Driving Mr. Yogi

by Harvey Araton

  He rode the elevator down to the clubhouse with Larsen, stopping in Torre’s office to say, “My day and Don Larsen’s here, this was great.” Then they went to congratulate the man of the hour. They took plenty of photos, Cone wanting to make sure he had every base covered for his own collection and posterity.

  On the day the Yankees were honoring number 8, with the number painted on the grass behind the plate, Cone learned that he had delivered exactly 88 pitches to Girardi. “It was kind of like a miracle,” he said later.

  Cone would go 2–5 for the rest of that season, 4–14 the next. He came to believe that as a largely spent former all-star, he had been inspired by Berra to turn back the clock. Nor was it lost on Cone that Larsen had been a marginal major-league pitcher, 81–91 over fourteen seasons. In the twilight of his own career, Cone had become Don Larsen.

  While they celebrated in the clubhouse, Cone introduced Larsen to his marketing agent, Andrew Levy. Fresh in the pantheon of all-time Yankees performances, Cone told Larsen that perhaps Levy could help him out, assuming that Larsen had never really cashed in on his perfect game, at least by contemporary marketing standards. Cone was right; the extent of Larsen’s “haul” over the years had been a few measly dollars per autograph.

  In no time, a new business partnership was born. Levy signed Larsen as a client, increasing his bookings and teaming him up with Cone on occasion. And when the new Yankee Stadium opened in 2009, Levy purchased a private sanctuary there in which to entertain his clients. He named it the Perfect Suite.

  With his museum open for business, Berra found new pathways to Yankees lore. In November, he hosted Larsen, Cone, Girardi, and Jorge Posada—who had caught David Wells’s 1998 perfect game against Minnesota—for a panel discussion in front of a theater every bit as jammed as it had been ten months earlier for Steinbrenner and Berra. Wells was unable to attend due to a case of gout, but all were present for the closing of the old Yankee Stadium in September 2008. A “perfect photo” hangs in Berra’s museum.

  Berra’s return to the Yankees created a revival for him as well, including a spate of books by him and about him. The week before Cone’s perfect game, he had signed a two-year deal to join the advisory board of an online auction house specializing in collectibles—and that was apart from a website that his son Tim was about to launch to sell Berra merchandising, including Yogi-autographed stuffed toy bears for $450 apiece.

  Some Berra keepsakes were not for sale and never would be. One of them was the prize photo Girardi left the museum with—of Yogi holding his daughter, Serena, who was just a couple of months old. Another was the mitt Berra had borrowed to catch the ceremonial toss from Larsen. Girardi asked Berra to sign it, and he took it home as a souvenir of what felt like a day of magic—even to Berra, who had already lived a baseball lifetime in what felt like his own fantasy kingdom.

  On the way home from the game, Yogi kept repeating to Carmen, “Can you believe it—a perfect game on my day?” It was hard to believe. But whatever the explanation, it was the best gift the Yankees ever gave him.

  Down in Lafayette, Guidry watched the ceremony, Larsen to Berra, and could see how much Yogi enjoyed the moment. The smile—he knew that Berra didn’t waste many—gave his feelings away.

  Guidry had been excited for his old mentor from the time he had flipped on ESPN to learn of George Steinbrenner’s apology on that January night six months earlier. He couldn’t help but laugh and say to himself, “Goddamn, that old son of a bitch beat the odds.” Who else could have pulled off such a coup?

  “For me, I already knew Yogi had integrity, but I think George found out just how much he had over those fourteen years,” Guidry said. “I think he miscalculated Yogi. I think what he didn’t understand was that Yogi was different from all the guys he had hired and fired, and that showed by the fact that George wound up going to meet Yogi at his place, not the other way around.”

  Talking about Berra brought a glint to Guidry’s eyes, a conviction to his words. “If Yogi had never come back, I wouldn’t have been disappointed in him, because he stood up for what he felt was right, and whether Yogi was at the stadium or not, he was the Yankees,” he said. “He is the Yankees.”

