Driving Mr. Yogi

by Harvey Araton

  “That’s for you, buddy,” Guidry said.

  Berra and Guidry passed the next hour doing what they usually did in each other’s company—talking baseball and teasing each other—the storied Yankees pitcher and iconic catcher drawing on an endless reservoir of camaraderie. When it was time for Guidry to go, he leaned close to Berra and said, “See you again in spring training, OK, Yog?”

  Berra nodded. Of course he would.

  “You’ll pick me up at the airport?” he said.

  After all these years, did he really have to ask? The answer, Guidry knew, was yes—Berra had to ask, over and over, until Guidry was ready to scream.

  In the weeks and months ahead, as Berra plotted his Florida journey, his rite of baseball renewal, he would badger Guidry by phone to quiz him on a multitude of arrangements. Carmen, meanwhile, began to have doubts about whether her husband was in any condition to make the trip, to be away from home and from her for weeks on end.

  As is often the case with the elderly, the fall had a permanent effect on the man she had been devoted to for six-plus decades, having married him in 1949. The facial cuts had healed, and he was walking again without pain. But he moved more slowly, spoke more softly, and no longer drove or tested the theory that the Jaguar had a protective bubble around it when he was at the wheel.

  As spring training drew closer, Carmen picked up the telephone one day, dialed Guidry’s number, and found herself on the line with his wife, Bonnie. “Maybe you should tell Ronnie not to be encouraging Yogi to go to Florida,” Carmen said, blunt as ever.

  Bonnie Guidry didn’t quite know how to respond. She and Ron loved the Berras more than anyone they’d known around the Yankees. She considered Carmen a special friend, too. She had gone out in the city with Carmen several times, once taking in a show with Carmen and Yogi’s adult granddaughter Lindsay.

  Bonnie understood why Carmen was apprehensive. Really, she did. But she also knew how much Yogi loved spring training and how crushing it would be for him not to go, especially this of all years, given the franchise’s losses of the previous summer. With Steinbrenner gone, he’d want to be there to help with the healing.

  “Carmen,” she said, “you know that something could happen to Yogi anywhere. But if anything were to happen in spring training, at least you know he would be doing something he absolutely loves. And you know that Ron will take care of him.”

  That Carmen did know. That much she could count on.

  Waiting by his truck, smoothing his mustache, Guidry wondered what the next few weeks were going to be like. No doubt, he figured, this spring training would be much harder than any previous one. Berra was going to need more looking after than usual. Ron had spoken to Carmen after the decision had been made that Yogi would come—which, truth be told, Guidry had never doubted.

  “You see, his whole world has always revolved around the game, outside of his family,” Guidry said. “Baseball has always been his life. It’s what the game means to him more than what he means to the game from other people’s eyes. But he doesn’t look at it that way. He just looks at the damn game, ’cause this is what he knows more about than anything else. And I’ve always been afraid if you took that away from him, how that would affect him. Because when you take away something from somebody at that age that he loves so much, they may just quit, and I don’t want that to happen. Nobody wants that to happen.”

  Guidry sighed at the mere thought of spring training without Berra—the Yankees without Berra—before pushing it away.

  “So I spoke to Carmen about that,” he said. “I love her, too, but I wasn’t afraid to say, ‘You have to let him come.’ She didn’t get mad, not at all. I think she just knew this is how it’s got to be.”

  Guidry was also a realist; he knew that his friend had aged more in six months than he had over the past six years. The recovery from the fall had required a good deal of inactivity. “When you take a person of his age and you take away six months, it’s hard to recuperate and pick up where he left off,” he said.

  So he waited anxiously for Berra, whose family had prearranged for assistance from the gate to the baggage carousel, where Guidry was supposed to be waiting, or at least had been in the past. He knew that with Berra, if you did something once in a particular way, it had to be done that way for all time.

  From outside, peering through the windows, Guidry finally spotted Yogi, a little more slouched than he remembered, looking around for him, already a little flustered. Berra was wearing a blue blazer with an American flag pin on the lapel and a blue-and-white-checked sweater underneath. The coat he would not need in Tampa was draped over his left arm.

