Kallman: Missing Mr. Yogi

From SABR member Jeff Kallman at Throneberry Fields Forever on December 31, 2018:

“Talking baseball with Yogi Berra,” A. Bartlett Giamatti once said, “is like talking to Homer about the gods.” See and raise: Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize winning economist and free market champion, was once arranged to have breakfast with Berra. They hit it off, apparently. Berra biographer Allen Barra related him admitting Friedman “is not a baseball fan, and I am not as much a money fan as most people think I am.”

According to Barra, Berra said Friedman told him he’d have gotten a good grade if he’d been in Friedman’s class. “It’s probably true,” Friedman said before his 2006 death. “I think he had a good grasp of basic economic principles, apparently better than some of the better educated people in the Yankee front office that he used to negotiate salaries with. One thing he said that I have always remembered is, ‘A nickel isn’t worth a dime anymore.’ He was right.”

Berra even caught Friedman in the kind of malaprop for which the Hall of Fame catcher was intergalactically famous: they talked a little literature at their breakfast, and Berra—who never minded when the joke was on him—mentioned having met Ernest Hemingway during his playing days and asking what paper he worked for. Friedman stopped laughing long enough to say one of his two favourite Hemingway novels was, quote, The Fisherman and the Sea.

Read the full article here: https://throneberryfields.com/2018/12/31/missing-mr-yogi/



Originally published: January 7, 2019. Last Updated: January 7, 2019.