Micah Bowie, on the mound as a National, before assorted elbow, hip, and shoulder issues killed a career they compromised in the first place.

Micah Bowie’s isn’t necessarily a name you’d recognise at first hearing. He pitched for five major league teams, when he could pitch at all, before retiring in 2008. Now he may be lucky to be alive at all. The lefthander who left baseball hoping to help aspiring players avoid or get past injuries of the kind that derailed his career gasps for air now. Literally.

Bowie suffers a ruptured diaphragm. A harrowing YouTube video shows him fighting for his breath behind assorted monitoring cables attached to his chest. (He’s believed to have a mere eight percent lung capacity now.) Compared to this, spending his professional baseball life losing a war with his elbow, hip, shoulder, and groin was child’s play for the now 44-year-old Texas product.

The Major League Baseball Players Association spurned a request from Bowie’s family to vest his $60,000-per-year medical benefit in advance of the normal 62-years-old vesting age. Bowie was released from palliative care on 29 December 2018, according to journalist Douglas Gladstone, whose mission has become advocating for such players as Bowie and for former major leaguers denied pensions after a 1980 rules change.

Bowie was due to go to the Jewish National Lung Hospital in Denver on 3 January. Bowie’s wife, Keeley, has all she can do to keep a semblance of normalcy for their children in the middle of her husband’s poor prognosis. The Players Association, whose executive director Tony Clark is a former major league first baseman, and whose staffers today include Hall of Famer Dave Winfield and several other former players, didn’t respond to requests from this journal for comment.

The players’ union may have rejected Bowie’s family for an early benefit vest, but that’s not the case with one-time Cy Young Award runner-up Mike Norris, one of the quintet of starting pitchers Sports Illustrated ballyhooed as the Athletics’ “Five Aces” in an April 1981 cover story. Former Nationals pitching coach Steve McCatty plus former Blue Jays pitching coach Rick Langford, Brian Kingman, and Matt Keough completed the quintet; Billy Martin, a manager whom Bill James once described as “a man who did not quite believe in the existence of the future,” rode them hard until they were put to bed wet, figuratively.

Their splash turned to drowning within three seasons, mostly, as one after another of the Five came down with career-destroying arm or shoulder issues after a collective workload that sent baseball people then and now to the nearest whiskey jug. Norris—who pitched through pain in 1981 and 1982 after winning 22 games in 1980—also turned up in cocaine’s grip, testifying at the notorious 1985 Pittsburgh drug trials.

He cleaned up and in time became involved with Reviving Baseball in Inner Cities, a group helping youth learn the game and its pitfalls alike. In 1999 hes underwent surgery to correct cervical myelopathy, a spinal condition. A decade later, at age 53, Norris asked for and received his $89,000 annual family disability benefit.

“It is anathema to me why, if Mike Norris could get his reported $89,000 disability benefits claim approved a decade ago,” says Gladstone, who doesn’t begrudge Norris receiving it, “the union is unwilling to do the same for Micah and his family. And Mr. Norris wasn’t in palliative care.”

Bowie never got anywhere near Norris’s brief but certain acquaintance with mound glory. What began with an ulnar ligament injury in the Braves’ system in 1966 turned into two more injuries to it that finally forced him to Tommy John surgery in 2003. He’d barely worked his way back when he suffered a detached latissimus muscle under his throwing arm and, two years later, a groin injury. He was lucky to pitch parts of six major league seasons with the Braves, the Cubs, the Athletics, the Nationals, and the Rockies before he called it a career after the Astros released him from their organisation in 2008.

“I’ve gone through most every injury that you can go through as a pitcher,” Bowie told the San Antonio Express-News in 2010. “I know how to find out how to fix it, and how to come back and pitch on the major-league level. I want to take those things that guarantee you take the hurt away.”

On ninety acres east of San Marcos, Texas, Bowie put his knowledge and his money where his mouth was. He formed the Bowie Baseball Academy with staffers that included former minor league manager Joe Szekely, former Astros first-round pick Jimmy Gonzalez, current Pirates prospect Pasquale Mazzocoli, former Dodger minor league catcher Brett Magnusson, and former Royals minor leaguer David Wood.

