Perfect: Don Larsen's Miraculous World Series Game (51 page)

Berra’s first foray as a National League manager was certainly respectable. The Mets battled for first place through much of the season and ultimately finished third. Life spiraled downward in the beginning of 1973 season and by the middle of August, the Mets were in last place. Yogi was not prepared to give up and kept telling his players that “it ain’t over till it’s over.” His optimisim was contagious, and the Mets won twenty-nine of their last forty-three games to finish first in their division. They then defeated the Cincinnati Reds in the play-offs to win the National League pennant.

No one was more proud than Berra. He had taken a team of young and largely inexperienced players to the pinnacle. Still, he knew that much of the team’s success was tied to the discipline that had been instilled by Gil Hodges. And so, after the team beat Cincinnati in the fifth game of the play-offs, Yogi went to his office in the clubhouse, closed the door, and called Hodges’ widow in Brooklyn. “I did not win this,” he said to Joan Hodges in a voice cracking with emotion. “This was your husband’s team.” It was a gesture she never forgot, and years later Joan Hodges would say of Yogi Berra, “I hope he lives to 150.”

Although the Mets lost to the Oakland Athletics in the World Series, Yogi was rewarded with a three-year contract at an annual salary of $75,000. But the magic was gone. The team finished next-to-last in its division in 1974 and continued to struggle in 1975. Yogi was fired in August after the team lost five games in a row and were all but removed from contention.

Yogi returned to his business interests and his family in Montclair, New Jersey, but not for long. When he learned that he would be the Yankees’ manager for the 1976 season, Billy Martin’s first call was to ask his former teammate to become a coach. (“Yogi’s a rare breed,” said the former Yankee second baseman.)

Martin came and went as manager (and came again), but Berra remained a Yankee coach for the next eight seasons, providing some stability to the tumultuous reign of George Steinbrenner. The same attributes that made Yogi a popular player contributed to his high standing as a coach. “I think an hour with him,” said Yankee pitcher Catfish Hunter, “can make you feel good all day.”

Steinbrenner no doubt appreciated Berra’s appeal. And so, when the team faltered under Martin’s leadership in 1983, the Yankees’ principal owner asked Berra to replace him for the 1984 season. The news was well received in the press, but the results were disappointing. The Yankees finished third, and Steinbrenner was not pleased. Still, the Yankees’ principal owner made it clear that there would no change in management for the new season. “Yogi will be the manager this year, period,” he told the press in February 1985. “A bad start will not affect Yogi’s status either.” Reassuring words that were soon forgotten when the Yankees began the season with a record of six wins and ten losses. Yankee general manager Clyde King called Berra after a night game in Chicago to tell him that Billy Martin would be managing the team for its next game in Texas.

To the press, Berra was nonchalant about his firing. “What’s the use of getting angry?” he told one sportswriter. But he was bitter about the way he had been fired, saying that Steinbrenner—not some underling—should have been the one to call with the news. And so he vowed never to step foot inside Yankee Stadium again as long as Steinbrenner was the team’s owner.

In the meantime, he spent a few years as a coach for the Houston Astros and then had his autobiography published. That was followed by an almost endless stream of best-selling books that capitalized on Yogi’s penchant for malapropisms. With the popularity of his books, it was only natural that Aflac—a company that provided insurance for disabled workers—enlist Yogi’s services to promote its name in humorous television commercials that featured a talking duck. (In later describing to Bobby Richardson how the commercials were filmed, Yogi took care to explain, “You know, the duck doesn’t really talk.”)

However much the books and commercials contributed to his fame and income, Yogi took more satisfaction from the museum established in his honor at Montclair State University in New Jersey. The museum not only houses Berra’s memorabilia but also provides a learning center for children of all ages. “He is very, very proud of it,” said Dave Kaplan, who has been the museum’s director since its founding.

Just as the museum was opening its doors in 1998, Yogi received a telephone call from Suzyn Waldman, a Yankee broadcaster, asking whether reconciliation with George Steinbrenner might be possible. “Yogi was a little suspicious at first,” said Kaplan. “He thought it was just another scheme to get him to come back to Yankee Stadium.” Berra finally consented, and it was agreed that the Yankee owner would meet his former manager at the museum at five p.m. on January 5, 1999. The appointed hour came and went without Steinbrenner’s appearance. At five minutes after five o’clock, a very nervous Steinbrenner walked in through the museum’s back door accompanied only by his driver. Yogi glanced down at his watch, looked up at Steinbrenner, and said, “You’re late.” Everyone laughed, and the tension was suddenly lifted.

