Yankees deserve boo-birds and empty seats after looking like $200M bust in ALCS

By Jeff Passan
Yahoo! Sports
October 14, 2012

Alex Rodriguez was a target of frustration for Yankees fans on Sunday. (AP)NEW YORK – Gone are mystique and aura, the two temptresses of the Bronx, who blessed old Yankee Stadium with kismet and joy and brilliant baseball. In their stead are apathy and malaise, a couple of hags from Yonkers. They embody the new Yankee Stadium, a sarcophagus if ever there was one: no matter how gorgeous and ornate the outside, it remains filled with lifelessness.

No wonder Game 2 of the ALCS featured thousands of empty seats, like Game 1 before it, and like the do-or-die Game 5 of the ALDS, too. New Yorkers understand a fraud when they see it. They pay for expensive seats, drink overpriced beers, buy exorbitant merchandise and fund a $200 million joke, a team that for the second straight game couldn't score a measly run off the Detroit Tigers' Nos. 3 and 4 starting pitchers. These Yankees earned every last boo.

The vitriol that has evolved here over the last week apexed Sunday with a 3-0 loss in which Robinson Cano extended his record playoff hitless streak to 26 at-bats, Curtis Granderson struck out three more times in three at-bats and Alex Rodriguez whiffed twice. Something is different here. Very different. Not only are the Yankees searching for their identity with a series deficit of 2-0 and three games beckoning in Detroit, their ravenously loyal fan base is revolting against an old, overmatched, passionless team.

"Our fans haven't had much to cheer about, so you can't blame them," Rodriguez said. "You've got to blame us. If I was sitting there, I'd be perplexed, too. We didn't score any runs. What the hell are you going to cheer about?"

[Related: Ump blows call that helps get Tigers two runs in Game 2]

A Rodriguez hit. Seriously. That's what drew the evening's loudest ovation. A single up the middle, just his third hit in 23 postseason at-bats. That's the new standard. That's what the most feared and hallowed place in baseball has come to. Yankee Stadium: Where they roar for a single.

Don't think this went unnoticed, either. It wasn't just the ushers instructed to fill in empty seats so the crowd looked better on TV. The players can tell, too.

"This is a very easy place to play now," Tigers outfielder Quintin Berry said. "Coming from Oakland, the fans there were so rowdy. It was easier to come here."

Oakland Coliseum, where tarps cover the upper deck, more electric than Yankee Stadium.

Every other playoff stadium filled to capacity, and Yankee Stadium with entire sections empty, thousands of unsold tickets, even ones as cheap as $15 through resellers.

No matter how the Yankees spin this – team president Randy Levine had the hubris to blame StubHub – the swiss-cheese crowd is a stunning indictment on their failures to transition the atmosphere of the old stadium to the new one. The cratering secondary ticket market bears out the criticism that face-value ticket prices are excessively high – that the Yankees priced out the average fan in search of corporate blood money.

This is their comeuppance: a bloated team, another playoff flameout at hand with Justin Verlander primed to carve them up Tuesday in Game 3 and a fan base so disenchanted it spent far more time booing its own than its opposition.

Here's how far it has degenerated: Nick Swisher said some fans blamed him for Derek Jeter's broken ankle, suffered toward the end of Game 1 following a misplay in which Swisher lost a Delmon Young fly ball in the lights.

"That's the last thing I ever thought would be in this ballpark: that people would get on you that bad," Swisher said. "Especially your home, man, where your heart is, where you're battling and grinding all year long. It's just frustrating, man. You never want to be in that spot. It's not like you're trying to go out there and do bad on purpose.

"It hurts."

To which the hags say: Boo freaking hoo.

Swisher is 4 for 26 this postseason, contributing to a Yankees offense hitting .202. New York has scored seven earned runs in 43 2/3 innings thrown by opposing starters. The ugliness has metastasized throughout the lineup.  Its sudden appearance in October is the starkest reminder that no matter how many division championships the Yankees win and playoff berths they earn, fans judge them on how they finish. And while the Yankees' one championship since 2000 is one more than 20 teams can boast, it cost nearly $2 billion, money siphoned from fans who expect a far greater return on investment. If they're going to pay silly subscriber fees for YES and take a plundering with each trip to the Bronx, they expect better than $114 million of that money owed to a 37-year-old who is 0-for-19 with 13 strikeouts against right-handed pitching this postseason.