“Every time I got hurt, I got released,” Bowie told Express-News writer Richard Oliver. “I lost my livelihood, my job. These kids get hurt, they lose college, they lose opportunity. I don’t want an injury to be the determining factor if they play baseball or not.”

Not the way it was for Bowie. After three relief appearances for the 1999 Braves, despite being groomed as a starter in the minors, he was traded to the Cubs in the package that brough the Braves veteran pitcher Terry Mulholland and infielder Jose Hernandez. The Cubs returned him to starting where he didn’t exactly flourish; then, he was converted to relief work by the A’s. The Tommy John surgery followed not long after that, and he missed 2004 recuperating before the Nationals signed him on a minor league deal.

Bowie got another major league callup to the Nats in 2006 and became an effective setup reliever (1.37 ERA in fifteen appearances) before a groin injury derailed his season. He returned for 2007, again in the setup role, before four of the Nats’ five starting pitchers hit the disabled list and he returned to the starting role. In six starts he earned a 4-0 record with a 3.82 ERA before the hip injury hit.

He has also been a regular instructor at T Bar M Camps, a non-denominational Christian sports camp located in his native Texas. His entry at the camps’ Website includes a quote from Paul the Apostle’s letter to the Colossians: “Whatever you do , work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, and not for men.”

It isn’t his heart that threatens Bowie’s life now.

Zach Britton stays a Yankee after all . . .

Apparently, Zach Britton has decided life in the Yankee bullpen is worth living for the next few years, and the Yankees have decided concurrently that life in their bullpen can only be enhanced by keeping him aboard. Hence will Britton sign to return to the Bronx for three years, $40 million, and an opt-out clause contingent on whether the Yankees pick up a fourth-year option after the second year of the new deal.

The Angels were thought to be the top finalists for both Britton and David Robertson, before Robertson negotiated his own new deal with the Phillies, eliminating the middle man, for two years, $23 million. Needing a serious bullpen upgrade, the Angels apparently didn’t move fast or furious enough on either, which seems a little too par for their course.

The Phillies have more or less hinted Robertson stands to become their Andrew Miller, going into games when they’re on the line regardless of the inning in question as well as being one of two relievers (Seranthony Dominguez the other) in line for the save opportunities. Britton merely re-joins a very powerful Yankee pen with encouraging work to build on since he went there from the broiled and basted Orioles last summer.

The Empire Emeritus didn’t exactly want to lose Robertson if they could help it, but they’re banking on Britton building upon 25 Yankee innings with a 2.88 ERA including 21 strikeouts. If he’s really begun to re-discover the right handle on what was once his money pitch, a hard, sharp, wipeout sinkerball, the Yankees make out at bargain rates when all is said and done.

The alarms sounded softly in Britton’s deeper numbers: his fielding-independent pitching rate (FIP: your ERA when your defense is taken out of the equation, folks) as a Yankee was 4.08, but that was down from the 4.44 FIP he showed with the Orioles last year before the trade. His strikeout-to-walk rate was 1.91 as a Yankee and 1.62 on the season as a whole. The Yankees know he isn’t quite Zach the Knife who terrorised the American League from 2014-2016. They also know he may not become that Britton ever again.

But if he can build on what he did do for them last year, they’ll get a Britton who keeps their bullpen in one piece and makes life a lot simpler in the late innings. For the Yankees, that is. A pen with such bulls as Aroldis Chapman, Dellin Betances, Chad Green, and a healthy Britton can turn the rest of the American League into a china shop.

If the Yankees want to go back to the postseason and go deeper than the round one dispatch they got from the Red Sox last October, they’ll need that. And maybe this time Britton’s manager won’t leave him or any of the other bulls stewed and warmed in the bullpen with no place to go when a wild card game, if not a pennant, is on the line.

Two Octobers ago, the Orioles and the Blue Jays took the wild card game to the eleventh inning tied at two each. The Jays spent their then-closer Roberto Osuna for a wipeout ninth against two of the Orioles’ biggest boppers, Manny Machado and Mark Trumbo, plus Matt Wieters, and the teams matched bulls until Orioles manager Buck Showalter pulled Brian Duensing after he opened the bottom of the eleventh by striking out Ezequiel Carerra.

