Baseball legend was a hit with his wit

Known for his Yogi-isms, Berra was also 15-time all-star

Yogi Berra, one of baseball’s greatest catchers and characters — who as a player was a mainstay of10 New York Yankees championship teams and as a manager led both the Yankees and New York Mets to the World Series, but who may be better known as an ungainly but lovable cultural figure, inspiring a cartoon character and issuing a seemingly limitless supply of unwittingly witty epigrams known as Yogi-isms — died Tuesday. He was 90.

In 1949, early in Berra’s Yankees career, his manager assessed him this way in an interview in the Sporting News:

“Mr. Berra,” Casey Stengel said, “is a very strange fellow of very remarkable abilities.”

So he was, and so he proved to be. Universally known simply as Yogi, probably the second most recognizable nickname in sports — even Yogi wasn’t the Babe — Berra was not an unlikely hero, but he was often portrayed as one. He was an all-star for 15 consecutive seasons whose skills were routinely underestimated; a well-built, appealingly open-faced man whose physical appearance was often belittled, and a prolific winner — not to mention a successful leader — whose intellect was a target of humour if not outright derision.

That he triumphed on the diamond again and again despite his perceived shortcomings was certainly a source of his popularity. So was the delight with which his famous, if not always documentable, pronouncements, somehow both nonsensical and sagacious, were received.

Whether Berra actually uttered the many things attributed to him, or was the first to say them, or phrased them precisely the way they were reported, has long been a matter of speculation. Berra himself published a book in 1998 called The Yogi Book: I Really Didn’t Say Everything I Said! But the Yogi-isms testified to a character — goofy and philosophical, flighty and down to earth — that came to define the man.

Berra’s Yogi-ness was exploited in advertisements for myriad products, among them Puss ’n Boots cat food, but perhaps most famously, YooHoo chocolate drink. Asked if YooHoo was hyphenated, he is said to have replied, “No, ma’am, it isn’t even carbonated.”

If not exactly a Yogi-ism, it was the kind of response that might have come from Berra’s ursine namesake, the affable animated character Yogi Bear, who made his debut in 1958.

The character Yogi Berra may even have overshadowed the Hall of Fame ballplayer Yogi Berra, obscuring what a remarkable athlete he was. He was the most durable and consistently productive Yankee during the period of the team’s most relentless success.

Stengel, the Hall of Fame manager, recognized Berra’s gifts. He referred to Berra, even as a young player, as his assistant manager and compared him favourably to star catchers of previous eras such as Mickey Cochrane, Gabby Hartnett and Bill Dickey.

“You could look it up” was Stengel’s catchphrase, and indeed the record book declares that Berra was among the greatest catchers in the history of the game, some say the greatest of all.

Berra’s career batting average of .285 wasn’t as high as that of his Yankee predecessor Dickey (.313), but Berra hit more home runs (358) and drove in more runs (1,430). Widely praised by pitchers for his astute pitch-calling, Berra led the American League in assists five times, and from 1957 through 1959 went 148 consecutive games behind the plate without making an error: a major league record at the time.