[Related: Tigers' pitching dominance makes ALCS look like a short one]

"Nothing against our environment here, but a change of scenery sometimes helps a little bit," Rodriguez said. "Maybe some of our guys will relax a little bit and go out and have some fun."

No, it's not easy playing when a support system turns so vociferously. Yeah, well, it's not easy being asked to support a team that performs so badly at the most important time of the year, either. The Yankees are staring into a deep abyss. Their core keeps getting older. Their pitching woes remain palpable. Their farm system – especially the upper-level arms that were supposed to be here by now – has dried up considerably. It's not like Jeter's injury was some sort of sign. It was just a reminder of what was – and what is no longer.

Jeter represents the era in which the Yankees could do no wrong. They won so much only a contrarian could view the franchise with cynicism. Those Yankees earned every ounce of pride.

It's easy to wonder how much of this traces back to the passing of George Steinbrenner, their bombastic owner. While he presided over more than a decade of misery that preceded the late '90s dynasty, his presence throughout the winning cannot be overstated. The culture under Steinbrenner was about the team. The culture today is about the business. Yankees fans loved Steinbrenner. Yankees fans don't know his sons. The urgency then was palpable. The urgency now is questionable.

Oh, manager Joe Girardi tried as he may, first with a pregame speech to rouse the team from its Jeter-related depression and then by getting ejected from Game 2 when reminding umpire Jeff Nelson just how badly he mangled an important call at second base. Neither stirred the somnambulant Yankees. They shrugged their shoulders.

"There's no explanation," Cano said.

Maybe not for the sudden inability to hit. There's a plenty good one for everything that permeated the stadium Sunday. Apathy and malaise didn't just show up this week. They've festered for a while, building, growing, readying for the proper moment to explode. And here they came, those old hags, happy to let this embarrassing Yankees team understand.

They earned this. Every last bit of it.

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Derek Jeter's path from Kalamazoo to Cooperstown

By Jim Baumbach

Newsday

September 29, 2012

When Derek Jeter was in the fourth grade, he stood in front of his class at St. Augustine Cathedral School here and said he planned to play shortstop for the New York Yankees.
Some moments as a teacher, Shirley Garzelloni said, you just don't forget.
Garzelloni, recently stood in the basement classroom where, she remembered, the 9-year-old Jeter boldly announced his career ambitions as part of a class sharing exercise.

His back to the chalkboard, Jeter faced his two dozen classmates and spoke the words that stuck with the teacher for nearly 30 years.
"When I grow up, I'm going to be a shortstop for the New York Yankees."
"It was something you sort of just knew was going to happen," said Garzelloni, 76, who retired as a teacher in 1998 and has remained active at the school since. "When it happened, it almost wasn't a big surprise. It was something he was talking about forever."
This summer marked the 20th year of theYankees using the sixth overall pick in the amateur draft to select Jeter, a 17-year-old shortstop from Kalamazoo's Central High School.
Jeter, 38, is preparing to embark on his 16th trip to the playoffs in 17 seasons as the starting shortstop for the Yankees. He has led the team to seven World Series, winning five championships. This season, he passed Willie Mays for 10th place on the all-time hits list. With 3,298 career hits, some are wondering if Jeter has a chance at 4,000.
It's a legacy few could have predicted when he arrived in the major leagues in 1995. And it's a legacy that has placed this Midwestern city on the national baseball map.
Kalamazoo County, with a population of about 250,000 and situated about halfway betweenDetroit and Chicago, is where Jeter spent the majority of his childhood. There are no signs saying, "Welcome to Where Derek Jeter Grew Up." But look closer and the depth of Jeter's roots are evident.
There's a high school trophy case that shows off his accomplishments, yearbooks in the public library that show a much younger, skinnier and baby-faced Yankee captain and a playground outside his old elementary school that his Turn 2 Foundation helped build, to name a few.
But the true evidence of Jeter's past resides with the people who knew him back in the day. And after all these years, their astonishment over just how the kid's oft-spoken goal became his reality hasn't worn off.
"I remember shagging fly balls in the outfield with him and guys were asking him which major league team he was hoping to play for," high school teammate Jim Gucma, 37, said. "It was like a joke for us, like it wasn't real. But shortly afterward he graduated, he was a Yankee and it became real.
"Just all very surreal."