Showalter reached for Ubaldo Jimenez, normally a starter but on a string in which he surrendered only a .172 batting average against him from August beginning through regular season’s end, married to a .252 on-base percentage. But Jimenez surrendered back-to-back singles for first and third, on fastballs down the pipe or at least belt high, abetted by left fielder Nolan Reimhold’s bobble of Josh Donaldson’s first-pitch base hit. And the skipper plus his infielders confabbed at the mound.

Maybe they agreed Jimenez’s job regarding Edwin Encarnacion checking in at the plate was to throw nothing but a double play ball. What just about everyone in baseball agreed upon in that moment was how ridiculous it seemed that Britton—who’d just posted the arguable best season any major league closer’s had under the contemporary coordinates of the job—wasn’t even a topic.

He’d allowed four earned runs all year long and not a one since April, he had an 0.54 ERA and a 1.94 FIP, and out of 254 hitters faced 202 of them either struck out or whacked balls into the ground. Yet Showalter didn’t go to the mound with a hook for Jimenez and a signal for Britton. He didn’t even have Britton warming up.

Showalter’s was the wrong conservatism in that moment, wanting the righthander-vs.-righthander matchup, not even pondering that, lefthander though he is, Britton in 2016 kept righthanded hitters to a .155 batting average and a .199 slugging percentage. With Encarnacion hitting in the lap of luxury as it was, having to think of nothing more complicated than hitting a measly sacrifice fly to win it, that luxury would have been spoiled if he’d had to try getting Britton’s sinker in the air.

But you know about those looking gift horses in the mouths. The Orioles should have. Their lineup struggled against lefthanded pitching that year but the Jays started righthander Marcus Stroman against them that night. And the only thing the Orioles had to show for it was Trumbo’s two-run homer in the fourth. So it was Jimenez versus Encarnacion, leaving Encarnacion in the luxury bath.

Sure enough, Jimenez threw Encarnacion a fastball right down the pipe to open. And Encarnacion hit that gift into the second deck, turning Rogers Centre into the place where the nuts hunt the squirrels, sending the Jays to the division series they’d win against the Rangers only to lose the League Championship Series to the Indians. Showalter hadn’t learned a thing from Mike Matheny’s identical mistake two years prior.

With a trip to the 2014 World Series on the line, Matheny stayed with a still-rusty Michael Wacha in the bottom of the ninth rather than reach for his then-shutdown closer, Trevor Rosenthal, because, well, you don’t bring your closer in unless you have a lead to protect, right? Wrong. The then-Cardinals manager watched Travis Ishikawa channel his inner Bobby Thomson and hit a three-run homer to the top of Levi’s Landing in Pac Bell Park with the pennant attached. Inspiring dubbings of Russ Hodges over Joe Buck and sending the Giants to the World Series.

Showalter and Matheny can commiserate over a few drinks now. Matheny and two coaches were purged last July, the first in-season managerial change the Cardinals made in almost a quarter of a century. Showalter was executed a couple of days after the 2018 season ended. Matheny lost his clubhouse; Showalter—who’d turned the Orioles around after taking over in 2010 and taking them to a three postseasons in five years string, belying his former reputation as a detail freak who wore out his welcome as fast as he earned it—may have been lucky not to lose his marble. Singular.

The Orioles collapsed completely after that wild card game loss. They finished dead last in the American League East the next two seasons including 2018 and found themselves forced to offload their more prime talents including Machado and Britton. Britton himself suffered even worse, losing part of early 2017 to tightness in his forearm, before an offseason workout hit him with a torn Achilles tendon that would keep him out of action until June last year.

Dealing Britton and Machado (to the Dodgers) was the Orioles’ admitting that it was time to blow up and rebuild. After they’d been 7-20 at one point last year, thirty years after another Orioles team with a couple of future Hall of Famers (Cal Ripken, Eddie Murray) aboard opened a season 0-21. The Yankees have re-upped Britton and may yet remain in the Machado market.

