As Yogi Berra turns 90, baseball tips its cap to a true living legend End Zone

Yogi Berra hits the Big 9-0 on Tuesday and all we can say is, Happy Birthday to an American icon, who always knew where he was going and always knew what he was saying, even if we were never quite sure.

Yogi, who never looked like a ballplayer; Yogi, who never hit in an orthodox manner; Yogi, who never seemed like the manager type; Yogi, who never spoke with the most elaborate vocabulary, remains baseball’s all-time winner, with 13 World Series rings, including 10 as a player, as well as being one of the most respected baseball minds of all time and one of world’s most quoted philosophers.

“You’ve got to be very careful if you don’t know where you’re going,” Yogi once told us, “or else you might not get there.”

Words he’s lived by.

When Yogi first reported to the Yankees’ Triple-A farm team in Newark after being discharged from the Navy in 1946, the manager there, George Selkirk, didn’t know what to make of him, this funny-looking 5-foot-7, 185-pound gnome of a man whom Selkirk at first thought was a clubhouse attendant. It wasn’t until Yogi got into the batting cage and began hitting almost every pitch thrown to him — high, low, outside or whatever — into the farthest reaches of Ruppert Stadium did Selkirk and the rest of the Yankee brass quickly come to realize they had something special here.

Yogi still needed to learn the rudiments of catching — and for that, the Yankees assigned Bill Dickey to tutor him where, as Yogi later said, “he learned me all his experiences” — but the .285 lifetime batting average, 358 homers, plus an .830 OPS, 12 homers and 39 RBI in 75 World Series games, were uniquely his own.

“See the ball, hit the ball,” was the simple philosophy of the man who is credited as being baseball’s all-time “bad ball” hitter.

They said he lacked the necessary smarts to be a manager, too, mostly because of his funny way of conveying his thoughts, so all Yogi did was manage the Yankees to the seventh game of the World Series in 1964 — without the services of his best pitcher, Whitey

Ford, who injured his arm in Game 1 — and then again with the Mets in 1973. In the years after, there wasn’t a manager in the Bronx, from Stump Merrill to Billy Martin to Lou Piniella to Joe Torre who didn’t say that Yogi was the greatest baseball mind they’d ever been around.

Learnt from nydailynews