Young Yankees fan

Born in Pequannock Township, N.J., Jeter says he had his Yankees passion instilled in him by his maternal grandmother, Dorothy Connors, who used to take him to Yankee Stadium to see players such as Dave Winfield, Don Mattingly and Ron Guidry.
Jeter's family moved to Kalamazoo when he was 4, but he continued to spend summers in New Jersey and attend Yankees games.
In the 1989 Kalamazoo Central yearbook, Jeter appears in the top row of a photo of student leaders while wearing a Yankees jacket, which people said was typical for him.
Yearbooks also show Jeter played varsity basketball, was a computer lab tutor and a member of the Latin club.
"You have to understand, he was always very determined to be a Yankee," said Sarah Baca, 62, who taught Jeter's math class during his senior year. "He not only wanted to play major league baseball. He wanted to do it for the Yankees."
Just a few years ago, as she was cleaning out some cabinets in her classroom after retiring as a teacher, Baca stumbled across Jeter's senior-year trigonometry final.
"He got 100," she said. (And, yes, she kept the test.)
Dan Carlson, 64, who taught math to Jeter as a sophomore and was the last of his teachers to remain active at the school, received a going-away surprise before retiring.
Two winters ago, just before Christmas, Carlson was teaching a class toward the end of the school day when the door opened. "And there was Derek Jeter and he walked right in my room and said, 'Hi, Mr. Carlson,' " he recalled.
Jeter had been in town for an event for his Turn 2 Foundation, which aims to motivate children to steer clear of drugs and alcohol. He often returns to Kalamazoo in the winter in order to attend, and he dropped by the high school with his sister, Sharlee.
"The kids, they were just foaming," Carlson said. "They sat there in a trance."

'This is my field'
Last December, Kalamazoo Central renamed its baseball field for Jeter, something his high school coach, Don Zomer, said he'd been pushing for more than a decade.
Jeter attended the ceremony, held in the school auditorium, and joked to the crowd, "I always looked at this as my field. Now I can actually say, 'This is my field.' "
Jeter's childhood home, a blue split-level on Cumberland Street that borders high school property, was sold again over the summer, this time to a pair of sisters who said they had no idea of its place in the Jeter saga when they made their offer.
"The home inspector asked me, 'So which room do you think was Derek's,' " said Jessica Rapelje, the home's new owner. "I was like, 'Who's Derek?' "
Once they learned the Jeter connection, Rapelje and her sister Amanda went on a phone-a-friend spree, letting everyone they could think of know their place in Jeter history.