All Yankee manager Aaron Boone has to do is prove he’s learned a lesson or two from last fall’s division series wipeout, and not leave Britton or any of his best bulls blowing in the wind, while leaving lesser or gassed arms to do the clutch pitching with a postseason advance on the line.

You’d think that with all the whining about things like defensive shifts (which aren’t as shifty as you’ve been led to think), bullpenning (They think we never done anything before we done it—Casey Stengel), and the ridiculous unwritten rules, continued, that baseball in 2018 sometimes seemed about as much fun as undergoing root canal with no anesthetic. And you’d be thinking wrongly.

Herewith the best of the 2018 highlights with one truly grotesque lowlight and one true vale of tears:

*The New Boston Massacre—It happened in early August, when the Red Sox swept the Yankees in a four-game set, four decades after the Yankees battered the Red Sox to get back into the American League East race. And it continued in the postseason, after splitting two division series games in Boston with Aaron Judge blasting “New York, New York” on his way out of Fenway Park.

Losing only one game each in all three postseason sets gave the 108 game-winning Red Sox—with the unlikely Steve Pearce the World Series MVP, with Mookie Betts winning the AL’s Most Valuable Player award, and with Andrew Benintendi making the catch of the season to save a Red Sox ALCS win and probably their season while he was at it, among other individual conquests, not to mention David Price burying his former reputation as a postseason bust—their fourth World Series triumph of the new century.

*Botes Against the Current—12 August. Pinch hitting for Cubs reliever Justin Wilson. Bottom of the ninth. Bases loaded and deuces wild. Nationals reliever Ryan Madson throwing a fastball to the floor of the zone. Pinch hitter (underline that, gang) David Bote hitting it over Wrigley Field’s center field wall. “Five minutes ago,” tweeted Washington Post baseball writer Barry Svrluga, “I was sure Washington would reach October. Now I think there’s no chance.”

Bote’s blast closed the coffin lid on the Nationals’ 2018; it wouldn’t be long before the nails were hammered in. It may have been the second most dramatic home run of the year, behind Max Muncy’s game-ending blast in Game Three of the World Series . . . in the bottom of the eighteenth inning.

And, just ahead of Betts’s July epic against the Blue Jays, when he ended a thirteen-pitch bottom-of-the-fourth at-bat against J.A. Happ with a salami. (Assist to Jays first baseman Justin Smoak, who ran down a 1-2 foul pop and had it bound off his glove to keep Betts alive early.) Betts was so jubilant after he hit the ball—knowing at once it was going out (and I mean out: it flew over a sign at the back of the Green Monster seats and out of Fenway Park entirely)—he almost tripped over himself up the first base line running it out.

*The Woe-rioles—How else does a team celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of going 0-21 to open a season? With 2018’s worst record and the third worst winning percentage in their franchise history, including when they were the woebegone St. Louis Browns. “This team is awful—direct-to-DVD awful,” writes Sports Illustrated‘s Jon Tayler amid the magazine’s hypothetical New Year’s resolutions for all teams. “There’s no reason to hope for anything other than 100-plus losses and a whole lot of innings and at-bats given to anonymous dreck. So don’t fret when it’s mid-August and you have fewer wins than Aaron Judge has home runs.”

From the Oriole Way to the Orioles Have Lost Their Way. (Trivia: The ’88 Zer-Os finished with seven more wins.)

*Manono—In April, Sean Manaea threw the Athletics’ first no-hitter since Dallas Braden’s perfect game on Mother’s Day 2010. It made the Red Sox—with an .894 winning percentage at the time—the best team ever to be no-hit. It was 2018’s first no-hitter, and Manaea enjoyed the double treat of being interviewed on the field post-game by Braden himself, now working for NBC Sports California.

But Manaea’s season ended for all intent and purpose in August when his shoulder began to bark. Come 19 September: arthroscopic surgery to repair a shoulder impingement, sending Manaea down for the count until after the 2019 season.

*Float like a Seaver, sting like a Schmidt—The Angels won the comparatively modest sweepstakes for Japanese two-way player Shohei Ohtani. After making a critical adjustment near the end of spring training, Ohtani won the American League’s Rookie of the Year award based on his mound and plate work. His signature moments: 1) Shaking off a three-run first to punch out twelve A’s in his first start. 2) Hitting three home runs in two days, against the Indians and the A’s.

