Yogi
Berra, one of baseball’s greatest catchers and characters, who as a
player was a mainstay of 10 Yankee championship teams and as a manager
led both the Yankees and Mets to the World Series — but who may be more
widely 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 on Tuesday. He was
90.
His
death was reported by the Yankees and by the Yogi Berra Museum and
Learning Center in Little Falls, N.J. Before moving to an assisted
living facility in nearby West Caldwell, in 2012, Berra had lived for
many years in neighboring Montclair.
In
1949, early in Berra’s Yankee 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.”
And
so he was, and so he proved to be. Universally known simply as Yogi,
probably the second most recognizable nickname in sports — even Yogi was
not the Babe — Berra was not exactly an unlikely hero, but he was often
portrayed as one: 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
humor if not outright derision.
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