The
next coach card up in my ongoing series is former New York Yankees
great Yogi Berra, who moved on to coaching the cross-town Mets after a
Hall of Fame playing career and one-year stint as a manager in 1964 over
in the Bronx:
Berra would go on to put in a few years coaching out in Queens for the
Mets before becoming their manager after the untimely death of former
skipper Gil Hodges, and wouldn’t you know it, they would go all the way
to the World Series before losing to the dynastic Oakland A’s.
This was the team best known for “Ya Gotta Believe” thanks to reliever
Tug McGraws famous call, and made Yogi a World Series manager in both
the American League (in 1964 with the Yanks) and National League with
these Mets.
He would go on to become a Yankee coach AND manager yet again, as well
as a Houston skipper later on before just being “Yogi”, the Yankee
ambassador of history and legend until his death in 2015.
About as beloved a player as the sport has ever seen, he is sorely
missed, but we’ll always have his “Yogi-isms” to make us smile...