In the weird, tribal world of sports fandom, no athlete can be impossibly successful and impossibly beloved at the same time. Success and reverence cruise along for a while, holding hands and stealing glances, but eventually success meets scrutiny in a filthy bar and they run off forever. Do you want to find a million people complaining about Derek Jeter, LeBron James or Tom Brady? Sorry, but all we have left in stock are millions and millions and millions of people. Welcome to the Internet, welcome to sports, welcome to life, pull up a chair and yell at something.
Yogi Berra was baseball, will always be baseball
In a world where athletes become resented if they’re too successful, Yogi Berra somehow became universally appreciated and desperately missed.
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It’s impossible for anyone born after 1950 to understand what Yogi Berra’s Yankees did, what they accomplished, how many hearts they broke. That’s 10 World Series championships in his career, including six championships in seven seasons and 15 pennants in 18 years. The Yankees weren’t just a team to envy and loathe back then, they were a team that would make you sell your soul to the devil if it meant watching them lose. They were a perpetual success machine that could be appreciated only by their fans, a Petri dish where resentment and envy would split and multiply, split and multiply, after each additional success.
Out of that context, Yogi Berra became one of the most beloved baseball players in the history of the game.
Passing of a Legend
When a baseball great dies, there’s something of a pattern to the reactions. You’ll have the memories from the writers who were there, the personal anecdotes that add depth to the player’s history on and off the field. You’ll have the historical retrospectives, the statistical appreciations, and the lamentations from the younger set who wish they could have seen the player in person. This isn’t to be cynical about what happens. It’s organic and touching, just in a familiar way.
With Berra, the template is shattered. There isn’t enough to go around. If you want elegantly written history from one of the most knowledgeable Yankees historians around, it’s there, waiting for you, earnest and illuminating. If you want personal remembrances, you’ll get them from writers who are desperate to share them. Everyone has something to share. Everyone has something they need to share. He was a baseball great, an advocate for humanity, a war hero and a symbol. If it’s almost unfair for someone to live that full of a life, at least this one went to someone who knew exactly what to do with it.
My wife woke me up at 5 a.m. by shouting the news that Berra passed away. I’m not sure if she could pick a picture of Nolan Ryan out of a two-picture lineup if you gave her three guesses, but the idea of Berra not being around made her nervous system react with shock and sadness before her conscious thoughts could catch up. It’s a short list of baseball players who can have that effect on people who aren’t baseball fans.
A lot of that has to do with the omnipresence, the way Berra was constantly around the game and the public eye, from appearances at Yankee Stadium to beer commercials with future Yankees employees to insurance commercials with a duck. His malapropisms were legendary, adding about as many expressions to the public lexicon as anyone since William Shakespeare. In 200 years, “It ain’t over ‘til it’s over” will still be rattling around in someone’s brain.
Reducing him to a string of quips, though, makes him a mascot and a caricature. He didn’t shuffle onto the stage, say his catch phrases, soak up the polite applause and move on to the next city on the tour. The malapropisms and beloved persona were subcategories under the larger header of Fun or Joy. It’s understandable that a team as successful as Berra’s Yankees could provoke feelings of resentment or envy, but those feelings gloss over the larger truth: Sports are supposed to be fun. The world is already a flaming mess of despair and decay, and the last thing you need is to drag your sports emotions down to the cellar and throw them onto the pile.
But you could always look at Yogi Berra and remember that fun exists, that baseball is fun, that he’s fun because of baseball and baseball is fun because of him.
Berra transcended the tribalism and helped everyone remember why we paid attention in the first place. He was an icon in the literal sense, not in the way the word is casually thrown around, the physical representation of baseball, the right mix of silliness and gravity. He knew that baseball is a whimsical trickster that’s going to take you wherever the heck it wants to take you, and he reminded everyone of that by existing.
You could always look at Yogi Berra and remember that fun exists, that baseball is fun, that he's fun because of baseball and baseball is fun because of him.
The sheer depth of emotion that’s emerged from his passing isn’t just because of how beloved he was and always will be, though that’s obviously a substantial part of it. It’s also because there’s no understudy, no one groomed to take over the job. There’s no one left to be the ubiquitous reminder that baseball is something we’re lucky to have, that it’s something to make us smile, not pace around the room and throw things. Sports aren’t something that exist just so we can tear down the most successful players and makes us feel better.
Sports are supposed to be fun. No one conveyed that simple truth more effortlessly.
Until someone comes along to fill that void, we’ll have to make do by remembering Berra, but the only problem with that is no one will ever come along to fill that void. That seems like a problem until you remember that Berra would have explained that paradox in a way that made our brains twitch and our mouths curl up.
Which means it’s not a void at all. Rest in peace, Yogi Berra.
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