Baseball Great Yogi Berra Recovering After Fall
By REUTERS
Published: July 17, 2010


NEW YORK (Reuters) - Baseball great Yogi Berra is recovering after a fall near his New Jersey home, the New York Yankees said on Saturday.

Berra, 85, a Hall of Fame catcher who was a Yankees star from the mid 1940s through 1963, suffered bruises in the fall and was recovering at his Montclair home, his family said in a statement released by the Yankees.

"He is extremely disappointed he is unable to participate in today's Old-Timers ceremonies and see so many of his friends" at Yankee Stadium, the statement said, referring to the baseball veterans' event to be held on Saturday at which he has been a fixture for years.

Berra, who later became a manager and coach before retiring in 1992, tossed the ceremonial first pitch in April 2009 to mark the opening of the new $1.5 billion stadium.

(Reporting by Chris Michaud; editing by Vicki Allen)

Yogi will be unable to attend .....we will all remember he threw out the first pitch at the new stadium

Diamond studs on the coffin!

Tim McCarver compares Yankee front office to Communists and Nazis for not sufficiently worshipping Joe Torre
Squawker Jon and I had other plans Saturday, so I missed watching Saturday's FOX game live. It's just as well, between A.J. Burnett selfishly hurting himself, and Tim McCarver's insane comments (captured by Ross at NY Stadium Insider) comparing the Yankee front office to Nazi Germany and the old Soviet Union for not having Joe Torre remembered in Yankee Stadium. McCarver's rant about Torre not being mentioned in the Stadium isn't even accurate, by the way - for one thing, Torre's picture is on the 2000 Yankee championship banner in the field level.

McCarver, who along with Joe Buck insisted in a previous broadcast that Joe Torre was the biggest reason the YES Network was so successful (as if the reason fans turned in to watch those games was to see the manager, and not the players!) gave a one-sided account of Torre's tenure with the Yankees. The broadcaster accused the front office of "corporate childishness" and said it was "the one thing they have bungled." He also had this to say about the Yankee front office's treatment of Torre:
You remember some of those despotic leaders in World War II, primarily in Russia and Germany, where they used to take those pictures that they had ... taken of former generals who were no longer alive, they had shot 'em. They would airbrush the pictures, and airbrushed the generals out of the pictures. In a sense, that's what the Yankees have done with Joe Torre. They have airbrushed his legacy. I mean, there's no sign of Joe Torre at the stadium. And, that's ridiculous. I don't understand it.
No, what's ridiculous is that McCarver would make such ignorant, outrageous comments, that simultaneously prop up Joe Torre as a victim and smear the Yankees front office, and that have no basis in fact. To compare Torre to a victim of Nazis and Soviet Communists is both offensive and absurd. These comments were in such incredibly bad taste, I half-expected McCarver to compare Torre's "The Yankee Years" to "The Diary of Anne Frank" and "The Gulag Archipelago."

McCarver has a lot in common with Torre, besides both of them having acrimonious ends to their tenure in Yankeeland. Both used to be very good at their jobs, but then they got complacent and arrogant as their fame and fortune grew. And both felt entitled to do whatever they wanted because of who they were, and thought they could just wing it on their names, without any preparation.

Now McCarver thinks that comparing Torre - who became a rich man and a future Hall of Famer thanks to his time as a Yankee - to Nazi and Soviet victims is just peachy. I think McCarver is off his rocker.

Let's review - Joe left Yankeeland because of the "insult" of getting a one-year, $5 million contract offer with an additional $3 million in incentives. He signed a contract with the Los Angeles Dodgers for less money than the Yankees offered him. Then he wrote "The Yankee Years" and trashed George Steinbrenner and the Yankee front office. He moved on, and so did the Yankees. But according to McCarver, the team ought to be obsessing about poor Joe every day. Give me a break.

Yes, Torre got left out of that Yankee Stadium closing tribute, and he should have been mentioned there. But McCarver didn't even bring that up; instead he focused on stuff that isn't even true.

How should the Yankees sufficiently honor Torre right now? Retire his number? Give him a plaque in Monument Park? And does McCarver really think that either thing will happen when 1) he's still an active manager for another team, and 2) he has yet to apologize for biting the hand that fed him for twelve years?

Casey Stengel had three more rings than Joe Torre. He didn't get his Yankee number retired until 1970, ten years after he was fired, and five years after he retired from the Mets. He didn't get a plaque in Monument Park until 1976, the year after he died.

If Torre didn't write "The Yankee Years," I think the front office would have retired his number after he himself retired from managing. Now, I don't see that happening any time soon. But that's Joe's own fault, not the Yankees.