  Soon Berra was ushered outside by the airline attendant, and his face brightened when he spotted the familiar white truck and Guidry waiting on the sidewalk. Guidry took the bags from the attendant—two moderate-size suitcases, one with the Yankees’ familiar interlocking “NY” logo.

  “How come you didn’t come in?” Berra asked, before proceeding to recite the itinerary for the rest of the day—hotel check-in, shopping, supper, and so on.

  Guidry rolled his eyes and complained aloud about what he had gotten himself into by serving as Berra’s personal valet.

  “Get your ass in the truck,” he barked, and Berra giggled like a little boy on his way to his first ballgame. Guidry reached inside for the dark blue baseball cap with the inscription DRIVING MR. YOGI and placed it atop his neatly combed hair. With Guidry at the wheel and Berra in the passenger seat, they pulled into traffic and drove off on another long adventure together, just as they had for eleven glorious years.

  2. Roots

  Yogi Berra and Ron Guidry first crossed paths in spring training of 1976. Guidry, twenty-five, was trying to build a future for himself as a major-league pitcher before he was too old to be considered a prospect. Berra was a crown jewel of the Yankees’ past, returning as Billy Martin’s bench coach, the first such appointment in the history of the game. For Berra, it was not love at first sight—or strike.

  Sure, Guidry could throw 96 miles per hour, harder than any smallish Yankees pitcher Berra had seen since Lefty Gomez, who retired in 1943. Guidry was two inches short of six feet, weighing in at a touch over 150 pounds—a welterweight after a night of fast-food binging. “But all he had was that fastball,” Berra recalled.

  Guidry arrived on the scene with so little fanfare that Marty Appel, the team’s earnest public relations man, didn’t even bother to prepare a mental dossier on him, as he usually did for new players. Appel didn’t think Guidry would be around long, and neither did Berra. “Skinny kid . . . maybe a lefty relief specialist . . . nothing real special,” Berra remembered thinking.

  Guidry had already been up with the Yankees the previous season when Bill Virdon was the manager and the team was in the back end of a two-year stay at Shea Stadium while its own storied ballpark in the South Bronx was being refurbished. When he walked into the clubhouse on May 20, 1975, he immediately got the third degree from two fellow pitchers—Albert Walter Lyle, the bullpen closer otherwise known as “Sparky,” and Dick Tidrow, whom teammates called “Dirt.”

  “What do they call you, ‘Ronald’?” Lyle asked.

  “Ron, I guess,” Guidry said.

  “You know,” Lyle said, “we don’t go around here calling each other by our Christian names.”

  Guidry gave him an “if you say so” nod.

  “So where ya from?” Tidrow asked.

  Guidry politely answered that he hailed from Lafayette, Louisiana, where there was considerable water and a lot of snakes and alligators. Though disappointed to hear that the newbie didn’t have webbed feet to show them, Tidrow went ahead and christened Guidry with the nickname he would answer to for the rest of his life.

  “How’s ‘Gator’?” he said.

  Guidry liked the sound of it and happily went out that day to pitch two scoreless innings in his major-league debut against the Red Sox in the second game of a doubleheader the Sox swept.

/>   After ten appearances in 1975, Guidry was sent to the club’s Triple-A Syracuse affiliate when the Yankees broke camp the following spring. He was recalled on May 20, with the Red Sox again in town. When Guidry stepped into Yankee Stadium for the first time, he had “chills and goose bumps that looked like welts”—and he proceeded to absorb a late-game lashing that nearly scarred him forever.

  That game is best remembered for a bench-clearing brawl, the result of Yankees teammate Lou Piniella crashing into Carlton Fisk at the plate and then Graig Nettles’s body tossing of Boston’s flaky left-hander Bill Lee. Nettles separated Lee’s shoulder. Guidry was summoned by Martin in the eighth inning with two outs and Boston holding a 4–2 lead.

  He got out of the eighth and promptly surrendered four hits and four runs in the ninth, including a two-run homer to Carl Yastrzemski. Ever compassionate and patient with young pitchers, George Steinbrenner bellowed to anyone within half a mile of him that Guidry “didn’t have any guts.” What Steinbrenner didn’t know was that Guidry had pitched out of the Syracuse bullpen four straight days prior to reporting and had asked Martin for a day or two off. Notorious for overusing pitchers, Martin called on him anyway.