The only major leaguer before him to hit 20+ home runs and pitch 50+ innings in the same season? Some bum named Ruth.

*This One’s for Mom—A’s outfielder Stephen Piscotty was traded there from St. Louis after 2017 so he could be closer to his ALS-stricken mother, Gretchen. She lost the battle on 6 May 2018. After taking one day off and returning with a base hit his first time up against the Astros (pitcher Lance McCullers politely stepped off the mound to let him bask in the ovation), Piscotty left the team on bereavement leave. He returned to the A’s in Boston two days after his first Mother’s Day without her.

With the A’s up already, 2-0, Piscotty batted for the first time in the top of the second . . . and ripped one into the Green Monster seats. “To hit a home run in his first at-bat [back] like that,” said manager Bob Melvin, “there’s something in the air. Probably Gretchen.”

*One for the Records?—Baseball’s going to miss Adrian Beltre, who retired after the season and now awaits his election to the Hall of Fame in five years. (Bank on it.) But he went out the same way he ended his seven previous seasons. I don’t know for sure if this is a record for petty crime, but Beltre stole exactly . . . one base each in his final eight years. The Man of Steal he wasn’t.

*Valdez is Coming—According to Jayson Stark of The Athletic, it took 92,000 major league pitching starts by almost 1,600 major league pitchers to do in the entire 21st century to date what Astros rookie Framber Valdez did in back-to-back 2018 starts: equal pitching lines in two starts each of five innings pitched, two hits, one earned run, three walks, and three strikeouts. This is what you call consistency. We think.

*Bang for the Big Bucks—Yankee rookie Miguel Andjuar earned $550,000 in 2018 and hit .297 with 27 homers and 92 runs batted in. Manny Machado, dividing his season between the Orioles and the Dodgers, earned $16 million in 2018 and hit . . . .297 with 37 home runs and 107 RBI. Says Red Sox podcaster Terry Cushman: “The Yankees would rather pay an extra $29,500,000.00 more a year for ten more home runs. Who’s the dummies?”

Cushman also points out that the Empire Emeritus could, in theory, go the entire length of the deal without winning a World Series with Machado under contract, if they end up winning the Machado sweepstakes, while the Olde Towne Team won the 2018 World Series despite still paying off on Pablo Sandoval’s deal.

*Jacob’s Ladder—The Mets looked even worse giving Jacob deGrom grounds to sue for non-support than the Mariners did with Felix Hernandez eight years earlier. How very Mets it was that deGrom pitched like a combination of 1965-66 Sandy Koufax, 1968 Bob Gibson, and 2000 Pedro Martinez, and the Mets treated him like the late Anthony Young, almost: deGrom had only ten wins to show for a performance that should have gotten him a 22-9 record at minimum.

Cy Young Award voters looked at his 1.70 ERA, his 1.97 fielding-independent pitching (once again: that’s your ERA when your defenses are removed from the equation), the sub-.200 batting average against him, his wins above a replacement-level player at any position (10.0), and that he was only the second pitcher since earned runs became an official stat (in 1913) to have an ERA under 2.00, 250+ strikeouts, and -50 walks in the same season, and voted deGrom the Cy Young winner with 29 of 30 possible first-place votes.

This made for the fourth Cy Young Award by Mets pitchers, and this time the Mets did everything in their power to prevent it.

*Urena Crock—Nobody could stop the National League’s Rookie of the Year, Atlanta’s Ronald Acuna, Jr., from destroying baseballs, but Miami’s Jose Urena picked the absolute wrong way to try . . . after Acuna spent the first three games of an August set a) hitting one bomb in each game of a doubleheader; and, b) hitting two bombs in the second game of the set. Leading off in the bottom of the first of the fourth game, Acuna took one on the elbow from Urena, on the first pitch, with malice aforethought. It brought the Braves pouring out of their dugout and a lot of questions as to why plate umpire Chad Fairchild delayed ejecting Urena.

