{"id":9815,"date":"2010-12-02T07:01:16","date_gmt":"2010-12-02T07:01:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/?p=9815"},"modified":"2010-12-05T17:11:43","modified_gmt":"2010-12-05T17:11:43","slug":"yogi-berra-eternal-yankee-by-allen-barra","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/?p=9815","title":{"rendered":"Yogi Berra: Eternal Yankee by Allen Barra"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yogi Berra: Eternal Yankee by Allen Barra (Norton, 2010), 451 pages<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"YBEY\"Few players in the history of baseball have left a legacy quite as successful and colourful as Lawrence \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcYogi\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 Berra.<\/p>\n

Yogi is synonymous with the New York Yankees, as the subtitle and pinstriped cover of this biography by Allen Barra attest\u00c2\u00a0 Former Major League pitcher and coach Ron Guidry once even went so far as to say \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Yogi is <\/em>the Yankees\u00e2\u20ac\u009d.\u00c2\u00a0 Yet it is the measure of the man that despite being so engrained in the Yankee legacy, his popularity extends to baseball fans of all persuasions.\u00c2\u00a0 There\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s no \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcEvil Empire\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 stigma surrounding Berra: he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the Yankee it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s okay to love.<\/p>\n

Yogi Berra: Eternal Yankee was released in hardcover in 2009, with this paperback version following earlier this year, and was immediately hailed as the biography that Berra\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s outstanding career deserves.\u00c2\u00a0 Every great player should have at least one great book documenting their life.\u00c2\u00a0 Such books don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t just tell you the story of that individual, they invariably open a window on a whole era of the sport because the great players define their period.\u00c2\u00a0 That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s certainly the case with Berra.\u00c2\u00a0 <\/p>\n

The book takes you step-by-step through Berra\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s life: his childhood in an Italian-American neighbourhood in St. Louis, his epic playing career including ten World Series triumphs and three MVP awards, his coaching and managerial career and his continuing popularity of recent days, including his appearances in those memorable Aflac duck adverts.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n

Berra has always appealed to fans, writers, broadcasters and advertisers because of his likeable image and tendency to come out with sayings that have a logic to them, but leave your head spinning.\u00c2\u00a0 \u00e2\u20ac\u0153When you come to the fork in the road, take it\u00e2\u20ac\u009d, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153He learned me all his experience\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and \u00e2\u20ac\u0153You can observe a lot just by watching\u00e2\u20ac\u009d are just a small selection of the many \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcYogisms\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 that baseball fans have come to love.\u00c2\u00a0 However his image to some as a bit of a clown has frustrated Yogi at times and it certainly frustrates his biographer.<\/p>\n

Yogi Berra: Eternal Yankee is partly Allen Barra\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s attempt to steer people away from that impression of Berra and to direct their focus instead onto his extraordinary playing ability and baseball acumen.\u00c2\u00a0 That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a worthy objective and he is successful in conveying just how good a player Berra was and what an essential role he played on some legendary Yankee teams, as well as his achievements as a manager and coach.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n

However, there are\u00c2\u00a0a few occasions\u00c2\u00a0when Barra\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s desire to redress the balance strays slightly into a tone of defensiveness.\u00c2\u00a0 In one case he questions why the phrase \u00e2\u20ac\u0153the Yogi Berra era\u00e2\u20ac\u009d is rarely employed despite other Yankees (Babe Ruth, Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle etc) having been so honoured.\u00c2\u00a0 It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a perfectly reasonable point to raise,\u00c2\u00a0 but he does lay the sense of injustice on a little thickly.\u00c2\u00a0 Similarly his analysis of the infamous \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcHarmonica Incident\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 (a confrontation on the Yankees\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 team bus, started by Phil Linz\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s harmonica playing, <\/strong>during Yogi\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s year as manager in 1964), comes off as a bit precious and protective, especially when he chides veterans Whitey Ford and Mickey Mantle for their part in the saga<\/p>\n

Yet maybe that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s what happens when you study Yogi Berra to the level of detail that Barra clearly has for this comprehensive book.\u00c2\u00a0 Perhaps it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s difficult not to take Yogi to your heart and fight his corner on every perceived slight against the man.\u00c2\u00a0 For other subjects of an autobiography that could lead to the charge of a lack of balance, a stubborn refusal to accept they had any faults or failures (like writing an autobiography on Mantle and feeling it necessary to claim he would have only had a drink on special occasions were it not for others leading him astray).\u00c2\u00a0 In Yogi\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s case, there are no deliberate cover-ups or gross exaggerations because they are not necessary to paint him in a good light.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n

The one British angle in the book involves the startling story that the British Navy very nearly ended Berra\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s life before his baseball career and journey into American popular culture history began.\u00c2\u00a0 Berra was part of the Allied invasion of Southern France in 1944 and the vessel he was on narrowly escaped being hit by a stray British shell.\u00c2\u00a0 He dropped the rocket he was cradling at the time and thankfully for us all it didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t go off.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n

Biographies often are not\u00c2\u00a0 the most absorbing read from cover to cover as they can tend to be dragged down by detail in a year-by-year account of a player\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s career and life.\u00c2\u00a0 Yogi Berra had such an incredible career that there are no pedestrian passages in this book to slow things down.\u00c2\u00a0 The level of detail is also\u00c2\u00a0one\u00c2\u00a0of its strengths\u00c2\u00a0because the best biographies serve as an authoritative reference source for the individual, becoming the tome that you pluck from the bookshelf when you want to look up something about them.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n

This is unquestionably the book that fulfils that role for Berra and, considering his place in baseball history, that makes this a significant piece of work.<\/p>\n

Have you read \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Yogi Berra: Eternal Yankee\u00e2\u20ac\u009d? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section below. Can you recommend any other similar books? If so, let us know.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Few players in the history of baseball have left a legacy quite as successful and colourful as Lawrence \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcYogi\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 Berra and Allen Barra’s biography is the book that Berra\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s outstanding career deserves<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[76,553,98,328],"class_list":["post-9815","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-baseball-books","tag-book-reviews","tag-mlb-2","tag-new-york-yankees","tag-yogi-berra"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9815","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9815"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9815\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9867,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9815\/revisions\/9867"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9815"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9815"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9815"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}