A called third strike
Jeter's high school class held its 20-year reunion celebration this past summer in Kalamazoo.
Jeter couldn't attend. He was in Oakland that night.
The last time Jeter returned to Kalamazoo was for the baseball field-naming ceremony. And he showed that he still has a keen memory of his high school days.
With Jeter on the dais, coach Zomer, 69, read his senior year statistics aloud.
"I mentioned he had one strikeout and that was a bad call," Zomer said. "And then it was quiet and Derek said, 'And that's correct,' and everyone laughed."
One strikeout in nearly 100 trips to the plate. And Zomer still remembers the circumstances. Big game against rival Portage Central, he said. Bases loaded, two outs and the score was tied when Jeter came up carrying a batting average north of .500. The chances Kalamazoo would take the lead were good.
But with a full count, Zomer 69, says Jeter looked at a pitch that was low, thinking he had walked and forced in a run. Yet the umpire surprised Zomer, Jeter and perhaps everyone else by calling out, "Strike three!" and ending the rally. Kalamazoo Central went on to lose that game.
Sitting in the stands at Derek Jeter Field, Zomer says whenever he sees the umpire these days, he still reminds him that he blew that call.
"He still to this day swears he was right," Zomer said. But when Newsday contacted the umpire, Dick Bird, 58, he reversed course.
"I might have missed the pitch," the umpire said.
Jeter was asked the other day if he remembers.
"Yeah, it was a bad call," Jeter said. "I don't know the specifics. I remember it was a called third strike. That would be kind of sad if I remembered all that."
Bird said that Jeter immediately walked back to the dugout, not even glancing back with a dirty look, like many kids would. That memory stuck with him.
"I've never had the chance to talk with him after that, but I've always wanted to tell him in person that I might have missed the pitch," Bird said. "I figured he might get a laugh out of that."
"He knows he missed it," Jeter responded when told about Bird's comment. "I swing at everything. If it was close, I'm swinging at it. I've always been that way."
With David Lennon

THE YOUNG JETER

His uniform number in baseball and basketball: 13
His grade point average: 3.8
Won the Kalamazoo area's B'nai B'rith scholar-athlete award his senior year.
Signed a letter of intent to play baseball at University of Michigan before Yanks drafted him.
< back to article

At 38, Derek Jeter continues to show up and get the job done for the Yankees

Things have changed for Derek Jeter since he joined the Yankees. But as he celebrates his 38th birthday five championships later, things are still the same.

By Filip Bondy
The Daily News
http://www.nydailynews.com/sports
June 27, 2012

Derek Jeter leaps to avoid the slide of Johnny Damon #33 of the Cleveland Indians to complete the double play at Yankee Stadium on June 26, 2012 in the Bronx borough of New York City. (Mike Stobe/Getty Images North America)

His teammates kept coming by his locker Tuesday in the clubhouse, patting the old shortstop on the back, wishing him a happy 38th birthday, until Derek Jeter could take no more. “This isn’t grade school,” he grumped, only half in jest.

Jeter doesn’t particularly enjoy such milestones or timelines, although he’ll begrudgingly tell you, “When people give me gifts, I don’t mind it.” He has been this successful, in large part, because of an uncanny ability to live in the moment while dismissing all the background noise and falling calendar leaves. Jeter doesn’t require perspective, because his brain is wired to eliminate context. He concentrates only on the spin of the baseball as it approaches the plate.

“I don’t come in here today thinking about what I did yesterday,” Jeter said, before leading off against Cleveland one more time. “I don’t come in here thinking about what could happen tomorrow. It’s just what you can do on that particular day.

“It’s my job. That’s the way I always looked at it.”

Certainly, a bit of the crazy, spontaneous joy and mischief has left the game for him over the years, if only because of lost friends and friendships. He once snuggled between Joe Torre and Don Zimmer on the bench between at-bats, inhaling their tales, disarming them while playing provocateur. His best pal, Jorge Posada, no longer dresses in the same uniform, no longer drives with him to or from games. He doesn’t even get to love/hate George Steinbrenner, or all the maddening fuss that came with the Boss.

Jeter doesn’t sing in the clubhouse anymore, Joe Girardi noticed, doesn’t tease guys quite as much as they walk past. His hairline is receding, along with his gaudy, early season batting average. But say this for the Yanks’ national treasure: He shows up for work every day, fields his position with enduring, leaping grace and still hits those inside-out doubles into the gap when the pitcher makes a mistake.

Jeter still follows the path of a pitch, uniquely, all the way into the catcher’s mitt, whenever he takes a ball. When he gets on base, he still smiles and banters with opponents as if this were his rookie season.

Things are different. Things are the same.

“When you’re young, you show up, you don’t have batting practice, you don’t even stretch,” Jeter said. “You spend a little more time getting ready. I don’t know if you can say it’s harder. It gets longer. There’s days, there’s little things. But when I feel good, I feel good. There’s no noticeable difference, I don’t think.”