  Guidry was promptly banished to the bowels of the bullpen and then ordered back to Syracuse several weeks later. Angered by the dismissal, he called Steinbrenner’s office, determined to discuss his future. When he received no answer, he got in the car with his wife, Bonnie, and began driving home to Louisiana, convinced that he was wasting his time and would wind up pushing thirty with no career and no means of supporting the child Bonnie was carrying.

  About a hundred miles into the trip, somewhere in Pennsylvania on Interstate 80, Bonnie Guidry spoke up: “You’ve never quit at anything you thought you could do!”

  Guidry drove another mile or two, then asked her if she could handle all the uncertainty and packing. Yes, she said. He turned the car around, reported to Syracuse, worked on the hard slider that Lyle had taught him, dominated hitters there, and returned to the Yankees later that summer.

  Martin and the coaches could see that he was growing as a pitcher and that he had a quiet determination to succeed. But the shortsighted owner still chafed over Guidry’s failure against the Red Sox. That off-season, Steinbrenner lobbied Gabe Paul, his president and general manager, to trade Guidry.

  Paul, the independent-thinking architect of what would become Steinbrenner’s first pennant and World Series champions, gave him an earful. “I’ll agree to it under one condition,” he said. “That you issue a press release saying that I, Gabe Paul, unalterably oppose the trade and that you, George Steinbrenner, insist on it, and that when—not if—Ron Guidry becomes an outstanding major-league pitcher for another team, you take the blame.”

  Startled by Paul’s audacity—along with his certainty—Steinbrenner backed off. Even after Guidry had a poor spring training in 1977, Paul wouldn’t budge, reminding his boss and others of another late-blooming left-hander named Sandy Koufax.

  The 1977 Yankees were defending American League champions, and although they had been swept by Cincinnati’s Big Red Machine in the World Series the previous fall, they were an entertaining mix of character and characters. Reggie Jackson was in the room, stirring the drink and a whole lot of controversy. So were Thurman Munson, Catfish Hunter, Lou Piniella, Mickey Rivers—as colorful and cacophonous a cast as there was in baseball at the time. But back inside the clubhouse for the start of the 1977 season, Guidry was much more impressed with a Yankees icon of yore.

  Yogi Berra just happened to be in the dressing stall two removed from Guidry’s, puffing on a cigarette and pulling up his uniform pants like your average baseball mortal.

  Born in 1950, Guidry came of age when Berra was still swinging at pitches over his head or practically on the ground and whacking them with authority. He was the product of an era when a baseball-loving boy, too young to know death from taxes, could at least count on the Yankees playing in the World Series. From the Cajun-rich southwestern region of Louisiana known as Acadiana, Guidry followed them with a growing curiosity alongside his mother, a rabid Yankees fan.

  On hot summer Saturday afternoons when the Yankees were on national television, Grace Guidry would summon her son inside for lunch and lock the door so that she could focus on the game without having to worry about where her only child—whom she called “B,” short for “Baby”—had run off to.

  Before long, Guidry was a fleet young athlete in his own right, running down balls in center field, like Mickey Mantle, the blond matinee idol. He also threw left-handed, pitching in the youth league, and studied Whitey Ford, the great Yankees southpaw, whenever he pitched in a nationally televised game. But to a preadolescent boy not far removed from Saturday morning cartoons, there was something irresistibly folksy—if not flashy—about Yogi Berra, Ford’s old catcher, who was so firmly committed to his beloved Yankees that he lugged his aging, squat body out to left field to make way for a younger man behind the plate, Elston Howard.

  Guidry was ten when Berra and the Yankees lost game seven of the 1960 World Series to the Pirates in Pittsburgh—considered one of the greatest games ever played. Bill Mazeroski won it for the Pirates when he hit a home run to left field in the ninth inning, a ball that sailed over Berra at his new post and into the stands at Forbes Field. Berra himself hit a three-run homer that day and a hard grounder down the first-base line. First baseman Rocky Nelson fielded the ball and stepped on the bag. Mickey Mantle, who was on first at the time, dove back into the bag ahead of Nelson’s tag, barely avoiding a game-ending double play, while the tying run scored.