Then, as Acuna continued shaking the pain off, the benches re-emptied after Braves manager Brian Snitker—justifiably—remained in a rage over why Urena had yet to be ejected from the game. At long last, he was. Bizarrely, so was Snitker. Urena ended up suspended six games. It should have been six starts.

*Eff Tha Fun Police—Nationals closer Sean Doolittle was unamused over bat flips and their accompanying harrumphing—because he wants to see more of them. Bat flips, that is. “If a guy hits a home run off me, drops to his knees, pretends the bat is a bazooka, and shoots it out at the sky, I don’t give a shit,” he said emphatically in an online interview. “When you’re in the backyard as a kid playing and falling in love with the game and you crush the ball? You do a celebration. You stand and watch it like Ken Griffey, Jr. You don’t hit the ball and put your head down and run as fast as you can. That’s not fun. It’s okay to embrace that part of a game.”

I agreed with him then and now. As I wrote then, “I hope a lot of hitters drop to one knee and point their bats to the sky like bazookas when they hit one out. I hope a lot of pitchers start channeling their inner Dennis Eckersley and start fanning pistols after they strike someone out. I’d kill to see a hitter moonwalk around the bases after hitting one out. Let’s see more keystone combinations chest bump or make like jugglers after they turn a particularly slick and tough double play.”

Hall of Famer Willie Stargell once said, “The umpire doesn’t say, ‘Work Ball’.” I said then and still believe now: you want to work ball, play the game in a business suit. This game’s still supposed to be fun. OK?

Yogi Berra, hitting the first pinch-hit home run in World Series history, 1947.

“Talking baseball with Yogi Berra,” A. Bartlett Giamatti once said, “is like talking to Homer about the gods.” See and raise: Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize winning economist and free market champion, was once arranged to have breakfast with Berra. They hit it off, apparently. Berra biographer Allen Barra related him admitting Friedman “is not a baseball fan, and I am not as much a money fan as most people think I am.”

According to Barra, Berra said Friedman told him he’d have gotten a good grade if he’d been in Friedman’s class. “It’s probably true,” Friedman said before his 2006 death. “I think he had a good grasp of basic economic principles, apparently better than some of the better educated people in the Yankee front office that he used to negotiate salaries with. One thing he said that I have always remembered is, ‘A nickel isn’t worth a dime anymore.’ He was right.”

Berra even caught Friedman in the kind of malaprop for which the Hall of Fame catcher was intergalactically famous: they talked a little literature at their breakfast, and Berra—who never minded when the joke was on him—mentioned having met Ernest Hemingway during his playing days and asking what paper he worked for. Friedman stopped laughing long enough to say one of his two favourite Hemingway novels was, quote, The Fisherman and the Sea.

“He meant The Old Man and the Sea,” Berra would say. “Do you suppose anyone called him on it? No. Suppose I had said the same thing.” Small wonder that nobody really believed him when he said he hadn’t said half of ninety percent of what he said. Or, however he said it.

It’s been three years since he went to his reward eighteen months after his beloved wife did. But it still feels as though something is missing from America because Yogi Berra doesn’t walk among us anymore. You might call it something on the silly side to mourn a man who lived 90 years, but it always seemed as though among baseball’s actual or alleged immortals Berra really was immortal, in more ways than one. Even people to whom baseball was about as relevant as life on Atlantis felt a quiet comfort that someone like him happened to be around.

Maybe it was because as accomplished as he really was in the game—he’s the arguable greatest all-around catcher who ever played major league baseball (Johnny Bench is his very close second); he was genuinely respected for his game knowledge and loved as a teammate, coach, and manager; he was a first-ballot Hall of Famer against whom everyone to play his position to follow would be judged; he played on more pennant winners and World Series champions than any player, ever—Berra was one of America’s most famous men while remaining as often as not “blissful(ly) unaware of his own celebrity,” as Barra phrased it.

After friends and family built and opened the Yogi Berra Museum and Learning Center in his longtime Montclair, New Jersey neighbourhood (“Every museum I ever went to as a kid was named after somebody who was dead,” he cracked), a woman from his native St. Louis visited and was surprised to see him there. “Mr. Berra, could you make up a Yogiism for me?” she asked, referring to the malaprops that were more famous than Berra’s staggering ability to hit out-of-the-zone pitches. “Ma’am,” he replied, “if I could do that, I’d be famous.”