  In Guidry’s mind, that was never plainer than on Yogi Berra Day, when Guidry went back in the house and Bonnie practically screamed the moment he walked through the door that David Cone was pitching a perfect game! Guidry was disoriented at first—“He’s what?”—but he was quickly riveted to the television, forgetting for the moment how the day at the stadium had begun.

  Both he and Bonnie could barely contain themselves—he as a pitcher who understood the incredible pressure Cone had to be feeling, and she as a pitcher’s wife ready to condemn the poor fielder who might blow the game for him.

  When Brosius squeezed the last out, Guidry’s first thought was that the outcome was as much about Berra as it was about anyone. It was a message from an authority much higher than the commissioner telling Steinbrenner and the world that he had done the right thing and here was his reward.

  “You know, everybody always says that Yogi is lucky, but I don’t think it is luck,” Guidry said, nodding, affirming his own contention. “I think it’s karma, and I’ll tell you something else, and I honestly believe this: if he wasn’t there, it wouldn’t have happened. It just wouldn’t have happened.”

  Not that Berra was much interested in taking credit, at least not any more than for what he could contribute as one man on a roster of many. For him, it was always about the team—and one team in particular. As such, July 18, 1999, could best be explained by the most famous threads in American sports.

  “Those pinstripes,” Berra said, “they make you do something.”

  5. Campers

  George Steinbrenner owned a hotel. Ron Guidry had a truck. The transformation of a baseball mentorship into a forever friendship was launched on the itinerant details of spring training life.

  In the early days of the Yankees’ 2000 camp, Yogi Berra was due to touch down in Tampa to begin the next and most natural phase of his reconciliation with the team. While the previous season had presented endearing occasions—throwing out and catching first pitches, suiting up for Old-Timers’ Day, and being introduced by the godlike intonations of Bob Sheppard—ritualistic formalities weren’t what Berra had yearned for over the past fourteen years.

  “My dad never felt like he wasn’t a part of the Yankees and would never have wanted to go back to the stadium just for a standing ovation,” Dale Berra said.

  But not being around the guys, in the clubhouse, in uniform, now that was painful. That’s what he missed.

  And then Steinbrenner, still basking in the goodness of his gesture from the previous winter, called in early 2000 with another proposal for his new best friend. Go to spring training, the Boss implored. Get back on the field. “I want you to look at our catchers,” he said.

  The offer excited Berra to the point that it was all he could do not to run to the closet and pack a bag, months in advance. He suspected and hoped that his focus as a guest instructor or adviser or whatever the Yankees would call him would be on Jorge Posada, who had become the number one catcher and was slated to carry an even heavier burden with the departure of Joe Girardi to the Cubs.

  Posada—a strong, switch-hitting onetime minor-league infielder—was still considered a work in progress. As a former catcher, Joe Torre had mentored him behind the plate, but a manager had a multitude of responsibilities and only so much time to devote to one player. Berra would get the chance to observe Posada’s mechanics up close and personal over a period of a few weeks.

  This would not be his first trip to the Yankees’ complex in Tampa, where the team had relocated from Fort Lauderdale in 1996, eleven years into the Berra boycott. Weeks after Steinbrenner’s apology in January 1999, he had dropped by for a day while in Florida with Carmen. He’d kibitzed with Derek Jeter and outfielder Bernie Williams, telling Williams he had never been able to play guitar because
his fingers were too fat. He’d watched an intrasquad game while perched between Torre and bench coach Don Zimmer. He’d worn a Yankees cap that Torre had graciously placed on his head.

  But his new assignment was different. It was special. It would put him in the clubhouse on a daily basis, back in full uniform, cap to cleats. He would watch exhibition games from the dugout. Finally, after fourteen years, he would be a Yankee with the Yankees.

  As January surrendered to February, and as the traditional countdown to pitchers and catchers intensified, Berra couldn’t wait to hit the road and to hear the familiar sounds of spring training—the banter in the clubhouse, the clomping of players on their way to the batting cages, the smack of ball making angry contact with glove.

  All he needed was his plane ticket, his hotel reservation, and a ride to the hotel from the airport in Tampa. On the morning of his departure, he asked Joni Bronander, who handled event planning for his museum and who had had Guidry’s DRIVING MR. YOGI cap custom-made, if a limousine would be waiting for him.

