Despite those strong emotional bonds, Pietro and Paulina never understood their youngest son’s obsession with sports. To be sure, it was a way for young children to spend idle time, but it would not, at least so these Italian immigrants thought, lay a foundation for any future as an adult. Seeing little value in sports, they wanted Larry—or “Lawdie,” as Paulina called him in her heavy Italian accent—to focus on his education so he could get a job where he could earn enough as an adult to help support their family and ultimately his own family. And so they were disturbed when Larry told them that he wanted to quit school after finishing the eighth grade.
The request could not have been a complete surprise. Larry never had any interest in academics, would often play hooky, and would rarely do well on tests. (A teacher once said to him in exasperation, “Don’t you know anything?” To which the young student responded, “I don’t even suspect anything.”) Never did he try to tell people otherwise. When someone asked him how he liked school, Larry said, “Closed.”
Pietro and Paulina had a conference with the principal and the parish priest in an effort to dissuade the young student from quitting, but Larry could not be turned aside. “I was a lousy student and pretty stubborn,” he later explained, “and I felt I was wasting my time.” And so, at the age of fourteen, Larry Berra joined the employment rolls in St. Louis.
Not that he could hold down a job—employment always took a backseat to baseball. In each case, the job would last until springtime, and then Larry would take off early to play baseball with his friends when they got out of school. His unexcused absences did not sit well with the employers, and in due course Larry would find himself on the street looking for another job.
None of that interfered with his success on the diamond. Ironically, Larry spent very little time as a catcher in the sandlot games and then with the teams organized by the YMCA and, when he turned sixteen, American Legion teams. It was there that he got his nickname. His friend Jack Maguie Jr. noticed that Larry would always sit on the sidelines with his legs crossed and his arms folded, like a Hindu fakir (and yoga disciple) they had seen in the movies. And so the name stuck.
The other quality that people noticed about Yogi Berra was his batting form. It was very unconventional. Like his good friend Joe Garagiola, Yogi hit left-handed even though he threw right-handed (a quirk that neither Garagiola nor Yogi could ever explain). Coaches and managers tried to talk to Yogi about the need to check his swing if the ball was not in the strike zone. But the instruction never had any impact. Yogi would flail away at balls over his head or below his knees and somehow manage to drive the ball into the outfield for a home run or other extra-base hit. (Ted Williams would later say that Yogi “gave hitting a bad name.” But Williams would also say that Berra was one of the most dangerous hitters in baseball because “he could move the runner, and move him late in the game, like no one else I ever saw play the game.”)
Some critics later said that Yogi was trying to duplicate the batting style of his childhood hero, St. Louis Cardinals outfielder Joe Medwick—a notorious bad ball hitter whose success landed him in the Baseball Hall of Fame and who often bought the local newspaper from Larry on street corners in those early days on the Hill. For his part, Yogi had no complex theories on hitting. When later asked to explain his batting philosophy in a locker room session at one of Mickey Mantle’s fantasy camps long after he had retired, Yogi said, “I see the ball, and I hit the ball.” And that was it. (There was the time when Dodger pitcher Don Newcombe quickly got two strikes on Yogi during a World Series game at Ebbets Field and then threw a ball low and away that was only a foot off the ground. “A waste pitch to everybody but Yogi,” said Garagiola. But Berra—with his unorthodox batting form—reached out for the ball and slammed it over the right-field scoreboard for a home run. As he trotted around the bases, Yogi kept apologizing to an astonished Newcombe, saying, “It wasn’t your fault, Newk.”)
They may have winced at the batting form, but Berra’s coaches and managers could not take issue with the results—which distinguished him from almost all of his peers. “I’ve got a ballplayer out there,” Leo Browne, the manager for Yogi’s American Legion team, would say, “I’d like you to see. He swings at everything in sight. His form is all wrong, but he’s the best hitter I’ve ever seen.”
With endorsements like that, Yogi thought he had a good chance of securing a professional baseball contract when he and Garagiola went to a tryout for the St. Louis Cardinals at Sportsman’s Park in 1942. They caught balls and, as Yogi recalled, “hit the ball pretty good that day.” But Branch Rickey—then the Cardinals’ general manager—said he was impressed only with Garagiola, giving the seventeen-year-old a promise of a $500 bonus when he graduated from high school. There was no similar offer for Garagiola’s good friend. Rickey told Berra that he was “too awkward” and that he “would never become a big league ballplayer.” Yogi was “devastated,” but, on the other hand, he did not regard Rickey’s decision as the last word on his baseball career. “I kept a positive attitude because I thought I was good enough to make it,” Berra later explained. “That rejection only made me more determined.”
