WASHINGTON — On the anniversary of his Major League Baseball debut with the New York Yankees, baseball lost one of its most colorful and iconic players. Lawrence “Yogi” Berra was 90.
I visited the Yogi Berra Museum and Learning Center on the campus of Montclair State University in New Jersey this past Friday to interview the director, David Kaplan, who proudly spoke of Yogi’s playing days, as a manager, husband, father and legend.
“This is really a great American success story in the sense that he was the son of immigrants,” Kaplan told me. “His father knew nothing about baseball and did not want him to play sports at all.”
Clearly, Berra didn’t follow those wishes. In his Major League debut on Sept. 22, 1946, Berra went 2-for-4 with a home run in a 4-3 New York win at Yankee Stadium over the Philadelphia Athletics. Berra would go on to have a Hall of Fame playing career, manage, and become an ambassador for the game of baseball.
But he was perhaps best known for his Yogi-isms of “It ain’t over till it’s over,” and ““It’s deja vu all over again.” Those sayings are so renowned that eight – ironically, his uniform number — are in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations.
“He’s probably the most quoted person in this country, and that’s not an exaggeration,” said Kaplan.
The museum sits next to the baseball field at Montclair State, home to both the Redhawks baseball team as well as the professional independent minor league New Jersey Jackals. In Berra’s honor, the museum holds programs to teach how to be a captain for high school student athletes, as well as character programs for younger kids.
The museum was robbed recently, but all the items were replaced thanks to donations from the Yankees. Kaplan was incredulous that anyone would do such a thing to an American icon.
“Who would want to steal from Yogi Berra?” he asked. “It would be like stealing from the Pope.”
Throughout the interview, Kaplan reiterated how much Yogi had meant to him. On Wednesday, the day after his passing, I share a similar feeling. Even though I never met Yogi, he meant a lot to me as a baseball fan.
Yogi, you came to a fork in the road, and took it.
