Yogi Berra, Hall of Fame catcher for the Yankees, has died at 90
Wednesday, September 23, 2015 2:58 AM EDT
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 cutural figure, inspiring a cartoon character and issuing a seemingly limitless supply of unwittingly witty epigrams known as Yogi-isms — died Tuesday. He was 90.
His death was reported by the Yankees and by the Yogi Berra Museum and Learning Center Museum in Little Falls, N.J. Before moving to an assisted living facility in West Caldwell, N.J., in 2012, Berra had lived for many years in nearby 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 wasn’t 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.
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