There are plenty of things to celebrate and savor, if Jeter ever steps outside of his own laser focus for a moment.

He went into the game on Tuesday with 3,181 career hits, 14th highest in history and the third-most at his age behind Ty Cobb and Hank Aaron. Jeter was 11 hits ahead of the pace of all-time leader Pete Rose, although of course the Yankee shortstop will not even consider Rose’s mark. As he pointed out, he didn’t figure to catch Rose’s mark on Tuesday, so what was the point of such ruminations?

Unlike his partner on the left side of the Yankee infield, Jeter has always been able to deflect difficult queries stylishly. He has the ability, still, to identify safe and dangerous questions from interviewers and treat them appropriately. You want to talk about his hitting stance? Jeter will sit down, discuss it at length. You want to dissect his relationship with Alex Rodriguez? He’ll politely decline. Not going to happen.

His fellow Yankees marvel at Jeter’s single-mindedness, his ability to shed all distractions with a shoulder shrug. He is still this way, at 38, even after five titles and two stadiums.

“It’s all gone by so fast,” Andy Pettitte said. “Blink your eyes and it doesn’t feel so long ago we won our first World Series.”

There’s that perspective thing from Pettitte, which only gets in the way. Maybe that’s why he retired for a year. For Jeter, this career of his has been a string of 2,948 regular-season games, plus 152 playoff games. A string of pearls, to be cherished one at a time.

“I was always aware that you can’t play forever,” Jeter said.

Just play the game tonight. Ignore the birthday cake.

Derek Jeter: Highlights

Bill ‘Moose’ Skowron, hero of the Yankees’ 1958 World Series team, dead at 81 from congestive heart failure

Skowron, the Yankees regular first baseman from 1955-62, was a five-time All-Star

By Bill Madden                                                                                                                                        New York Daily News
http://www.nydailynews.com/sports
April 27, 2012

Bill ‘Moose’ Skowron (r.) is pictured with Roger Maris, Yogi Berra and Mickey Mantle after the four sluggers are named to the 1960 American League All-Star squad. (Charles Hoff/New York Daily News)

Bill (Moose) Skowron, the hulking and popular Yankee first baseman of the 1950s and ’60s and the hero of their come-from-behind 1958 World Series triumph over the Milwaukee Braves, died of congestive heart failure early Friday morning at Northwest Community Hospital in Arlington Heights, Ill. Skowron had also battled lung cancer for several years. He was 81.

Skowron, a five-time All-Star, was the Yankees’ regular first baseman from 1955-62, averaging 18 homers and 75 RBI as a Bomber. He finished his career with a .282 average, 211 homers and 888 RBI. He was especially lethal in the World Series, hitting .293 with eight HRs and 29 RBI in 39 games over eight Fall Classics.

In the 1956 World Series, Skowron had been held hitless by the Dodgers until the seventh game when he came to bat with the bases loaded in the seventh. He hit a grand slam into the left field stands to break the game open. Two years later, Skowron spurred the Yankees to rally from three games to one against the Braves by singling in what proved to be the winning run in the 10th inning of their Game 6 4-3 victory. He then hit a decisive three-run eighth-inning homer off Yankee killer Lew Burdette for the 6-2 Game 7 win.

It was after that Series that Skowron revealed that his nickname was not due to his bulky 6-foot, 200-pound frame but because when his grandfather gave him a short haircut, his grade school classmates thought he looked like Benito Mussolini and began calling him “Moose.”

Skowron went to Purdue on a scholarship as a fullback and punter. After his freshman year, however, he felt his calling was baseball and signed a $25,000 bonus as an outfielder with the Yankees in 1951.
After Skowron hit .341 and led the American Association in homers (31) and RBI (134), the Yankees were sold on his bat, but not so much on his glove. (“I almost got killed in the outfield,” Skowron later said. “I couldn’t go back on balls and I didn’t get good jumps on them.”)