Ralph Houk, Yankees Manager, Dies at 90
By RICHARD GOLDSTEIN
Published: July 21, 2010


Ralph Houk, a third-string catcher for the Yankees who went on to win three straight American League pennants and two World Series championships in his first seasons as their manager, died Wednesday at his home in Winter Haven, Fla. He was 90.

Ralph Houk, awaiting a game in 1966, won a Silver Star in World War II and was known in baseball as the Major.

His death — coming soon after the deaths of George Steinbrenner, the principal owner of the Yankees, and Bob Sheppard, the team’s former public address announcer — was announced by his daughter, Donna Slaboden.

As he got ready to manage in a World Series game for the first time, against the Cincinnati Reds in 1961, Houk was asked if he was nervous. “Why, is somebody going to be shooting at me?” he replied, according to “The Man in the Dugout” (Crown, 1992) by Leonard Koppett.

Houk had displayed his courage as an armored corps officer in World War II, winning the Silver Star. Upon returning to baseball, he was known as the Major, a tribute to his commanding presence, whatever the uniform.

When he became manager of the Yankees in October 1960, Houk stepped into a pressure-filled situation: he was replacing a man who had won 10 pennants and 7 World Series.

“There’s only one Casey Stengel,” he said. “I’m Ralph Houk.”

Managing for 20 seasons — with the Yankees, the Detroit Tigers and the Boston Red Sox — Houk’s strong point was building the morale and confidence of his players with an optimistic outlook and a refusal to criticize them publicly.

“I don’t think you can humiliate a player and expect him to perform,” he said.

Ralph George Houk, a Kansas native, was born on Aug. 9, 1919, the son of a farmer. He was a star athlete in high school, then was signed by the Yankees as a catcher in 1939.

After playing in the minors for three seasons, he enlisted in the Army as a private but received a lieutenant’s commission after officer candidate school.

He took part in the invasion of Normandy in June 1944 and the Battle of the Bulge that December, when he received the Silver Star for exposing himself to enemy fire as he drove off German tanks near a village in Luxembourg. When he was discharged as a major at war’s end, Houk took home a souvenir: a helmet he wore at Omaha Beach with holes in the front and back, a bullet having narrowly missed his skull.

In his first game with the Yankees, on April 26, 1947, Houk got three hits against the Washington Senators, and he went on to hit .272 in 41 games. That was his best season. With Yogi Berra en route to the Hall of Fame as the Yankees’ catcher, Houk appeared in only 91 games and had 158 at-bats over eight seasons, never hitting a home run.

He spent most of his time in the bullpen.

“I used to sit out there with pitchers who weren’t in the starting rotation, and I learned exactly what went through their minds,” Houk once told the sportswriter Lee Allen.

In 1955, Houk was named manager of the Yankees’ top minor league team, the Denver Bears of the American Association. In three years at Denver, he managed such future Yankees as Tony Kubek, Bobby Richardson, Don Larsen and Johnny Blanchard.

After the Yankees lost the 1960 World Series to the Pittsburgh Pirates, Stengel was forced out, at age 70, in favor of Houk, and General Manager George Weiss was replaced by his aide, Roy Hamey.

Houk made his debut as manager in an epic season: Roger Maris hit 61 home runs to break Babe Ruth’s record. The Yankees defeated the Reds in a five-game World Series, then captured the Series again in 1962, beating the San Francisco Giants in seven games. They repeated as pennant winners in 1963, but were swept by the Los Angeles Dodgers in the Series.

Houk and Hughie Jennings, who managed the Tigers to American League pennants from 1907 to 1909, are the only managers to finish in first place in each of their first three seasons.

After the 1963 season, Hamey retired because of health problems, Houk was elevated to general manager and Berra was named manager. The Yankees won the pennant again in 1964, but lost to the St. Louis Cardinals in seven games in the World Series.

Berra, never having enjoyed the players’ respect the way Houk had, was fired after the 1964 season and replaced by Johnny Keane, who had managed the Cardinals to the Series championship and then quit.

The Yankees’ stars were getting old, and the team finished sixth in 1965. When the Yankees got off to a 4-16 start in 1966, Houk fired Keane and returned to the dugout. The Yankees fell to 10th and last place, and during the season CBS took over complete ownership.

In January 1973, a syndicate headed by Steinbrenner bought the team. Under CBS, Houk had a free hand on the field while Lee MacPhail handled the front-office duties.

Houk quit on the final day of the 1973 season as the Yanks finished fourth in the Eastern Division. He said that he had not accomplished what he hoped for, and “I blame no one but myself.”

Houk managed for five years in Detroit, never finishing higher than fourth place, then retired to his Florida home. But he returned to baseball in 1981 as manager of the Boston Red Sox and had modest success over four seasons. He had a career record of 1,619-1,531, and upon retiring as a manager for a second and final time, stood 10th on the career list in games managed. He became a vice president of the Minnesota Twins in November 1986 and helped build their World Series champions of the following season.