Yogi, Carmen, and George then retreated to Kaplan’s office (later referred to by participants as “Camp David”). “You know, Yogi,” Steinbrenner confessed, “what I did fourteen years ago when I fired you and the manner in which I did was probably the worst mistake I ever made in baseball. I hope you will look into your heart and forgive me. We want you back at Yankee Stadium.” Yogi had received what he wanted and was gracious in response. “George,” he said, “I’ve made a lot of mistakes too.” The two Yankee stalwarts shook hands and hugged.

Thus began a new era in Yogi Berra’s life. He became an assistant to the Yankee owner and would make appearances at events, talk with Yankee general manager Brian Cashman about a variety of topics, and provide advice at spring training (during the month of March) and during the season as well. “He is like a clubhouse rat,” said Kaplan, who would drive Yogi to the stadium. “He just loves that whole atmosphere and being with the guys.”

Health issues began to arise as Yogi aged. His physician diagnosed an arrhythmia shortly before he turned seventy. Although it was not life-threatening, Yogi was sufficiently concerned to change some habits. No longer would he smoke. Drinking was curtailed to a daily glass of vodka. And exercise became a daily ritual.

He continues to attend baseball fantasy camps and spends the month of January playing golf in Palm Springs. And—especially surprising for someone who never made it into high school (let alone out of high school)—he continues to enjoy the status of being one of the country’s most quoted individuals.

 

Andy Carey and Casey Stengel continued to argue about the third baseman’s batting style after 1956. “Carey and Casey cannot get together on the batter Andy really is,” said one sportswriter in 1957. “Carey thinks he is a power hitter and swings for the circuit. Casey insists that Andy must learn to hit with the pitch.”

₁₂
The Alameda native had some marginal success in 1958 (twelve home runs and a .286 batting average in 102 games), but life took an unexpected turn shortly after the 1959 season began. Andy noticed some spots on his face and suspected measles. “You’ll wish it was measles before it’s over,” said the doctor. The doctor knew what he was talking about. The condition was not measles but mononucleosis, a debilitating illness that stayed with him the remainder of the season and left him unable to play. (“He was weak as a kitten,” Gil McDougald remembered.)

Carey geared up for the 1960 season with a daily dose of vitamin B
₁₂
, but it was too little, too late. The Yankees now had Clete Boyer, a twenty-three-year-old prospect who was a better glove man at third base than Andy. And so Stengel came to him one day toward the end of May and simply said, “Well, Carey, we just traded you to Kansas City.”

Carey enjoyed only moderate success with the Athletics but seemed to be doing better with the White Sox in 1961. (“I was hitting the shit out of the ball,” he remembered.) And then he sustained a painful injury after sliding into second base in one game. His batting average sank from .340 to .266, and his thoughts drifted to a life outside baseball.

The Philadelphia Phillies sent him a contract for the 1962 season, but the thirty-year-old Carey decided to send it back unsigned. Andy already had many other interests he wanted to pursue, including a position as a stockbroker with a Los Angeles firm. There was the personal side of it too. Lucy had all but abandoned her acting career, and Andy believed that he should also be at their Southern California home with the family (which now included a two-year-old daughter in addition to his five-year-old son). “This kid has definitely decided to give up the game,” Phillies manager Gene Mauch told a sportswriter who inquired about Carey’s status. “He wants to be home with his wife and family.”

There was, however, a qualification to Carey’s decision to retire. As he later told
The Sporting News
, “Lucy and I had decided that . . . I would play only with the Dodgers or [the Anaheim] Angels.” And so, as Mauch was telling the press that Carey was hanging up his spikes, the Dodgers were announcing that they had purchased the former Yankee’s contract from the White Sox.

Carey saw very little action with the Dodgers. In fact, the season’s most memorable moment was a hitless appearance during the team’s first game in Philadelphia. Andy Carey was not a well-loved figure in the City of Brotherly Love. He had rejected an opportunity to play for the Phillies with talk about retirement and then signed a contract to play with the Dodgers. Not surprisingly, there were boos and catcalls when he stepped into the batter’s box to pinch-hit with the bases loaded. And when he struck out, the fans rose with cheers and applause. “That was,” Carey later said with amusement, “the only time I got a standing ovation.”

