Wednesday, September 23, 2015
Yogi Berra was pretty amazin'. EGC tells a story about her time in western China: there were two books in English in the village where she was staying. One was Moby Dick, and the other was a book of Berra quotes. I like to think about that bit of cultural penetration sometimes: the local population didn't even speak Mandarin, but there was Yogi.
I'm confused about this story, from the NYTimes obit:
Yogi Berra was a pretty remarkable guy. It goes without saying that he was a great athlete, but he also had a great temperament: he was a lot more intelligent than he got credit for, and rolled with a lot of other abuse that by contemporary standards seems gratuitously cruel. He seems to have enjoyed his life, and good for him; we enjoyed it too.
I'm confused about this story, from the NYTimes obit:
That almost sounds as though Williams broke up Reynolds' no-hitter, but if the first pitch was hit foul, and the second was caught then Williams was out, and the no-hitter was still alive. In fact, it was the bottom of the ninth with two out, and Reynolds got his no-hitter.In September 1951, once again on the brink of a no-hitter, this one by Allie Reynolds against the Red Sox, Berra made one of baseball’s legendary errors. With two out in the ninth inning, Ted Williams hit a towering foul ball between home plate and the Yankee dugout; it looked like the end of the game, sealing Reynolds’s second no-hitter of the season and making him the first American League pitcher to accomplish that feat. But as the ball plummeted, it was caught in a gust of wind; Berra lunged backward, and it deflected off his glove as he went sprawling.Amazingly, on the next pitch, Williams hit an almost identical pop-up, and this time Berra caught it.
Yogi Berra was a pretty remarkable guy. It goes without saying that he was a great athlete, but he also had a great temperament: he was a lot more intelligent than he got credit for, and rolled with a lot of other abuse that by contemporary standards seems gratuitously cruel. He seems to have enjoyed his life, and good for him; we enjoyed it too.
// posted by Bill @ 11:36 AM 
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