  As a matter of fact, she said, Ron Guidry called and said that he will be there to get you.

  “Gator?” he asked.

  Yes, Bronander said. That Ron Guidry.

  “When we found out that he was coming, everybody started looking forward to it,” Guidry said. “I mean, we’re not talking about John Doe here; we’re talking about Yogi Berra.”

  He had heard that morning of Berra’s impending arrival in the afternoon and thought it would be nice if someone Berra actually knew showed up to greet him, as opposed to an anonymous driver. Berra, after all, was now by consensus proclamation “the Greatest Living Yankee” following the death of Joe DiMaggio the previous year, but Berra didn’t exactly welcome the moniker.

  “What about Whitey and Phil?” he said when the subject came up, referring to his pals Ford and Rizzuto. “They’re pretty good, you know.”

  Berra was the opposite of DiMaggio, who wore the appellation like the most ostentatious bling and demanded reverence from everyone within a two-hundred-mile radius. When the Yankees dared introduce Mickey Mantle after him during one Old-Timers’ Day—to spare DiMaggio the wait through prolonged applause for the recently retired Mick—Joe D. wailed as if they had moved his monument into the men’s room.

  When Guidry played, he liked to observe the old-timers as they got reacquainted and mingled in the clubhouse. “When Joe D. and Yogi were both there, he had more people talking to him than there were talking to Joe D., I can tell you that,” Guidry said.

  Berra was an entirely different breed from DiMaggio, almost oblivious to the impact his return to spring training would have on the clubhouse. “We were all thrilled he was coming back and was going to be with us on a daily basis,” said Joe Torre. “It felt like a special day, a holiday. We all wanted to do whatever we could to make him feel comfortable.”

  For a man of unyielding habit, Berra was facing adjustments of his own, having been away for so long. He didn’t know his way around the complex, much less the Tampa area. The staff was unfamiliar, the broadcasters were different, and the players barely knew him.

  At least Steinbrenner was still perched in his box. Torre and two of his coaches, Mel Stottlemyre and Don Zimmer, were baseball lifers with whom Berra was at ease. And the guest camp instructors were all players he had coached in the late seventies. If there was one commodity the Yankees never seemed to run short of, it was retired legends, certified champions, to remind their current stars of what had come before them. It was one of the sweetest parts of spring training, the old guard again in pinstripes.

  In fact, Steinbrenner asked Guidry back before he’d stepped one foot out the door following his retirement press conference in July 1989. The Boss had never forgotten how Guidry, at the height of his success as a starting pitcher in 1979 and only three years after Steinbrenner himself had questioned his character, had volunteered to pitch out of the bullpen as the closer after Goose Gossage tore a ligament in the thumb of his pitching hand while roughhousing in the clubhouse with catcher Cliff Johnson. “First he’s for the Yankees, second he’s for Guidry,” Steinbrenner had raved. “Would that every Yankee act like him.”

  For better or worse, Steinbrenner had a long memory when it came to his ballplayers. In Guidry’s case, it was all for the better. After he finished his retirement press conference, he was handed a note from the Boss that read: “I’d like to see you in my office after the interviews.” Guidry rode the elevator to the owner’s lair, where Steinbrenner asked him a favor.

  “What the hell could I possibly do for you?” Guidry said.

  “I’d like you to continue to come to spring training,” Steinbrenner said. “Be there for me, for the organization. Just walk around, look at the pitchers. One thing I know is that you’ll say what you think, because you always have.”

  Guidry couldn’t argue with Steinbrenner on that point. At age thirty-eight, with a career record of 170–91, he still believed he could help the Yankees on the mound and had told them as much. They had apparently disagreed, but he wasn’t bitter. He had achieved everything he’d wanted to do in baseball. But he still felt like a Yankee, and the commitment to Steinbrenner would only take him away from Lafayette for a few weeks. What the hell, he told the Boss. Sure, he’d go to spring training.

