My sincere sympathies are with you, Zappaa. To us, your dad was an idol, one of the greatest ballplayers of all time, and, you could say, the greatest winner in baseball history. And all this while displaying the kind of humility that was hard to reconcile with his stature in sports and in American life. But to you, he was a father, which makes this all the more real to you. We all grieve with you and your family today.
When I was a kid, there were only two people who were spoken of reverently in my house by my mother: Phil Rizzuto and Yogi. When she was growing up in Clifton in the late '40s and through the '50s, both men were a symbol of such strong Italian pride for her family. But they also, I came to understand later, provided context for memories of her father that my mom was able to pass onto me. My grandfather died just weeks after my folks married in 1969, and just a year before I was born. I never knew him, but I remember watching Yankees games as a kid, listening to Rizzuto, and the WPIX cameras often caught your dad on the bench, and that would start my mother down the road of recollection about how terrific these guys were when she was younger, and how much they meant to her father. Sometimes, she would even get a little teary-eyed, and I couldn't quite believe she was so emotional about these guys, as iconic as they were - a fact I well understood. But as I got older, I realized they were a living connection between her late father and the grandson he never knew, a vessel through which she was able to make me understand him, while holding up men like your dad as someone to be honored an emulated.
So, to that end, and not at all to diminish the loss you feel today, Yogi was a part of our family, too. God bless yours.