Yogi Berra: The Gunner Who Caught Lightning
They said he looked funny behind the plate, squat and bandy-legged, like a man who'd wandered in from a cartoon. But on June 6, 1944, nineteen-year-old Seaman Second Class Lawrence Peter Berra didn't look funny at all. He was one of six aboard a 36-foot rocket boat off Omaha Beach, firing machine guns and launching rockets at the German bunkers while the biggest invasion in history stormed ashore.
"It was like the Fourth of July," Yogi remembered years later, the tracers and explosions lighting up the dawn. He took shrapnel in the hand but never put in for the Purple Heart—didn't want to worry his mother back on The Hill in St. Louis. The boat stayed in the fight for nearly two weeks, then went south for the invasion of France again. When it was over, the kid from the Italian neighborhood came home with medals he seldom mentioned and stories he told even less.
He'd signed with the Yankees before the war, a $500 bonus that Branch Rickey tried to match across town but never did. When Yogi finally reported in 1946, he tore up Newark in the minors, then arrived in the Bronx looking like anything but a future Hall of Famer. Too short, arms too long, swing too loopy. Casey Stengel called him "my assistant manager" because he was always talking, needling pitchers, jawing with umpires, chattering at batters until Hank Aaron finally snapped, "Yogi, I came up here to hit, not to read."
But the numbers don't lie. Eighteen All-Star games. Three Most Valuable Player awards. A .285 lifetime average, 358 home runs, 1,430 runs batted in. And the World Series—nobody touched him. Fourteen appearances, ten championships, more rings than fingers. He hit the first pinch-hit homer in Series history in 1947 off Ralph Branca. In 1956 he caught Don Larsen's perfect game, then leaped into the pitcher's arms like a kid who'd just won the sandlot.
He played the game with a joy that made cynics smile, handled pitchers like a maestro, and when the pressure was highest, he was calmest. The same steadiness that kept him cool under fire off Normandy kept him cool with the bases loaded in October.
ogi Berra never bragged about the beaches or the banners. He just showed up, did the job, and let the record speak—ten titles, a perfect game behind the mask, a life that proved some guys are built for the biggest moments, whether the shells are falling or the Series is on the line.Not bad for a sailor who once said, "It ain't over till it's over." For Yogi, it never really was.
