THE ANNOTICO REPORT

Yogi was the unlikeliest of Baseball heroes, with his ungainly appearance, coupled with his less than graceful style of play, "Being knock-kneed as well as barrel-shaped, he gives the impression of being welded together from hips to knees and of running only from the knees down like a fat girl in a tight skirt," wrote Life magazine but his sandlot prowess was the stuff of local legend. 

Still, Yogi tends to be seen as a sort of bridge between two golden eras of Yankee baseball, DiMaggio’s and Mickey Mantle’s. But as Barra convincingly establishes, Yogi Berra is well deserving of his own era: Between 1947 and 1958, with Yogi anchoring the defense and hitting in the heart of the lineup, the Yankees won 10 pennants and 8 World Series. 

The New York Times
By Jonathan Mahler
May 3, 2009

YOGI BERRA; Eternal Yankee; By Allen Barra 

Several years ago, when Tom Lysaght set out to write a play about Yogi Berra’s self-­imposed exile from Yankee Stadium, he titled it "Nobody Don’t Like Yogi." It was a feeble attempt at a Yogi-ism " which doesn’t do senseless violence to the language, but rather conveys a kind of metaphysical wisdom that a more logical or grammatical formulation would lack " and yet it contained an essential truth: everybody likes Yogi.

Allen Barra, the author of "Yogi Berra: Eternal Yankee," is no exception. He comes clean, abandoning all pretense to objectivity in the process, less than 10 pages into the introduction of this book: "Like millions of people around the country, I never felt I had to root for the Yankees to love Yogi, and like everyone else, whatever my feelings about the Yankees " I distinctly remember rooting against them when they played Mays and the Giants in the 1962 World Series - I always loved Yogi." 

What follows is part biography, part baseball analysis and all Yogibration. Barra has assumed a different task from that of the average biographer, who is concerned, foremost, with tracing the arc of a life. He is out to prove that Yogi Berra is underappreciated as a ballplayer and misunderstood as a human being, that Yogi’s image as an "amiable clown" created "a pseudo-Yogi that took on a life of its own, a caricature of the real man." 

Like Richard Ben Cramer’s memorably unflattering biography of Joe ­DiMaggio, this book too is aimed at shattering the popular perception of a Yankee great, only instead of demythologizing his subject, Barra aims to elevate Yogi to baseball immortality - and then hoist him a few notches higher. Yogi’s life and career, the author boldly writes, leaving nothing to inference, "transcend fashion, pointing to something indelibly good in the American character." 

Certainly, Yogi’s is a quintessentially American story. Christened Lorenzo Pietro " Lawrence Peter" he was reared in an Italian enclave of St. Louis known as the Hill, or, in another era, "Dago Hill." His father, an immigrant from a small town in northern Italy, was a manual laborer. Yogi had little interest in school, and though he hardly had the physique of a typical athlete "Being knock-kneed as well as barrel-shaped, he gives the impression of being welded together from hips to knees and of running only from the knees down like a fat girl in a tight skirt," a Life magazine reporter wrote of him early in his major-league career - his sandlot prowess became the stuff of local legend. 

Still, Yogi’s ungainly appearance, ­coupled with his less than graceful style of play, turned off what at the time were the two big-league clubs in St. Louis, the Cardinals and the Browns. In the fall of 1942, he was working as a tack puller at a shoe factory, having all but given up hope of playing professional baseball, when the bullpen coach for the Yankees appeared at the door of his parents’ home with a $500 signing bonus and a contract worth $90 a month.

Yogi’s rise through the minor leagues was interrupted by a stint in the military during World War II, and his service was by no means limited to running baseball clinics for the troops on the home front. He was in the thick of the D-Day invasion, on a small craft assigned to spray rockets in advance of the troops landing on Omaha Beach. (Years later, a sportswriter would quip that Yogi had survived D-Day and George Steinbrenner, the source of his aforementioned exile from Yankee Sta­dium, "and all in 40 years.") Here and elsewhere, Barra sticks to the facts, relying on other writers, in this case Cornelius Ryan, to set the scene for him. The book suffers as a result; as deeply immersed as the author is in the life and times of Yogi, one can’t help feeling that he never takes full possession of his material. 