In addition to his daughter, of Westerville, Ohio, Houk is survived by his son, Robert, of Bainbridge Island, Wash.; 4 grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren. His wife, Bette, died in 2006.

When Houk was named manager of the Yankees, he affected no false bravado. As Clete Boyer remembered: “At his first meeting, Ralph said we knew how to play the game better than he did. So if we wanted to bunt, bunt. If we wanted to hit and run, then hit and run.”

But his players never forgot that Houk was in command. As Kubek put it in his remembrance of the 1961 season: “None of us questioned Ralph. He was the Major.

Thats a great day for you grandpa! Did you make it?

Kubek Says Battlefield Made Houk a Leader
By RICHARD SANDOMIR


Nearly all of Tony Kubek’s recollections about Ralph Houk, who died Wednesday, reflect on the leadership qualities of the former Yankees manager and World War II battlefield hero.



“Ralph learned leadership the hardest way possible — seeing his friends and comrades die around him in the Battle of the Bulge,” Kubek, a Yankees shortstop from 1957 to 1965, said from Michigan on Thursday.

He recalled that in the late 1980s Houk showed him the helmet he wore at Omaha Beach with holes where a bullet narrowly missed his skull. “Ralph had a few more difficult times in a leadership position, leading the remnant of a platoon in Europe, than managing a team in a pennant race,” he said of the man who led the Yankees to World Series titles in 1961 and 1962 and the American League pennant in 1963.

Houk became the general manager of the Yankees the next season, when the Yankees lost the World Series to St. Louis, then became the field manager again in 1966, a job he kept until stepping down after the 1973 season, George Steinbrenner’s first as owner. But from 1965 on, Houk never returned to the postseason.

On Thursday the Yankees announced that they had placed a black armband on the left sleeve of the team uniforms for the remainder of the season to honor Houk. The armband will be placed below the patch that now honors Bob Sheppard, the longtime public-address announcer who died last week. The team’s uniforms now also have a patch on the chest to honor Steinbrenner, who died two days after Sheppard.

To have three such tributes on one uniform is highly unusual, but it is a reflection of the Yankees’ long and distinguished history. On Thursday night the Yankees also honored Houk with a moment of silence before their game with Kansas City.

As for Kubek, he first met Houk in the mid-1950s when Kubek played for the Yankees’ Class AAA team in Denver and Houk managed.

He recalled an instance when Denver’s two catchers got hurt and Houk stepped in. “Ralph activated himself and caught a doubleheader,” Kubek said. “That’s how he was. He could have asked some kid to catch.”

Kubek said that when Houk took over as Yankees manager in 1961, he usually had a set lineup, platooning less often than his predecessor, Casey Stengel. “He wasn’t a superstrategist,” he said. “He didn’t want to overmanage.”

“Ralph had a feel for people,” Kubek added. “He spent more time before games with the guys who weren’t playing. He’d be in the outfield with them during batting practice.”

Kubek said that years of being a backup catcher with the Yankees had also taught Houk how to handle pitchers. “When he came out to the mound, he could just look in the pitcher’s eyes and know if he should stay in,” he said.

Beyond that, Kubek said, Houk “understood people, he understood men, he understood veterans.”

But he said Houk could also be volatile. “Nobody — maybe Lou Piniella — became more irate than Ralph,” he said.

He said Houk once squashed a cigar “playfully” into pitcher Ryne Duren’s face; decked the singer Gordon MacRae for dancing, maybe too closely, with his wife, Betty (something witnesses said happened in 1967 at the Waldorf Astoria but which both men, who were friends, denied); and disarmed a man during a barroom brawl in Illinois.

Kubek said that in the years when he was a baseball analyst for NBC and Houk had gone on to manage Boston and Detroit, they would talk before games. “I’d be there to do the ‘Game of the Week,’ and I’d go to his office way early,” Kubek said. He said Houk would always want to talk about the great Yankees players he managed, but never about himself.

Alex Rodriguez hit his 600th career home run on Wednesday at Yankee Stadium.

Alex Rodriguez ended a 46 at-bat homerless skid to reach the 600 club on Wednesday.
Rodriguez hit a two-run homer to straightaway center field in the first inning of a game against the Toronto Blue Jays, off Shaun Marcum. It came on a 2-0 pitch over the middle of the plate with Derek Jeter on first and two out.

At 35 years, 8 days, Rodriguez became the youngest player in history to join the 600 Club, and the seventh player in baseball history to reach the milestone.

Congratulations A-Rod on Your 600th Homer! Know lets start winning and bury Tampa bay and Boston. Lets Go Yankees.