October 1964 Read Online Free Page A

know, only went four games and we didn’t make any money,” Houk said. The former manager had gone overnight, Hamilton, who still admired Houk, said later, from blowing smoke to blowing acid rain.
    Houk’s replacement as manager was a surprise to the team and to the media: Yogi Berra, the longtime star catcher. Berra was chosen, it was believed by those who knew the front office well, partly to compete with the upstart team in the New York area, the Mets, who were now managed by none other than the indefatigable Charles Dillon Stengel, soon to be seventy-four. Brilliant and verbal, live and in color, a nonstop one-man media show, Stengel could be safely called many things, but no one ever called him boring. The combination of the Mets’ virtually pristine incompetence and Stengel’s singular charm made the Mets a major draw, to the surprise of the Yankee ownership, which valued winning over fun. The more talented of the young New York sportswriters preferred covering the lowly Mets rather than the dynastic Yankees. The Yankees under George Weiss did not think in modern terms about the entertainment dollar, and the general manager had not wanted to broadcast the games on television, thinking that it was giving his product away for free. He had even been reluctant to sell the paraphernalia of modern baseball, including Yankee shirts, Yankee caps, and Yankee jackets. He did not want every kid in New York going around wearing a Yankee cap, he said, for it demeaned the Yankee uniform. The Mets were the reverse of this, and indeed part of their success in the earlier years happened because they successfully blurred the line between player and fan. The Mets were perceived as inept but lovable by a new generation of fans, while the Yankees were coming to be seen as the athletic equivalent of General Motors or U.S. Steel. Something profound was taking place in the larger culture and it was extremely troubling to the Yankee high command. In 1963 Yankee attendance slipped again, the second year in a row in which that had happened; it had surged to more than 1.7 million in 1961, the year Maris and Mantle had chased Ruth’s record, but fell by more than 200,000 a year in the two years after. In 1963 the Yankees drew only about 220,000 more fans than the Mets, and it seemed likely that in 1964, when the Mets moved into their handsome new home at Shea Stadium, they might well outdraw the Yankees (which, in fact, they did, with 1.7 million customers, or nearly half a million more than the first-place Yankees). “My park,” said Stengel, surveying Shea for the first time, “is lovelier than my team.”
    In a somewhat misguided effort to become more popular, the Yankees decided to make Yogi Berra their manager. Over the years the New York media had viewed Berra as something of a cartoon figure: funny, awkward, but lovable, much given to inelegant but ultimately wise aphorisms. Some of the famous Yogiisms were genuine, but a good many were manufactured by the writers, and the real Yogi Berra was quite different from the one that had been invented by the press. He was shy and wary with strangers, particularly the media, because of their jokes about his looks (his wife, Carmen, smart and extremely capable, hated those jokes) and about his lack of education. In the beginning the jokes were more than a little cruel, but Yogi was shrewd enough to go along with them; had he resisted, the jokes would have taken on a longer life. But it still did not mean he liked them. Nor was he the easiest of interviews. “Why do I have to talk to all these guys who make six thousand dollars a year when I make forty thousand dollars a year?” he once asked in what was to become a rallying cry for thousands of ballplayers yet unborn.
    The truth was that the Yankees had made a serious miscalculation if they hired Berra because he was good with the media. Rather, the media was good with him—inventing a cuddly, wise, witty figure who did not, in fact, exist.