for Billy, but we all knew that his hardest job besides dealing with the Reggie thing and George was filling out the lineup.”

  It was painful for Guidry to watch Berra in the crosshairs during an 87
–75 third-place season—smoking more than he should have been and once so infuriated by Steinbrenner’s second-guessing that he threw a pack of cigarettes at the Boss. You make out the damn lineup if you’re so smart.

  “George actually tried once, but he couldn’t do anything with it,” Guidry said. “It got to the point where you wanted to do something to help Yogi, but you couldn’t. You felt helpless.”

  There were lighter moments, the kind Berra was so good at generating, intentionally or otherwise. On the same night that Meacham was sent to the minors, Guidry’s family visited from Lafayette, as they often did when the Yankees played in Arlington. His father, Roland, would mark the occasion by preparing a rabbit-stew feast, Cajun-style. Like a student placing an apple on his teacher’s desk, Guidry would bring some into the clubhouse for his favorite coaches, Berra and Howard, no strings attached. But this time, Roland Guidry made a special request: he wanted to know if there was any chance that Ron’s teenage brother could meet Yogi Berra.

  Travis Guidry had been born eighteen years after Ron. Deprived of oxygen during a difficult birth, he was brain-damaged. Ron made no promises but said he would ask.

  During batting practice, Roland noticed his son chatting with Berra near second base and gesturing to the area behind third base. As Berra began walking toward them with Ron alongside him, Roland grabbed Travis to move down the aisle. But a few feet from the barrier in front, the path was blocked by a gaggle of fans with visions of an autograph.

  When Ron saw his father’s head poking through the crowd, he yelled, “Where’s Travis?” Roland pointed and shrugged. At this point, Berra reached out his arms and yelled, “Let that boy through.” A pathway formed, and within seconds Berra’s arm was around Travis Guidry, who went home with a hug and a handshake he never forgot. Berra was compensated with the gratitude of the Guidry family, the depth of which he would not understand until years later.