The Dodgers released Carey on October 19, 1962—the day after his thirty-first birthday. Still, there was much satisfaction in his new life. Business flourished, his children got older, and baseball became an almost forgotten part of his past. But the satisfaction was short-lived. By 1974, he and Lucy were divorced, and Andy was on the road to a second marriage with Carolyn Long.

Maintaining good relations with Lucy after the divorce was understandably difficult. The challenge, Andy soon learned, was to retain the love of his two teenage children. They were apparently convinced that their father had made a bad decision for the wrong reason. And so they would have nothing to do with him—a separation that pained their father and caused untold guilt when Jimmy died in tragic circumstances in California in February 1980 at the age of twenty-two. Andy believed that, in some indirect way, he was responsible for his son’s death, and never would he discuss the circumstances of the incident with anyone but his closest family members.

In the meantime, his divorce from Lucy coincided with a change in business careers. The securities business was forsaken for a fishing business in the Pacific Islands, and, when that failed, he returned to the United States to pursue a career in insurance, which, like the securities business, required a license. (“I think,” said Carey years later, “I’ve had every license known to man.”) That business prospered and, for a time, so did his marriage with Carolyn. But after the arrival of two children, that marriage floundered as well. By the time the millennium had passed, Andy Carey was a single man again.

He had already known Susie Parker as a friend for a couple of years when they began to date. He invited her to a golf tournament in May 2002, and the marriage was held on June 14 of that year.

In the meantime, Carey’s business interests were augmented by appearances at card shows because, as Carey had learned almost from the first days of retirement, being a former Bronx Bomber had its benefits. “They always remember you with the Yankees,” he later said. And, as the years went by, it became a humbling honor to remember the prominent Yankees who had been his teammates—Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra, and Whitey Ford. “Imagine a young kid,” he would later say, “and I’m playing on a team with all these Hall of Famers. I look back and think I was the luckiest guy in the world.”

Unfortunately, his luck did not hold out. In the spring of 2005, he slipped on the stairs in his Newport Beach villa and fell down. Although seventy-four, Carey had been physically active and should have weathered the incident without serious injury. But the fall precipitated physical repercussions that almost defy explanation. He became paralyzed from the waist down and could not remember anything—even, according to his wife, Susie, the two children by Carolyn Long “that he would live and die for.”

The doctors identified the cause as “psychological paralyzation”—Andy’s physical response to the guilt he continued to experience over the estrangement from his first two children with Lucy and, more important, the premature death of his son Jimmy.

The road to recovery was a slow and painful one. “He had to learn how to do everything all over again,” Susie explained. “How to walk, how to brush his teeth, how to talk.” But progress was made, and while he has not regained his prior form, Andy is now able to play golf and talk about those days when he wore Yankee pinstripes.

 

Jim Gilliam remained an integral part of the Dodger team for many years after 1956. Although he never batted above .282 in any of those years, he continued to command respect for his ability to get on base through walks as well as hits, to steal bases, and to play almost flawlessly in the field. “Gilliam’s trouble,” said one sportswriter on the eve of the 1959 World Series, “seems to be he’s too steady a player. He performs at such a consistently high standard, day in and day out, that he becomes monotonous.”

That consistent performance—and Gilliam’s willingness to sacrifice his own preferences for the team’s good—drew criticism when the Dodgers battled the San Francisco Giants for the pennant in 1962 (ultimately won by the Giants in a three-game play-off series). The criticism arose from Alston’s decision to have Gilliam bat second in the lineup behind shortstop Maury Wills, who had an extraordinary ability to steal bases (and would break Ty Cobb’s 1915 record of ninety-six steals in a season with 104 in 1962). Gilliam would often take a pitch he would otherwise swing at if he saw that Wills was running toward second for an attempted steal. “Out of the corner of my eye,” he later explained, “I might see Maury got a good jump on the pitcher, and I’d let the ball go by.” Conversely, if Wills did not get a good jump, he would, as Buzzie Bavasi later explained, “foul the pitch off”—and thus give Wills another chance to make a steal.