It was decided to move him to first, but at the time the Yankees had future Hall of Famer Johnny Mize and Joe Collins there, so they sent Skowron back to Kansas City.

In the meantime, they enrolled him in the Fred Astaire dance school in an attempt to make him more nimble around the bag.

“It helped me a lot with my footwork,” Skowron said, “and it didn’t hurt me socially, either.”

When Skowron finally did get called up in ’54, he batted .340 in 87 games, platooning with Collins. He hit over .300 his next three seasons and became entrenched at first base.

His career, however, was plagued by injuries — in 1957 he missed 30 games after damaging his back lifting an air conditioner; in 1955 he was out for more than 40 games with a torn thigh; and in 1959 he missed half the season with a broken arm suffered in a collision with the Detroit Tigers’ Coot Veal.

His battles to stay in the game were ironic given the advice he got from a Yankee first baseman of the past, Wally Pipp.

“I met Pipp at an Old-Timers’ Day at Yankee Stadium,” Skowron recalled, “and he told me: ‘Don’t ever get a headache or catch a cold. I got a headache once and took a day off and never played again. A guy named Lou Gehrig took my place.’ I made sure from that day on to do everything I could to remain healthy.”

After the 1962 season, the Yankees traded Skowron to the Dodgers for pitcher Stan Williams in order to make way for Joe Pepitone. The deal quickly came back to haunt them in the ’63 World Series when Skowron led the Dodgers’ four-game sweep over the Yankees, hitting .385 with a homer and three RBI.

That spring, Skowron was charged with assault when he left the Dodgers spring training camp in Vero Beach, Fla., and paid a surprise visit to his house in Hillsdale, N.J., where he caught his then-wife in bed with another man.

He played for three other clubs, including his hometown White Sox, and retired in 1967.

In recent years, he worked as a greeter in the U.S. Cellular Field suites for the White Sox. He is survived by his second wife, Cookie; two sons, Greg and Steve; and a daughter, Lynnette.

“Moose was a guy who brought huge joy to everyone he came in contact with,” said White Sox board chairman Jerry Reinsdorf. “I can’t tell you how much people here loved him.”

Book details bond shared by Yankee legends Berra, Guidry

By Steve Gardner, USA TODAY
http://content.usatoday.com/communities/dailypitch/
March 15, 2012

TAMPA -- In baseball, spring training is all about the rhythm of the daily routine.

For the active players, everything is geared toward getting ready for the regular season. But for former players, spring training may be the only chance they get to put on the old uniform.

A new book by New York Times columnist Harvey Araton chronicles a cross-generational friendship between former New York Yankees Yogi Berra and Ron Guidry that is renewed every spring when the two icons become almost inseparable both on and off the field.

Driving Mr. Yogi details how Guidry, who won 170 games in 14 seasons for the Yankees and was serving as a spring training instructor, volunteered to pick up the Hall of Fame catcher at the airport in March of 1999 when Berra famously ended his 14-year boycott of the franchise.

That simple act developed over the years into much more than a spring training ritual.

It's a story about baseball, yes. But it's also a story about a friendship. And it's a story about caring for and respecting those of an earlier generation.

The book hits store shelves on April 3, the day before the 2012 season opens.

Araton says Guidry's unquestioned devotion to Berra was a story that needed to be told. "After spending one day with him (last May in Louisiana), I was able to get a sense of the depth of feeling he has for Yogi just by the way he spoke about him in an emotional way," the author says.

For each of the past 14 years, Guidry drives his pickup truck from Louisiana to Florida while Berra arrives on a flight from his home in New Jersey. And they spend just about all of the following month together.

For his part, Guidry doesn't feel he's doing anything special by picking Berra up every day and driving him to the park, looking after him at camp and then going out to dinner each night -- among other duties.

"Even though it's routine ... it's always been fun. I'm not doing it for any particular purpose, he's just my best friend. He's one of my heroes," Guidry says.

The deep friendship with Berra is readily apparent. Asked why he continues t0 go to such lengths, it seems appropriate that Guidry would sum it all up his own Yogi-ism: "Who wouldn't want to do what I'm doing? And I'm not doing nothing!"

