Sultans Of Swat The Four Great Sluggers Of The New York Yankees

Introduction by Yogi Berra Don't compare them because you can't. It's impossible to compare eras and say today's players are better or worse. How would our Yankee teams compare to other great Yankee teamshow would I know? What's true is each had something in common: good players. Ruth and Gehrig and DiMaggio and Mantle were great, that's for sure. But what people forget is how much each guy loved the game. Each gave everything he had to baseball. Each helped make Yankee history and tradition. It's a tradition I'm lucky and proud to be part of. Funny, where I grew up, nobody cared or knew about the Yankees. Growing up in St. Louis in the 1930's, all we knew were the Cardinals and Browns, and maybe we liked the Cardinals a little better because they were. In the later years of the Depression, the W.P.A. ran an instructional clinic at Sherman Park and some of the Cardinals players would come and talk to a bunch of us kids. And Joe Medwickmy favorite player happened to be a regular customer when I was a 12-year-old newspaper hawker on the street corner. All summer all we did was play baseball. Those were the days. Occasionally a lady on our street, Mrs. Domenica, would take us to Sportsman's Park to see those Cardinalsthe Gashouse Gang. We'd sit in the leftfield grandstand and see Medwick, Dizzy Dean and Frankie Frisch, but to be honest, I always preferred playing than watching. The Yankees? Babe Ruth might as well as been a cartoon character because he didn't seem real. There was no TV then and all you heard and read about Ruth is being this great popular character who hit monster home runs. Never saw him play nor did I ever see Lou Gehrig. Gehrig emerged as a star in 1925, same year I was born. When I started following baseball in the 1930's, Italian-American players were a rarity. I did notice the Yankees had Tony Lazerri, Frank Crosetti, Joe DiMaggio, but it was the Cardinals who fired my imaginations and big-league dreams, especially me and Joe Garagiola, who grew up right across the street from me. When the Cardinals held tryouts in Sportsman's Park in the summer of 1942, it was a great thrill. Me and Joe dreamed of making the Cardinalsand Joe's came true. After the tryout Branch Rickey, the Cardinals general manager, gave Joe a $500 signing bonus. Me? I got discouraged. Rickey told me I'd never become a major-leaguer. What I didn't know was that Leo Browne, who ran our American Legion program, told George Weiss, the Yankees farm director, about me. After the Cardinals beat the Yankees in the World Series that October, Weiss told the Yankees bullpen coach John Schulte, who lived in St. Louis, to check around on me. So one day Schulte came to our house, said he'd never seen me play, but had talked to some people. He was willing to offer me the same $500 to sign with the Yankees organization, and $90 a month to play for Norfolk in the Piedmont League. My father didn't want me to play ball. My brothers finally convinced him to give me the chance. So he signed it. I was 17 and joining the New York Yankees organization. I hadn't a clue what lay ahead. After playing in Norfolk in 1943, I served in the Navy, then joined Newark, the Yankees' top farm team, in 1946. Being short and blocky, I wasn't your classic-looking ballplayer. But I could always hit pretty good, and liked to hit bad pitches. There were a lot of stories written and said about me, not all of them true. One true one is when I first walked into Yankee Stadium in my Navy uniform on a weekend liberty, someone said I didn't look like a ballplayer. Peter Sheehy, the clubhBerra, Yogi is the author of 'Sultans Of Swat The Four Great Sluggers Of The New York Yankees', published 2006 under ISBN 9780312340148 and ISBN 0312340141.