PASSING – AT 8:32 A.M. ET:  When I was a kid I rooted for the One True Faith in baseball, the Brooklyn Dodgers.  We were aware that, across town, there was a team that wore capitalistic pinstripes and played in the largest stadium of the major leagues.   The team was called the "Yankees," or, as we called it, the best team money could buy. 

We despised them.  It wasn't right that they should have this big ballfield, and players like Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and Joe DiMaggio.  Just wasn't right.  And they won too much.  They must have owned the umpires,a too.

But we reserved some of our pure affection for some of their players.  And no one won more grudging affection than their catcher, Yogi Berra.  Even the name demanded affection.  And his Yogi-isms like "It isn't over until it's over," and "If you come to a fork in the road, take it," made us feel that, deep down, he had a bit of Brooklyn in him. 

Yogi Berra has died at 90.  He was one of the last survivors of a time when baseball was a game, not just an industry, when a family could go to the ball park without mortgaging its children, and a kid could wait after the game and see players picked up by their wives, not limousines.  From The New York Times:

Yogi Berra, one of baseball’s greatest catchers and characters, who as a player was a mainstay of 10 Yankee championship teams and as a manager led both the Yankees and Mets to the World Series — but who 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 — died on Tuesday. He was 90.

His death was reported by the Yankees and by the Yogi Berra Museum and Learning Center in Little Falls, N.J. Before moving to an assisted living facility in nearby West Caldwell, in 2012, Berra had lived for many years in neighboring Montclair.

In 1949, early in Berra’s Yankee 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 — even Yogi was not the Babe — Berra was not exactly an unlikely hero, but he was often portrayed as one: 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.

COMMENT:  We always felt we knew him, that he could be the guy next door.  And yet I can still hear the revered Yankee announcer, Mel Allen, exclaiming when Yogi made a great play, "How about that?"

We'll remember Yogi, and the game and era he symbolized.  We'll recall how he crouched behind the plate when Ted Williams of the Red Sox was batting, after Williams returned from a second stint as a Marine Corps pilot.

A little different today, I'm sorry to say.

September 23,  2015