Leo Browne was not prepared to accept Rickey’s assessment anymore than Yogi was. So Browne contacted John Schulte, the Yankee bullpen coach who lived in the St. Louis area, and told him about the young prospect on his American Legion team. After consulting Yankee management, Schulte drove down to the Berra home after the 1942 World Series to see if he could strike a deal. “What will it take us to sign you?” Schulte asked the teenager. “$500,” said Yogi. “If I don’t get it, I don’t sign.” Schulte yielded to the demand and said the Yankees’ offer would include $90 a month to play for the Yankees’ Norfolk, Virginia, farm team in the Class B Piedmont League.
Pietro was skeptical about the offer. In his mind, playing games for a living did not seem like a good career path. But Yogi’s three older brothers, who had been forced to abandon their own dreams of careers in professional sports, pressed their father to give his youngest son a chance, and Yogi Berra became the property of the New York Yankees. (Years later, Yogi would never tire of saying that his older brothers were better baseball players than he was and that he would periodically tell his father that he could have been a millionaire if he had allowed them to play professional baseball too. To which his father would always say, “Blame your mother.”)
Yogi’s first professional season was filled with new experiences. To begin with, he was asked to be the team’s catcher—even though his primary experience was in the outfield and at third base. (The first game he caught was at night under lights, and a batter hit a high pop-up in foul territory near the third-base line. Berra flipped off his mask, circled under the ball, and kept yelling to the third baseman, who had approached the ball as well, “I got it, I got it.” “Okay,” said the third baseman. “You got it.” And then the ball landed about ten feet from where Berra was standing.) He also learned that there was a condition to the $500 bonus Schulte had promised—the bonus would be paid at the end of the season if, but only if, Berra had not been cut from the team. It was a lesson about contract negotiations never to be forgotten. “When they gave me the business about not getting the money until I stuck with the ball club for a year,” Yogi later said, “I made up my mind I was going to see to it I got everything that was coming to me from then on.” The Yankees would later learn about that lesson and find that their All-Star catcher was no pushover when it came to the yearly negotiations for the next season’s salary.
In the meantime, Berra had to worry about meeting expenses on a monthly salary of $90. He was able to cajole a few dollars a week out of his mother (who extracted a promise from him not to tell his father). When that proved insufficient, Yogi decided to go on a hunger strike and told his manager one day that he would not play unless he was given some money for food. The manager came through with a few dollars, and in the next two games Yogi had twelve hits (including three home runs) and drove in twenty-three runs. (“When I wasn’t hungry,” he later explained, “I did good.”)
Yogi finished the season with a respectable average and seven home runs (one fewer than the league leader). But he could not look forward to returning the next season. He was drafted into the navy, sent to Bainbridge, Maryland, for basic training, and then to Little Creek, Virginia. One evening after watching a movie, a base commander asked for volunteers to staff a fleet of new thirty-six-foot rocket boats to be used in amphibious landings. Bored with military life, Berra raised his hand, and in due course he was sent to Lido Beach in Long Island and ultimately to England to train for what turned out to be the D-day landing at Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944.
To foot soldiers rushing from amphibious vessels to the shoreline in the early-morning hours of that day, it was a vortex of violence that defied description. But the experience was entirely different to a young seaman on a rocket boat hundreds of yards from shore. As Yogi remembered, the constant barrage of bombs and flares lit up the sky “like fireworks on the Fourth of July.” Entranced by the seeming beauty of the display, the St. Louis native sat up in the boat despite the German gunfire that filled the night. His indiscretion did not escape the attention of the commanding officer. “You better get your damn head down if you want to keep it!” he yelled to Berra. Yogi obeyed the instruction and was able to survive the battle with only minor injury.