He may be the baseball figure most frequently found in the pages of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, but if you asked him about it he was liable to reply something like, “I wish I could say them when I wanted to because I would have made a fortune by now.”

Berra was a tough customer talking contract with the Yankees every winter and prudent with his money as it was. Savvy enough to spot opportunity’s earliest knock, he and his wife, Carmen, earned a fortune through their association with the old Yoo-Hoo chocolate soft drink, first by his endorsements, then earning a vice presidency when he lured other investors to the company, and finally by holding considerable stock the couple unloaded only when the company changed hands and flavour too often for their taste.

Yogi in the Navy.

This son of an immigrant Italian brickyardsman who once admitted that in his boyhood the only way he liked school was “closed!” survived D-Day; he was a Navy seaman and gunner who was one of six aboard a 36-foot rocket boat on the waters of Normandy as the invasion began and stayed two weeks. (“You ever try shooting a machine gun on a 36-footer? You could shoot yourself.”) Before his Navy service was over, Berra actually qualified for a Purple Heart—but refused to accept it because he didn’t want to give his mother a heart attack.

(Decades later, when the Mets first hired Berra as a full-time coach and part-time catcher/pinch-hitter, they also had as a pitcher-coach Hall of Famer Warren Spahn, who earned a Bronze Star and Purple Heart himself for service that included the Battle of the Bulge. Asked whether they’d make baseball’s oldest battery, the prankish Spahn shrugged. “We’d be the ugliest by far,” he cracked.)

His unawareness of his own celebrity was real nevertheless. “It’s not that hard to get inside his inner circle,” his oldest son, Larry, once said. “Basically, he loves everybody as long as you’re trustworthy and loyal.” If they’re not, look out. When George Steinbrenner fired him through an intermediary as the Yankees’ manager in 1985, after having promised he’d have the job for the full season, Berra famously refused to return to Yankee Stadium or to any Yankee function as long as Steinbrenner owned the team.

It took a Thanksgiving-sized helping of crow, not to mention the insistence of Mrs. Berra and their youngest son, Dale, for Steinbrenner to patch it up. It happened in time for Berra to bring his grandchildren to the Stadium on Yogi Berra Day. Before the game, Berra took a ceremonial first pitch from Don Larsen, whose perfect game in the 1956 World Series Berra caught. Then, after catcher Joe Girardi asked Berra to bless his glove, Yankee pitcher David Cone pitched his own perfect game against the Montreal Expos in an interleague game.

Girardi was far from the only one who believed good fortune came to those within Berra’s reach. “He could fall in a sewer,” his longtime Yankee manager Casey Stengel once said, “and come up with a gold watch.”

It must have shocked those who remembered the squat, plain, awkward-looking kid in his first spring training to discover he’d become the subject of a serious 1997 monograph, The Jurisprudence of Yogi Berra, published by Santa Clara University School of Law professor Gerald F. Uelmen. No Berraism went unanalysed for its legal significance, including and especially what I usually call Berra’s Law: it ain’t over until it’s over:

Much of the stability and certainty of our legal system rely upon the essence of this Berraism and are in fact contained in the Constitution of the United States. Where would our entire system of jurisprudence be without the concept of appellate review? Indeed, if “it was over when it was over” at the trial or legislative level, much of the work of the Supreme Court would cease to exist, and then so much for our system of checks and balances.

The Berras, 1950s. Asked his greatest achievement, Yogi didn’t miss: “Getting her to marry me. Who’d have thought?”

That about the man who once signed an anniversary card with, “Love, Yogi Berra.” Mrs. Berra never let him live that one down, either: “I was actually glad he thought to sign it that way,” she loved to say. “I wouldn’t have wanted to confuse him with all the other Yogis I know.”