Yogi tends to be seen as a sort of bridge between two golden eras of Yankee baseball, DiMaggio’s and Mickey Mantle’s. But as Barra convincingly establishes, his subject is well deserving of his own era: Between 1947 and 1958, with Yogi anchoring the defense and hitting in the heart of the lineup, the Yankees won 10 pennants and 8 World Series. 

Barra’s recaps of those seasons and postseasons, in particular his chronicle of Don Larsen’s perfect game in the 1956 World Series, make for some of the book’s best reading. Unfortunately, Barra can’t resist a good debate. He intrudes frequently into the story to tussle with Yogi’s detractors " managers like Leo Durocher, who derided his lack of discipline at the plate, and sportswriters who lambasted his erratic arm. Each time, the author’s evaluation of the facts leads him to the conclusion that Yogi’s critics were wrong. No doubt, Barra felt an obligation to set the record straight - and he may well be performing an overdue service to obsessive Yogi fans - but these pedantic digressions can make it difficult to get absorbed in the narrative.

Similarly, Barra’s discussion of Yogi’s career as a manager " he did two stints with the Yankees and one with the Mets " reads as much like a brief defending ­Yogi’s record as it does a historical account. Barra is a first-rate sports analyst. His articles for Salon and The New York Times, among other publications, are reliably original and persuasive, and he has written two terrifically entertaining books ("Brushbacks and Knockdowns" and "Clearing the Bases") in which he attempts to settle some of baseball’s greatest debates. But his argumentative style and its predictable conclusions grow weary­ing in this lengthy biography.

Barra’s love for Yogi also seems to work against him. There is nothing inherently wrong with writers becoming enthralled with their subjects: Look no further than Jane Leavy’s "Sandy Koufax: A Lefty’s Legacy," one of the finest baseball books of the last decade and a loving portrait if ever there was one. Barra doesn’t manage to achieve the same level of intimacy in "Yogi Berra." It’s almost as if his admiration for his subject caused Barra to keep him at arm’s length. Barra covers all the key events, dwelling in detail on the baseball accomplishments, but never really peers into Yogi’s inner life and offers only a superficial portrait of his subject off the field. "At home, Yogi’s life was story­book," Barra writes..... 

Barra might have done well to listen to his subject’s own advice. "Even if the world were perfect," Yogi once said, "it wouldn’t be.”"

Jonathan Mahler, a contributing writer for The Times Magazine, is the author of "Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning: 1977, Baseball, Politics, and the Battle for the Soul of a City."

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/03/books/review/Mahler-t.html?ref=review

I was dismayed to read in Jonathan Mahler’s review of my biography of Yogi Berra (May 3) that I am guilty of both abandoning "all pretense to objectivity" in my love for Yogi and at the same time of keeping Yogi "at arm’s length." Surely I cannot be guilty of both at the same time?

I was also dismayed to find that I had failed to peer "into Yogi’s inner life" off the field when in fact I devoted a large portion of the book to detailing Berra’s childhood in the Italian-American "Hill" area of St. Louis and Yogi and Carmen’s home life in New Jersey. My research revealed no fireworks of the kind Mahler found in investigating Billy Martin’s life, but what the heck, that’s Yogi.

I am puzzled, though, as to the criticism that "Barra sticks to the facts, relying on other writers" and that "the book suffers" as a result. I don’t know how sticking to the facts can hurt a book, and the example that Mahler offers " my quoting Cornelius Ryan on the subject of the Normandy invasion " is even more puzzling, as I wasn’t there myself and could hardly give a firsthand account. Yogi was, and I let him tell his story " a fact Mahler neglects to mention. (Did Mahler not "rely on other writers," many of them, in writing his own fine book on the Yankees, "Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning"?

I thank Mahler for complimenting my work for The New York Times, but that was more than six years ago. Since then I have been laboring in obscurity, contributing to The Wall Street Journal.

ALLEN BARRA
South Orange, N.J.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/17/books/review/Letters-t-DISSECTINGYO_LETTERS.html?_r=1
 

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