  The following February and for every February after that, with the exception of the strike year, 1995, he’d made the familiar drive to Tampa, put on number 49, and gone to work for managers—Dallas Green, Bucky Dent, Stump Merrill, Buck Showalter—who came and went with a mind-numbing frequency while the franchise tried to pull itself together.

  By 2000, with Torre entrenched as the paternal face of New York sports, the Yankees were a far more stable and successful organization than the one Guidry had left. They had three championships in four years, and they had a revered nucleus of players that reminded him of his late-seventies group. True, the Bronx was no longer burning, and no one confused the clubhouse with the borough’s famed zoo. But Torre’s Yankees had just as much competitive zeal and professional commitment as Billy Martin’s, with far fewer headaches.

  If Guidry could still revel in dressing next to former teammates such as Goose Gossage, Graig Nettles, and Mickey Rivers, there was also an inescapable ache in his heart that spring. The previous fall, weeks before the Yankees’ sweep of the Atlanta Braves in the World Series, they had lost yet another iconic member of the extended family when Catfish Hunter had died of complications related to ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.

  Guidry loved the like-minded Hunter—a no-nonsense strike thrower and incorrigible wisecracking country boy from North Carolina. He knew how much bodily dysfunction and pain Hunter had endured in the years after he was stricken. His death was still shattering, in some ways as difficult to fathom as Thurman Munson’s tragic plane crash in 1979.

  These were Guidry’s baseball brothers, not only great Yankees who died too young. If ever he needed a dose of Berra’s unique wisdom, his way with words, it was now.

  Berra was also hurt by Hunter’s passing. He had admired the pitcher’s tenacity and his straightforward demeanor. But even on the subject of death, Berra could charm the melancholy out of anyone, just as he had Whitey Ford at one Old-Timers’ Day. Turning to his old pal while the list of that year’s deceased scrolled down the scoreboard, Berra had confided, “Boy, I hope I never see my name up there.”

  Berra had a reservation to stay at Steinbrenner’s hotel, the Bay Harbor Inn, in the Westshore district of Tampa, a few minutes’ drive from the airport and the Yankees’ complex. Guidry just happened to be lodging at an apartment complex right down the road. He didn’t like staying in hotels, preferring to have a kitchen where he could prepare and enjoy a home-cooked meal, especially when Bonnie came to visit. Little did he know that the situational arrangement—meaning his proximity to Berra—would demand regular dining out, a routine that would become as much a part of spring training as pitchers and catchers.

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p; “There was no real plan when he came in,” Guidry said. “It just made sense [for me to pick him up at the airport], because I knew I’d be done at the ballpark by the time he landed and I was staying right there anyway.”

  Berra was thrilled to see Guidry and, as always, couldn’t help but marvel at how he managed to look more in shape than many of the active players.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked.

  “No, what are you doing here?” Guidry replied, already tweaking Berra for abandoning his boycott.

  Berra appreciated Guidry’s wry sense of humor. They had a good laugh and shook hands. Guidry loaded Berra’s bags into his truck, drove Berra to the hotel, and helped him inside. But he sensed that Berra was a bit uneasy, a little unsure of himself.

  When Berra remarked that he hadn’t packed certain items that he would need, toiletries and the like, Guidry suggested that they go shopping.

  “What are you doing for supper?” Guidry said on the way back.

  Berra shrugged. It had occurred to Guidry that fourteen years was a long time to be away from spring training. In 1985, over in Fort Lauderdale, where the Yankees used to train, Berra would have had his routines, his favorite places to eat, his coaches and a staff member or two to keep him company.

  “Well, we got a good place right over there,” Guidry said, referring to a Caribbean restaurant called the Bahama Breeze across the street.

  Hungry following his trip, Berra liked that idea. They made a date for dinner that would, in essence, never end.

  “There was really nobody else that he had to sit and talk with, to be around after the day at the ballpark,” Guidry said. “I knew that, so I just told him, ‘I’ll pick you up, we’ll go out to supper,’ and that’s how it started.”

  Berra had worn three major-league uniforms in his life—those of the Yankees, the Mets, and the Astros. But the pinstripes, he admitted, “always felt right.” They always fit best and still did at age seventy-four.