Culturally, Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays were light-years apart. Yet they were nearly the same age and almost the same size, and they came to New York at the same time. They were both products of generations of baseball-playing families, for whom the game was the only escape from a lifetime of brutal manual labor. These two men shared a close personal friendship, and each was the only man who could truly understand the other's experience.

Yogi Berra is one of the most popular former athletes in American history, and the most quoted American since Abraham Lincoln. Part comedian, part feisty competitor, Berra is also the winningest player (14pennants, 10 World Series, three MVPs) in baseball history. In this revelatory biography, Allen Barra presents Yogi's remarkable life as never seen before, from his childhood in "Dago Hill," the Italian-American neighborhood in St. Louis, to his leading role on the 1949-53 Yankees, the only team to win five consecutive World Series, to the travails of the '64 pennant race, through his epic battles and final peace with George Steinbrenner.

CLEARING THE BASES is the first book to tackle baseball's most intriguing questions, plus it offers hard, sensible answers --- answers based on exhaustive research and analysis. Sports journalist Allen Barra takes on baseball's toughest arguments using stats and methods he developed. Barra takes you to the heart of baseball's ultimate question: Who's the Best?, in this, the ultimate baseball debate book, guaranteed to spark thousands of heated debates and to supply the fuel for thousands more.