one of the great gifts of baseball is that the game provides consolations all the time. you just have to find them.

so you go 0-for-4 with three whiffs? so you boot a ball at second which lets in the winning run? so you trip and fall running off the field after the last out?

so?

the game offers consolations, which you can use as a kind of balm later. there's sunshine, exercise, razzing of your teammates, seeing that white
ball fly against a blue sky, the ability to go home and dare to dream that future games will be better.

still got your doubts about consolations?

well, then, consider none other than yogi berra, three-time american league mvp winner, ten-time world series champion, hall of famer,
someone who did all this on a 5-foot, 7 1/2-inch frame. he obviously played much taller than he was.

but he had some hard moments. one of them came in 1950, as allen barra writes in his biography, "yogi berra, eternal yankee."

yogi had a sensational season in 1950: he hit .322, led the yankees with 124 rbi (two more than dimaggio), hit 28 homers, 30 doubles
and six triples, and led the AL in put-outs and fielding average (.982, or 21 points higher than the league average).

the surprise, and possible pain (though yogi shrugged it off) was not that his teammate, shortstop phil rizzuto won the mvp award
in 1950. the 5-foot-8 rizzuto too had a great year: he hit .324, with 7 homers and 200 hits (two behind AL leader, the Tigers' George Kell.) he led
the AL with a .982 fielding percentage (only 14 errors in 452 chances). rizzuto also showed a terrific eye at the plate: he struck
out just 39 times in 617 at-bats.

then again, yogi whiffed just 12 times in 597 at-bats.

the surprise (and the pain, in part because it affected yogi's negotiations for his 1951 contract) was that red sox all-purpose position player billy
goodman was second in the mvp balloting. goodman hit .354 in 110 games with only four homers. (but, as noted, yogi shrugged it off).

what yogi couldn't shake off, partly because his st. louis friends wouldn't let him, was a kind of consolation award. during the season, yogi
caught the eye of the national association of women's artists, which, in december, voted him as having "one of the most stimulating faces in
america," along with several others, including actress lauren bacall and orchestra conductor arturo toscanini.

the association's president ruth yeats said yogi's face "stimulates women's subconscious yearning for the Neanderthal man." most men,
she went on, "carry faces that have no more stimulation than a bowl of oatmeal."

now, that's a consolation, right? yogi left the season third in mvp balloting but first in the hearts of a national group of women artists.
(though the award left him uneasy. "what," he asked his friends, "if carmen finds out?" carmen was his wife. )

then again, if you go 0-for-4 with three whiffs and an error in a big game and you trip leaving the field and your face STILL looks like
oatmeal, well, then you'll just have to work harder to find those consolations. right?

but, boopie, the consolation is that the consolations are there. they really are.

-mike




-- Edited by mhart on Saturday 3rd of September 2016 12:52:44 AM