“I haven’t seen this in like 60 years.”
“This is what we used to wear in a doubleheader when it was 90 degrees in July. Feel that.”
What the 84-year-old Berra was holding in his hands and showing to those gathered around him was the wool flannel Yankees jersey he wore as a rookie in 1947.
On the front, of course, was the interlocked “NY” logo that has become one of the most iconic symbols in sports, the midnight navy blue felt stitched onto the pinstriped white uniform.
Not No. 8, which is the number Berra wore during the vast majority of his 19-year Hall of Fame career — the one that was on his back when he won three MVP Awards and 10 World Series championships as a catcher with the Yankees.
The man who had brought the item to this 2009 autograph session on Long Island had been researching its origin for years. And now he had confirmation.
“He was so excited to see it,” said Matt Marino, whose father owned the jersey. “And then he signed it under the Yankee logo.”
The 78-year-old jersey sold at auction for $363,505 over the weekend. But the question on the mind of anyone who laid eyes on it was the same question Berra had when he saw it 16 years ago:
“Where did you get this?”
It began at the Boys’ Club of New York on East 111th Street in Harlem during the winter of 1959.
That’s when 18-year-old Sonny Cillo walked in just as he had done for years — especially during that time of year, when recreational options were few.
On this particular day, kids had gathered around a box, each youngster taking a turn at reaching in and pulling out whatever was at the top of the pile.
They were baseball jerseys, and when Sonny got his chance, he drew out a Yankees jersey with the number 35 on the back.
A short while later, Sonny’s 10-year-old cousin, Ron Marino, was visiting from the Bronx.
“Hey, I was at the Boys’ Club,” Sonny told his younger cousin. “I guess the Yankees were cleaning out some of their storage rooms at Yankee Stadium, and they had these big cardboard boxes full of jerseys.”
“What do you mean?” asked Ron, a diehard Yankees fan.
“They had boxes of jerseys from the Yankees and they had some from the old Negro Leagues,” Sonny replied.
“I got this one for you.”
Ron held up the jersey and saw that it had “Berra” stitched on the inside of the collar, just beneath the manufacturer’s logo (Spalding), the size (44) and dry cleaning instructions.
“As I turned it around, I was fully expecting to see No. 8,” Ron remembers. “And it’s got No. 35.”
“This isn’t Berra’s jersey,” Ron said to Sonny. “He wears No. 8.”
And then, in the typical and completely relatable manner of a 10-year-old, Ron had a blunt follow-up question:
“Didn’t they have any Mantles or DiMaggios or anything? Babe Ruth?”
When Yogi Berra stepped on the field at Yankee Stadium on April 17, 1947, he was about to play in his second game of the season, and the ninth of his Major League career.
Berra took his position behind the plate, a position he inherited from another Yankees great, Bill Dickey.
In 1946, two weeks before Berra made his MLB debut on Sept. 22, Dickey played in his final game. At that point, he was a player/manager for the Yanks after replacing Joe McCarthy, who had resigned that May.
By the time Berra was called up, Dickey had resigned as well, but he returned to the club as a coach and became a mentor to Berra, one who was so instrumental in Berra’s development behind the plate that Berra later said, “I always say I owe everything I did in baseball to Bill Dickey. He was a great man.”
Berra not only inherited a position and a wealth of knowledge for how to play it from Dickey, but also the number that he’d wear for most of his big league career.
Dickey gave Berra his old uniform number, 8, in 1948 (the number was retired by the Yankees in 1972 in honor of both of them). Berra took the number — and with it, the torch — and lived up to it as another legendary Yankees backstop. But before that, he wore two other numbers in the Majors: 38 in September 1946, and 35 during the ’47 season.
It was 35 that Berra wore on April 17, 1947, which decades later would prove to be an important date. Against the Philadelphia Athletics that day, he went 1-for-4 with a single.
A dozen years later, that jersey was no longer in circulation, and Berra had by this point been wearing No. 8 for more than a decade. So from the bowels of Yankee Stadium, the jersey made it to 111th Street in East Harlem, where it would be given away at the Boys’ Club.
More than 60 years after that, it was photo-matched to what Berra wore on April 17, 1947.
These days, collectors are thrilled when they tear open a pack of baseball cards and pull a rare gem featuring a small piece of a game-worn jersey.
Imagine going to a Boys & Girls Club and suddenly someone brings out a box full of game-used Yankees jerseys. You walk up and reach into the box, pulling out a jersey worn by Aaron Judge. And just like that, it’s yours.
For 41 years, the jersey hung wrapped in plastic, in a closet just outside Ron Marino’s old bedroom in his childhood home in the Bronx.
While he didn’t know for certain whether it was authentic and game-worn by Berra, he treated it with the respect he had for baseball memorabilia, including a huge collection of baseball cards he owned.
In 2000, after his father died, Ron brought the jersey to his place in Brooklyn. About five years later, his son, Matt, started doing some internet research.
“He said, ‘Dad, Yogi wore this number for one year,'” Ron remembers. “‘It’s real.’”
It certainly was much more real now. But as for authentication, that was another matter.
At a small ice cream parlor in a strip mall in Massapequa, Long Island a few years later, father and son got all the authentication they needed.
“Yogi instantly recognized it,” Ron said. “He was visibly emotional. At that point, we knew it was his jersey. There’s been subsequent identification with photographs and the stitching, but we knew it then.”
The stories behind the stitching
One of the precious traits of baseball is that it is a game of stories. They get passed down from generation to generation, and while the epochs change, the game itself — and the aura of tradition that surrounds it — remains the same.
We see memories in our mind’s eye, but we also see the game’s glory in the tangible elements — bats, balls, gloves, caps, and yes, uniforms that come from the greatest players and the greatest moments.
Many of them hang in display cases at museums such as the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.
But as Ron and Matt Marino discovered, some of them were pulled out of a box at the Boys’ Club of New York almost 70 years ago.
