They will talk today about all the winning Yogi Berra did with the Yankees, and about as enduring a picture as there is in baseball history, Yogi jumping into Don Larsen’s arms after Larsen’s World Series perfect game in 1956. They will talk about all the funny things he said and the character he became and the way he stayed away from the Yankees for 14 years once because of the way George Steinbrenner fired him one time. And they will talk about how not one New York Yankee was ever loved more than he was, across the nearly 70 amazing years from when he first put on pinstripes.

It will all be true, as much part of his record as the records he set when he was one of the great baseball players of his time and all time, and one of the most accomplished champions we’ve ever had in American sports. You have to know that when Derek Jeter finally won his fifth World Series in 2009, and Yogi was asked about it, he smiled and said, “Hey, he’s halfway to me.”

But it was always more than baseball with Yogi Berra. The measure of this man, the full measure you take now that he is dead at the age of 90, the true measure of everything that happened to him after his talent for hitting a baseball got him off the section of St. Louis known as The Hill, was the goodness in him, and the courage, because in addition to everything else, when Yogi was 18 in 1944, he was on the beach in Normandy.

He was a war hero before he was ever a baseball hero, because all kids like him were war heroes in that time, at places like Normandy. He went from there to Yankee Stadium and he married his lovely wife Carmen, became a father and a grandfather and, in his own way, became as famous as DiMaggio or Mantle or any of the Yankees he played with in one of the most celebrated eras any team has ever had in any sport. He was more than No. 8, as much as we loved calling him that. He led a wonderful American life, one that spoke of talent and friendship, duty and possibilities and decency.

Read the article “Yogi Berra’s Wonderful American Life” on nydailynews.com.