  It never took much prodding for that era’s highlights to flood Guidry’s mind—the Yankees’ defeat of the Reds in the 1961 series and the Giants in 1962, followed by the domination of the Dodgers’ Koufax and Don Drysdale in 1963, Berra’s last season as a player. In 1964, rookie manager Berra watched helplessly as Cardinals ace Bob Gibson beat his Yankees in game seven.

  During his time with the Yankees in 1976, seldom pitching and never sure when the trapdoor to the minors would open and swallow him up, Guidry would walk into the clubhouse and head straight for the row of stalls on the right-hand wall. Lyle had the prime real estate in the corner, Tidrow was next, and then came Guidry, Howard, and Berra.

  In his state of major-league limbo, sandwiched between present-day pitchers and yesteryear’s catchers, Guidry mostly kept to himself. “I was just a new kid on the block,” he said. “You tell everybody hello, but that’s about it. You don’t walk around strutting your stuff, because you got nothing to strut.”

  Guidry would occasionally steal a glance to his right in the direction of Howard and Berra, eavesdropping with the hope that he might learn something. He tried to convince himself that he was really a Yankee, just as they were, but that was futile. “I’m looking at Yogi not as a former player but as my hero,” he said.

  Once in a while, Berra would stroll by and ask, “You OK, kid?” To Berra, everyone younger than him was named “kid.”

  “Yep,” Guidry would say, desperately wanting to invite Berra to sit down and share from the vault of pitching wisdom he had collected from the crouch over so many years. Instead, Guidry was deferential to the point of barely rising above mute.

  On April 29, with Martin in need of an emergency starter in a home game against the Seattle Mariners, he turned to his quiet southpaw. Guidry responded with 8⅓ innings of shutout ball, 8 strikeouts, and only 2 walks. Lyle closed out the 3–0 victory.

  Soon after, Guidry found himself in the rotation, pitching every five days, making a visionary of Gabe Paul, and earning another nickname from Yankees broadcaster Phil Rizzuto. “Louisiana Lightning” became part of the Yankees’ nomenclature, and along with it came a totally different clubhouse vibe.

  “You start winning games, stopping a losing streak, and your teammates start looking at you in a different light,” he said. “You’re sitting in the same spot where almost no one said a word to you, but now
they’re asking you little stuff.”

  How’s your arm?

  Hey, Gator, want a sandwich?

  Need a coffee?

  Guidry looked at the others differently as well, especially Berra. He began to feel more involved and entitled.

  “Now that I’m earning my stripes and I’m starting to think maybe I can say something to him,” Guidry said. “I’m telling myself, ‘You know what, he’s not playing anymore, and if he wants to get another World Series opportunity, he may actually be thinking that I’m a guy who might help him.’ I’m thinking that maybe this is how it all works, so if I say something to him, he’ll want to talk to me.”

  But not necessarily on cue.

  “You got Munson over there, one of the best catchers in baseball,” Berra replied to one of Guidry’s early entreaties.

  Guidry persisted, convinced that Berra was only trying to push him closer to Munson, the all-star, and not brushing him off.

  “What you start to realize is that he’s not that open a person, especially with ordinary people,” Guidry said. “But we’re not ordinary people; we’re teammates. And he’s sitting there, and he’s starting to see in my face that I really want to ask these things, because I know there’s never been any question that’s ever been asked that he doesn’t know something about. He’s seen it all, done it all, so he starts to think, Here we go again, just like with Whitey Ford and Mel Stottlemyre, another young guy who maybe I can help.”

  So Guidry, before facing the imposing lineup of the Kansas City Royals in mid-June, looked over at Berra and blurted out, “Jesus Christ, George Brett is smokin’—how the hell are we getting him out?”

  Puffing away on a cigarette, Berra looked up, impressed by Guidry’s choice of pronoun.

  “Go up and in, first pitch, see what he does, send a message,” he said. “Then you got opportunities.”