A Day in the Life of a Baseball Player
In later years Berra would become one of the best signal-callers in the game, calling unexpected pitches here and there. Sometimes he would come back with the same pitch two and three times on a hitter who would be looking for something else. Eventually, many of the pitchers followed his lead and found that the odd little man behind the plate truly knew something of the game. Between Dickey and the pitching staff, Yogi Berra was nudged toward greatness.In the end, though, the pitchers created a monster. Berra still had the immense confidence of Stengel. And in serious run-ins with Raschi and Reynolds, they found Berra could give as good as he got.
Raschi once told Berra in a mound conversation, “Just catch. I’ll pitch.”Another time he said, “Yogi, you just get your Dago ass the hell back behind the plate.”And another time he told the catcher, “Yogi, get the hell out of here with your (expletive deleted) sixth-grade education.”But Berra could get Raschi’s goat as well.“Raschi pitched better when I got him mad,” Berra once said. Berra would approach the mound, which Raschi hated.
Berra recalled one incident, saying to Raschi, “‘You’re supposed to be a pitcher. You been pitchin’ for 15 years, and you can’t even get the ball over.’ And he would get mad at me.” But Raschi would turn his fury into a winning fastball. Berra knew what he was doing.“I think you’re losing it, Vic,” Berra would say, walking toward the mound. “Yogi, you’ll lose your sorry ass right here if you don’t get behind that plate,” Raschi would respond.But their arguments would blow over after the game, and they became longtime friends.Reynolds was also headstrong and intimidating, though he was not as difficult as Raschi.
Once while playing bocce at Berra’s home, Henrich asked Reynolds how he thought he would do in an upcoming game, and when Reynolds replied that he would do well, Henrich asked him why he thought so.Reynolds answered, without a hint of affectation, “Because I am good at all sports.”“After the season I said I was going back to the reservation, and I told him to go back to Dago Hill in St. Louis,” Reynolds said years later. Berra’s relationship with Lopat was different.
Lopat was known as a junkballer who relied on throwing slow curves.“When Lopat was pitching, I didn’t need my catcher’s mitt. A Kleenex did fine. Some days, if he was throwing well, I would need more than one,” Berra said later.Lopat’s favorite game was against Cleveland. It was hot and humid, and in an attempt to get out of their hotel rooms, the players went down to the stadium in Cleveland to take some cool showers and hang around the locker room.
But the Indians were taking early batting practice when no one was around, having their pitching staff throw them slow curves and change-ups. They were knocking the ball over the second baseman’s head. What the Cleveland players didn’t know was that Lopat had seen the whole thing. When Berra came to the park, Lopat rushed to him, saying, “No slow balls today, Yogi. Don’t even call for ’em. Fastballs and sliders only.” Lopat and Berra blew through the lineup the first time through and then reverted to the usual routine when Cleveland started looking for fastballs. Lopat won 5-3.“Counting the screwball and the curve and my fastball, and the speeds I used with each, I figured I had 11 pitches,” Lopat said years later. “Yogi only counted nine. As long as he was calling the pitches and catching them, that was fine with me.”
The one thing Berra held over all their heads was his ability to have them pulled out of games. Stengel had taught Berra a signal—Berra would pick up a small handful of dirt behind the plate, and with that, Stengel would walk out to the mound and the pitcher would eventually be pulled. When Reynolds and Raschi found out, they went ballistic. Reynolds once threatened Berra, saying, “Yogi, if I ever see you give that sign again—ever, even once—I’ll kill you. I mean it, Yogi. I’ll fight you in the clubhouse.”However, neither could deny that Berra’s opinion counted when it mattered most, and he was often kind to them, which is undoubtedly one of the toughest spots a catcher is put in.Early in the season, Stengel slowly shuffled to the mound after Raschi had given up two hits and a walk.“What about him?” Stengel said to Berra, motioning to Raschi.“He’s still got some stuff,” said Berra, “but he’s getting too cautious.” Stengel lifted Raschi and called in Tom Ferrick to close out the win for Raschi.
“I’d have let him stay in if Yogi told me to. The kid knows what the game is about,” Stengel told the press after the game.Many years later, Stengel said, “When he had to go out to the pitcher and tell him what he was doing wrong, he wasn’t bashful and he wasn’t embarrassed and he wasn’t afraid, even if it was those big, famous fellows like Allie Reynolds and Vic Raschi. He went out and he told them, and he usually didn’t have to wait for me or anybody to tell him to do it.”
It’s been alleged that Yogi Berra once said, “All pitchers are liars and crybabies.” But the Hall of Fame catcher caught some of the greatest pitchers of his era. When he was asked to choose the best pitcher he caught in his 18 years with the Yankees, he responded,“It’s impossible to pick the best. You take your pick: Vic Raschi, Allie Reynolds, Eddie Lopat, and Whitey Ford. I wouldn’t be afraid to call on either of them.”“First and foremost, Yogi Berra was a fierce competitor. It wasn’t smart to get him riled,” Yankees pitcher Don Larsen wrote years later about Berra in his prime.“Opponents were the enemy, and we pitchers certainly weren’t immune. He would chastise all of us on occasion, trying to rev us up when we were pitching poorly.”
In the end, whatever their differences and disagreements on the field, Berra became close with many of the great pitchers of his career.
And in the end, they all spoke very kindly of him.
This excerpt from “Yogi: The Life & Times of an American Original” is printed with the permission of Triumph Books / www.triumphbooks.com.
http://www.observer-online.com/articles/2008/06/26/sports/sports1.txt