For Berra and Guidry, It Happens Every Spring

By HARVEY ARATON
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com
February 23, 2011

When Yogi Berra arrived on Tuesday afternoon at Tampa International Airport, Ron Guidry was waiting for him. (Edward Linsmier for The New York Times)

TAMPA, Fla. — With all the yearly changes made by the Yankees, Yogi Berra’s arrival at their spring training base adds a timeless quality to baseball’s most historic franchise.       
Berra, the catching legend and pop culture icon, slips back into the uniform with the famous and familiar No. 8. He checks into the same hotel in the vicinity of George M. Steinbrenner Field and requests the same room. He plans his days methodically — wake up at 6 a.m., breakfast at 6:30, depart for the complex by 7 — and steps outside to be greeted by the same driver he has had for the past dozen years.

The driver has a rather famous name, and nickname, as well.

“It’s like I’m the valet,” said Ron Guidry, the former star pitcher known around the Yankees as Gator for his Louisiana roots. “Actually, I am the valet.”

When Berra arrived on Tuesday afternoon from New Jersey for his three- to four-week stay, Guidry, as always, was waiting for him at Tampa International Airport. Since Berra forgave George Steinbrenner in 1999 for firing him as the manager in 1985 through a subordinate and ended a 14-year boycott of the team, Guidry has been his faithful friend and loyal shepherd.

Guidry had a custom-made cap to certify his proud standing. The inscription reads, “Driving Mr. Yogi.”

“He’s a good guy,” Berra, the Yankees’ 85-year-old honorary patriarch, said during an interview at his museum in Little Falls, N.J. “We hang out together in spring training.”

By “hanging out,” Berra means being in uniform with the Yankees by day and having dinner with Guidry by night. That is, until Guidry, who loves to cook and rents a two-bedroom apartment across the road from where Berra stays, demands a break from their spring training rotation of the five restaurants that meet Berra’s approval.

“See, I really love the old man, but because of what we share — which is something very special — I can treat him more as a friend and I can say, ‘Get your butt in my truck or you’re staying,’ ” Guidry said. “He likes that kind of camaraderie, wants to be treated like everybody else, but because of who he is, that’s not how everybody around here treats him.

“So I’ll say, ‘Yogi, tonight we’re going to Fleming’s, then to Lee Roy Selmon’s tomorrow, and then the night after that you stay in your damn room, have a ham sandwich or whatever, because the world doesn’t revolve around you and I’m taking a night off.’ ”       
Berra played 18 years for the Yankees, from 1946 to 1963, and was part of 10 World Series champions. Guidry pitched from the mid-1970s through 1988, played on two World Series winners and was a Cy Young Award winner in 1978, when he was 25-3 with a 1.74 earned run average.

While Guidry was blossoming into one of baseball’s premier left-handers, Berra was a coach on Manager Billy Martin’s staff (and later became Guidry’s manager). They dressed at adjacent stalls in the clubhouse of the old Yankee Stadium. Eager to learn, Guidry would pepper Berra with questions about what he, as a former catcher, thought of hitters.

Berra would say, “You got a great catcher right over there,” nodding in the direction of Thurman Munson. But Guidry persisted, and their bond was formed.

During Berra’s self-imposed absence, Guidry saw him only on occasion, at card-signing shows and at Berra’s charity golf tournament near his home in Montclair, N.J. When Berra returned, the retired players he knew best were no longer part of the spring training instructional staff.

“There was really nobody else that he had to sit and talk with, to be around after the day at the ballpark,” Guidry said. “So I just told him, ‘I’ll pick you up, we’ll go out to supper,’ and that’s how it started. It wasn’t like I planned it. It just developed.”

In offering his companionship, Guidry discovered that he was the luckier side of the partnership spanning generations of Yankees greatness.

“I never got to pitch against Ted Williams, for example,” Guidry said. “I’d say, ‘Yogi, when you guys had to go to Boston and you had to face Williams, how did you work him?’ You know, he’s like an encyclopedia, and that’s what I loved, all the stories and just being with him. If he’s not the most beloved man in America, I don’t know who is.”

