Lorenzo Pietro

NY Times review Allen Barra's new Yogi Berra biography.

Certainly, Yogi’s is a quintessentially American story. Christened Lorenzo Pietro — Lawrence Peter — he was reared in an Italian enclave of St. Louis known as the Hill, or, in another era, “Dago Hill.” His father, an immigrant from a small town in northern Italy, was a manual laborer. Yogi had little interest in school, and though he hardly had the physique of a typical athlete — “Being knock-kneed as well as barrel-shaped, he gives the impression of being welded together from hips to knees and of running only from the knees down like a fat girl in a tight skirt,” a Life magazine reporter wrote of him early in his major-league career — his sandlot prowess became the stuff of local legend.

Still, Yogi’s ungainly appearance, ­coupled with his less than graceful style of play, turned off what at the time were the two big-league clubs in St. Louis, the Cardinals and the Browns. In the fall of 1942, he was working as a tack puller at a shoe factory, having all but given up hope of playing professional baseball, when the bullpen coach for the Yankees appeared at the door of his parents’ home with a $500 signing bonus and a contract worth $90 a month.

Yogi’s rise through the minor leagues was interrupted by a stint in the military during World War II, and his service was by no means limited to running baseball clinics for the troops on the home front. He was in the thick of the D-Day invasion, on a small craft assigned to spray rockets in advance of the troops landing on Omaha Beach. (Years later, a sportswriter would quip that Yogi had survived D-Day and George Steinbrenner, the source of his aforementioned exile from Yankee Sta­dium, “and all in 40 years.”) Here and elsewhere, Barra sticks to the facts, relying on other writers, in this case Cornelius Ryan, to set the scene for him. The book suffers as a result; as deeply immersed as the author is in the life and times of Yogi, one can’t help feeling that he never takes full possession of his material.