Twenty-seven months after D-Day, wearing the famed pinstripes of the New YorkYankees, Berra stood in the lefthand batter’s box at Yankee Stadium for what was his first major league game. Jesse Flores, a pitcher for Connie Mack’s Philadelphia Athletics, threw him an outside curveball. Berra whacked it into the rightfield seats for his first home run. The next day, he hit another one.
Berra would go on to become, in most arguments, the greatest catcher in baseball history and, without argument, the greatest winner the game ever has known. Berra saw baseball and America grow up. He entered the sport when it was an all-white game and left it when indoor baseball arrived. In that spot between integration (1947) and expansion ('61), when baseball was the unchallenged great American pastime, nobody but Stan Musial drove in more runs than Berra and no one was more beloved. Berra played in 14 World Series, winning a record 10 of them, and participated in seven more as a coach or manager—putting him in 21 of the 34 World Series played between 1947 and '81.
No one ever knew more success or took part in more famous baseball moments than Berra. “Talking to Yogi Berra about baseball,” the late commissioner Bart Giamatti once said, “is like talking to Homer about the gods.”
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