Yogi Berra, a great catcher and character, dies at 90

Baseball player Lawrence Peter 'Yogi' Berra, one of the most successful catchers of all time, has died at the age of 90, the Yogi Berra Museum has announced.

He was one of baseball's greatest catchers and characters, who as a player was a mainstay of 10 New York Yankees championship teams and as a manager led both the Yankees and New York Mets to the World Series.

However, he may be more widely known as an ungainly but lovable cultural figure, inspiring a cartoon character and issuing a seemingly limitless supply of unwittingly witty epigrams known as Yogi-isms.

Before moving to an assisted living facility in nearby West Caldwell, New Jersey, in 2012, Berra had lived for many years in neighboring Montclair.

In 1949, early in Berra's Yankees career, his manager assessed him this way in an interview in The Sporting News: "Mr Berra, " Casey Stengel said, "is a very strange fellow of very remarkable abilities."

And so he was, and so he proved to be.

Universally known simply as Yogi, probably the second most recognizable nickname in sports, Berra was not exactly an unlikely hero, but he was often portrayed as one.

He was an All-Star for 15 consecutive seasons whose skills were routinely underestimated, a well-built, appealingly open-faced man whose physical appearance was often belittled, and a prolific winner, not to mention a successful leader, whose intellect was a target of humor if not outright derision.

That he triumphed on the diamond again and again despite his perceived shortcomings was certainly a source of his popularity.

So was the delight with which his famous, if not always documentable, pronouncements, somehow both nonsensical and sagacious, were received.

“You can observe a lot just by watching,” he is reputed to have declared once, describing his strategy as a manager.

"If you can't imitate him," he advised a young player who was mimicking the batting stance of the great slugger Frank Robinson, "don't copy him."

“When you come to a fork in the road, take it,” he said, giving directions to his house. Either path, it turned out, got you there.

“Nobody goes there anymore,” he said of a popular restaurant. “It’s too crowded.”

Whether Berra actually uttered the many things attributed to him, or was the first to say them, or phrased them precisely the way they were reported, has long been a matter of speculation.

Berra himself published a book in 1998 called "The Yogi Book: I Really Didn't Say Everything I Said!"

But the Yogi-isms testified to a character, goofy and philosophical, flighty and down to earth, that came to define the man.

Berra's Yogi-ness was exploited in advertisements for myriad products, among them Puss 'n Boots cat food and Miller Lite beer, but perhaps most famously, Yoo-Hoo chocolate drink.

Asked if Yoo-Hoo was hyphenated, he is said to have replied, “No, ma’am, it isn’t even carbonated.”

If not exactly a Yogi-ism, it was the kind of response that might have come from Berra’s ursine namesake, the affable animated character Yogi Bear, who made his debut in 1958.

The character Yogi Berra may even have overshadowed the Hall of Fame ballplayer Yogi Berra, obscuring what a remarkable athlete he was.

A notorious “bad ball” hitter ? he swung at a lot of pitches that weren’t strikes but mashed them anyway, he was fearsome in the clutch and the most durable and consistently productive Yankee during the period of the team’s most relentless success.

New York Times