Berra’s wife, Carmen, typically joins her husband in Tampa during spring training, but charity and family obligations generally limit her time here to a few days. Guidry, she said, has been “so special to Yogi, like a member of the family.”

He has asked Berra to stay with him in his apartment, but Berra prefers the hotel.

“I mean, the only time we’re really not together is when he’s asleep,” Guidry said. “But you can’t get him out of there because that’s how it’s been. You can’t change him. When he does it one day, it’s going to be that way for the next 1,000 days.”

Berra was 73 when he rejoined the Yankees family, but his rigid need for routines had little to do with his age, said Carmen Berra, his wife of 62 years.

“That’s always been Yogi,” she said. “If the doctor tells him to take a pill at 9 a.m., the bottle is open at 5 of 9.”

That is why Guidry considers his supreme achievement in their dozen years as the Yankees’ odd couple to be the day — he guessed it was five years ago — that he persuaded Berra to try a Cajun culinary staple.

Every spring, Guidry brings from his home near Lafayette, La., about 200 frog legs and a flour mix to fry them. One day, he took a batch to the clubhouse to share with the former pitching coach Mel Stottlemyre, turned to Berra and said, “Try these.”

Berra shook his head, as if Guidry were offering him tofu.

Guidry told him, “You don’t try it, we’re not going out to supper tonight.”

Berra relented, and soon a dinner of frog legs, green beans wrapped in bacon and a sweet potato at Guidry’s apartment — usually timed to a weekend of N.C.A.A. basketball tournament games — became as much a rite of spring as pitchers and catchers.

“He calls me at home this year to remind me about the frogs’ legs — ‘Did you get ’em yet?’ ” Guidry said. “I said, ‘Yogi, it’s freaking January, calm down.’ ”

Though Berra often calls Guidry during the off-season, he has never visited him in Louisiana. “He lives in the swamps, you know,” Berra said.

When Guidry was the Yankees’ pitching coach in 2006 and 2007, Berra could count on him being in spring training. Now Guidry must receive an invitation from the Yankees, which he and Berra anxiously await.       
During exhibition games, they sit on the bench together, in the corner by the water cooler, studying the game. “Every once in a while, Yogi will see something about a guy and think that he can help,” Guidry said.

Last season, Berra noticed that pitchers were getting Nick Swisher out with breaking balls and mentioned to Guidry that he thought Swisher might try moving up in the batter’s box to attack the pitch sooner.

“Tell him, not me,” Guidry said.

“Nah, I don’t want to bother him,” Berra said.

After Swisher grounded out, he walked past Guidry and Berra in the dugout. Guidry stood up, pointed at Berra. “He wants to talk to you,” Guidry said. Swisher sat down, heard Berra out and doubled off the wall in his next at-bat. After he scored, he returned to the dugout and parked himself alongside Berra.

“For Yogi, that meant everything,” Guidry said. “Now who knows if that had anything to do with the great season Swisher had? But in Yogi’s mind, he made a friend and he felt, ‘O.K., that justifies me being here,’ even though everybody loves having him here anyway.

“But that’s the thing — for Yogi, spring training is his last hold on baseball,” Guidry added. “When he walks through that door in the clubhouse, sits at the locker, puts on his uniform, talks to everybody, jokes around, watches batting practice, goes back in, has something to eat, and then he and I will go on the bench and watch the game, believe me, I know how much he really looks forward to it.”

Since taking a fall outside his home last summer that required hospitalization and a period of inactivity, Berra has slowed. His voice is softer. His words seem to be sparser.

“I know Carmen feels he’s going to be fine and occupied because I’m around,” Guidry said. “But this year may be harder than the rest because of what happened. I’m just going to have to watch a little more closely to see what he can do.”       
The first item on Berra’s agenda, he said, would be to go shopping.

“He buys his roast beef, I buy my bottle of vodka,” Berra said, with a twinkle in his eye. “We get along real good.”