Yogi returned to the New London, Connecticut, submarine base after the war and was discharged from military service in May 1946—just as he was turning twenty-one. Even before he was discharged, the Yankees had invited Berra to a workout at the stadium during one of his leaves. The first task was to find a Yankee uniform to wear at the workout. Dressed in his shapeless blue navy uniform with the white cap sitting at a tilt on his head, Yogi went to see clubhouse manager Pete Sheehy. When Berra asked for the uniform, Sheehy looked at him in disbelief. “I guess I don’t look like a ballplayer,” Yogi said with characteristic modesty. “You don’t even look like a sailor,” Sheehy responded.
Sheehy may have been right, but Berra had the last word. Within days of leaving the navy, he joined the Newark Bears, the Yankees’ Triple-A farm team, and, as one sportswriter explained, soon established himself as “one of the league’s most dangerous batters.” In the remaining seventy-seven games of the season, Yogi batted .314 and hit fifteen home runs. In September, the Yankees called Berra up to the parent club for the final week of the 1946 season. Yogi hit a home run off of the Philadelphia Athletics’ Jesse Flores in his first major-league game and then hit another home run in his second game, finishing the week’s sojourn in the big leagues with a .364 average. It was only the beginning—and not just for his baseball career.
Yogi was becoming known as much for his personality as for his performance on the field. “Larry was extremely popular with his Newark teammates,” said one sportswriter in early 1947, “who took every opportunity to rib him.” And how could they not? He had a knack for saying things that caught people off guard and that often made them laugh. (There was the time when Yogi—an avid reader of comic books—was sharing a hotel room with Bear teammate—and future Yankee teammate—Bobby Brown, who was reading a textbook in conjunction with his study to become a medical doctor. Tired from his reading, Brown asked Yogi to turn the lights off. Berra demurred, saying that he had to finish the comic book. When he did, Yogi turned to Brown and said, “This was a good story. How did yours come out?”)
Stories of Yogi’s comments spread throughout the baseball world, and in time
The Sporting News
would devote a whole column to “Ber raisms.” “A lot of people thought he wasn’t too quick with his brain,” Bobby Brown said of his former roommate many years later. “But that’s not true. He’s got great intelligence. It’s just that he didn’t have a whole lot of formal education. And if you look at the things that he said, they really mean a lot. It’s just that the words are sometimes a little misused.”
The Yankees were not concerned about any shortcomings in Berra’s verbal skills. Their only interest was to make the most of his considerable talent on the field. Bucky Harris, the Yankees’ manager, thought it would be wise to continue Berra’s development as a catcher during the 1947 season. But it proved to be more challenging than either Harris or Berra would have liked. “He was in tough shape for two reasons,” said Spud Chandler, the first Yankee pitcher to have Berra as a battery mate. “One, he was worried about his catching. And two, he had good reason—he was not a good catcher.” Berra agreed with that assessment. “Yeah, I was bad,” he would later say of those first two years catching in the big leagues. “I stunk.”
Objective evidence supported that assessment. On one occasion he made a wild sidearm throw to second base in an effort to stop a stolen base and beaned the second-base umpire. On another occasion his throw to second was too low and hit the pitcher in the chest. But there were signs of progress—including the time when a St. Louis Browns batter pushed a squeeze bunt toward first base to score the runner on third. Yogi leaped out in front of the plate and completed an unassisted double play by tagging both the batter running to first and the base runner trying to score. (When asked about the play by sportswriters after the game, Berra dismissed the accomplishment, saying, “I just tagged everybody in sight, including the umpire.”)
Berra’s uneven performance behind the plate sometimes forced Harris to leave the young player on the bench, but he would also play Yogi in right field—because, whatever limitations he had as a catcher, Berra had lost none of his ability to swing a bat. Harris tried without success to correct Berra’s habit of reaching for balls out of the strike zone, telling the rookie to think before he swung. It was not useful advice to someone who relied on natural instincts. “How can a guy think and hit at the same time?” Yogi responded. Harris could not quarrel with the rookie’s logic. By the time the 1947 season ended, he had hit a respectable .280 in eighty-three games with eleven home runs (and only twelve strikeouts). More than that, he had experienced the elation of a night planned in his honor by family and friends from the Hill. After a night game against the Browns in St. Louis, the young player was feted with a bevy of gifts from local merchants. Yogi had never previously given a speech, and he became so nervous when he got to the microphone that his planned remarks were all but forgotten. As a result, he ended by thanking everyone “for making this night necessary.”