As a manager he won two pennants the hard way, with the 1964 Yankees (who needed a stretch drive surge to take the pennant, after being bedeviled earlier in the season by a lack of bullpen consistency until late-season acquisition Pedro Ramos delivered several key saves) and the 1973 Mets (dead last in the National League East to start September; division and pennant winners to finish the season before losing a seven-game World Series to the Athletics). The latter may have been his managerial masterpiece.

Between and after, until he retired as the Astros’ bench coach in 1989, Berra enhanced a reputation he began earning in his latter Yankee playing seasons, for helping younger players without thinking twice. His personal popularity didn’t hurt at the turnstiles, but team administrators also savoured the prospect of their players and even their managers picking his brain while enjoying his company.

“Yogi was always with the catchers, going through the drills, blocking balls, watching us, laughing with us,” remembered longtime Yankee catcher Jorge Posada. “It was amazing. You could tell how much he was enjoying it. I mean, we’re thinking, this is Yogi Berra. We should be honoured to be in his presence. But the way he acted, it almost was like it was the other way around.”

It’s rare to find people who achieve greatness in the public eye and remain decent people in and out of it. Decent, if imperfect. But even people with renowned senses of humour sometimes find those senses compromised.

Berra took some of baseball’s most merciless ribbing over his looks, the plain face atop a body that looked six parts wrestler and half a dozen parts simian. (Tigers pitcher Dizzy Trout, learning of his marriage to the stunning-looking Carmen in 1949, cracked, “Hey, Yogi, I hear ya got married. How does your wife like living in a tree?”) Having the guts to smile through the insults won him as much admiration as his baseball ability and knowledge. (“All you have to do is hit the ball, and I never saw anybody hit one with his face,” he once said.)

He was not amused, though, when animators Hanna-Barbera created Yogi Bear in the 1950s, after a neighbourhood kid hailed him by calling him Yogi Bear. The name nagged him enough to make him wonder whether H-B chose it mockingly. He pondered litigation for defamation of character until he was advised that it wouldn’t hold. Especially since Yogi the bear sounded more like The Honeymooners‘ halfwit sewer worker Ed Norton and behaved more like scheming Sgt. Bilko, two characters for whom Yogi the Berra would never be mistaken.

That was nothing compared to the Yogasm flap five decades later. That’s when TBS ran billboards promoting their syndication of the execrable Sex in the City, the billboards asking the definition of “Yogasm,” with one of the multiple choice answers being “Sex with Yogi Berra.” Berra sued for $10 million because he feared the ads compromised his clean living reputation. (He also hadn’t given the network permission to use his name.)

Berra with Sandy Koufax, at the announcement of their election to the Hall of Fame in 1972.

Some may have thought the very thought of Yogi as a sex symbol even in the breach was, shall we say, the most unheard-of thing they never heard of. The network ended up settling with Berra for an undisclosed amount. Even the most approachable guy in the neighbourhood had his limits. Unless his ever-loving, ever-needling wife couldn’t resist during their pillow talk, and we’ll never know (appropriately), thou shalt not take the name of the Berra thy Yogi in vain.

Harvey Araton, writing of the sweet friendship between Berra and former Yankee pitching star Ron Guidry as spring training coaches in Driving Mr. Yogi, remembered an Old Timer’s Day at Yankee Stadium, during which the scoreboard listed those in the Yankee orbit who’d passed on that year. Guidry and the Yankees’ Hall of Fame pitcher Whitey Ford were made melancholy by the roll, but Berra standing next to Ford turned to him and said, “Boy, I hope I never see my name up there.”

Mrs. Berra once asked her husband, “Yogi, you were born in St. Louis, we live in New Jersey, and you played ball in New York. If you go before I go, where do you want me to have you buried?” Her husband replied, “Surprise me.” It seemed to surprise as well as sadden America when it saw his name up there, even knowing that when one half of a great love story passes the other isn’t long for this island earth. He finally came to that fork in the road and took it. On his wife’s birthday. Said his granddaughter, Lindsay, herself a sportswriter, “Grandpa wanted spend her birthday with her.”

A lot of us wish Mr. Yogi didn’t have to just yet. But we were sure that Mrs Berra was ready to show him around, advising one and all that they wouldn’t want to confuse him with all the other Yogis they knew. No worries there, this Yogi was one of a kind.