A shout out for Yogi

When I was a kid, I spent first grade through fourth grade in Bend, Oregon.  There was no TV, and the only sports teams were fielded from the town's high school.  Thus, the only sport I grew up with, (and played in Bend's Little League) was baseball.  And, the majority of games we got on the radio were Yankee games.  So, I became a pretty rabid little Yankee fan continuing through our move to the Bay Area in California where I started fifth grade.  Like a lot of my buddies I was an admirer of Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford, but unlike those buddies, my favorite Yankee was Yogi Berra.  Even though I was not deeply into statistics at that time and age, I sensed that Yogi truly was a great ball player who was especially productive in clutch situations.  He was the MVP in 1951, 1954, and 1955, which today most people don't remember.  But let's  dig a little deeper.  Here are his stats for 1950, the year before his first MVP.  The reason I'm choosing 1950 will be explained later.

At Bats =597
Runs = 116
Hits = 192
Doubles = 30
Triples = 6
Home runs = 28
RBI's = 124
Stolen bases = 4
Walks = 55
Strike outs = 12
Batting average = .322
On base percentage = .383
Slugging percentage = .533
On base + slugging (OPS) = .915

These are stats today's ball players would kill for.  An OPS even in the low eight hundreds is considered excellent. Yogi's is in the nine hundreds!  But, you may have overlooked the most amazing stat he put up in 1950, which was:  Strike outs = 12!!  That amazes me every time I think about it.  Out of 597 times at bat he only struck out 12 times.  True, Joe Sewell of the 1925 Indians struck out only 4 times in 608 at bats, but it was a different game than it was in 1950.  Any way you slice it a mere 12 strike outs in a season is very rare.

Yogi was an awesome player, and as we all know, his "Yogi-isms" are legendary. For instance:

"You should always go to other people's funerals, otherwise, they won't come to yours."

"You've got to be very careful if you don't know where you are going because you might not get there."

 Recall most of them right here.