About This Stamp
Beloved by fans across the country, Yogi Berra (1925–2015) was one of the best and most celebrated Major League Baseball™ players of his era. Berra won a record 10 World Series™ with the New York Yankees™ and was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame.
The stamp art is an original digital illustration. The artist first sketched the image with graphite and pastel oil pencils. He then scanned the image and finished the portrait digitally by applying layers of color to add highlights and detail.
Berra earned his famous nickname while playing American Legion baseball. Legend has it that Berra and his teammates went to the movies, where they saw a travelogue about India. Noticing that Berra sat waiting to bat with legs and arms folded in the same fashion as the yogis on the screen, one of his teammates decided everyone should call Berra “Yogi.”
The Yankees™ signed Berra to a Minor League™ contract in 1942. After playing one season, he was drafted and served in the Navy during World War II. Discharged in May of 1946, Berra played with the Yankees for the final week of the season. He hit the first of his 358 Major League™ home runs in his second at bat. The next season, he won the first of his World Series rings.
Berra won three American League MVP awards, was selected as an MLB™ All Star in 15 different seasons, and played in the World Series in 14 of his 18 seasons in Yankees pinstripes. Considered the best catcher in the American League in the 1950s, he was also a feared hitter, averaging better than .300 four times—finishing with a .285 lifetime average—and knocking in 100 runs five times.
A talented athlete, Berra became almost as well known for his paradoxical sayings, Yogi-isms— contradictory bits of logic and humor—as for his skill on the baseball diamond. “I never said everything I said,” Berra conceded, but several quotes attributed to him appear in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations.
After retiring as a Yankees player at the end of the 1963 season, Berra began a second career managing and coaching, taking two teams to the World Series as manager, the Yankees in 1964 and the Mets™ in 1973.
Berra was elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1972 and was a posthumous recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award.
Art director Antonio Alcalá designed the stamp with original art by Charles Chaisson and lettering by Michael Doret.
The Yogi Berra stamp is being issued as a Forever® stamp in panes of 20. This Forever stamp is always equal in value to the current First-Class Mail® one-ounce price.
Major League Baseball trademarks and copyrights are used with permission of Major League Baseball.
Stamp Art Director, Stamp Designer
Antonio Alcalá
Antonio Alcalá served on the Postmaster General’s Citizens' Stamp Advisory Committee from 2010 until 2011, when he left to become an art director for the U.S. Postal Service's stamp development program.
He is founder and co-owner of Studio A, a design practice working with museums and arts institutions. His clients include: the National Gallery of Art, Library of Congress, National Portrait Gallery, National Museum of Women in the Arts, The Phillips Collection, and Smithsonian Institution. He also lectures at colleges including the Corcoran College of Art + Design, SVA, Pratt, and MICA.
In 2008, his work and contributions to the field of graphic design were recognized with his selection as an AIGA Fellow. He has judged international competitions for the Society of Illustrators, American Illustration, AIGA, and Graphis. Alcalá also serves on the Smithsonian National Postal Museum and Poster House Museum’s advisory councils. His designs are represented in the AIGA Design Archives, the National Postal Museum, and the Library of Congress Permanent Collection of Graphic Design.
Alcalá graduated from Yale University with a BA in history and from the Yale School of Art with an MFA in graphic design. He lives with his wife in Alexandria, Virginia.
Stamp Artist
Charles Chaisson
Born and raised in New Orleans, Charles J. Chaisson, Jr., comes from a family that has a long history with the United States Postal Service: His mother, uncle, and grandfather having collectively worked for the USPS for approximately 98 years. Raised by an incredibly supportive, close-knit, and artistic Black Louisiana Creole family, he was encouraged to pursue his love for creative exploration at a very young age. He began taking art classes when he was three years old and left his hometown to study at the Ringling College of Art and Design in Florida, where he earned his B.F.A. in Illustration. After college, Chaisson moved to New York to further his education at the School of Visual Arts from which he received an M.F.A. in Illustration.
Chaisson has worked on a variety of projects for which he has created art for magazine covers, theater posters, clothing, advertisements, and book covers. He also creates abstract work, which explores themes of memory, time, historical culture, and the intersection of perspectives. With his use of bold and pastel colors and composition, his illustrations incorporate themes of fantasy juxtaposed with reality. Among his clients have been Penguin Random House, Atlantic Records, Scholastic Books, and Essence magazine.
Yogi Berra (2021) is Chaisson’s first project for the U.S. Postal Service. He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Typographer
Michael Doret
Born in 1946, Michael Doret grew up in Brooklyn, New York, near Coney Island. He graduated from Cooper Union with a BFA in 1967 and started his own design studio in New York.
Doret’s work includes logos, album art, posters, and magazine covers for clients such as the New York Knicks, Major League Baseball, the rock band Kiss, Walt Disney Motion Pictures, Taschen Publishing, and many others. Four of his covers for TIME Magazine are in the permanent collection of the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.
In 2003 Doret expanded his work to include font design. His digital type foundry, Alphabet Soup Type Founders, features unique font designs, which have won accolades from the Type Directors Club as well as from Communication Arts and Applied Arts magazines.
Blending elements of lettering, illustration, and graphic design in his work, Doret finds inspiration from matchbook covers, theater marquees, enamel signs, early and mid-20th century packaging, and various other artifacts of American culture.
An eight-time recipient of the New York Art Directors Club Silver Award, Doret has exhibited work in all the major industry shows and annuals. His Bedlam Ballroom CD packaging project for the band Squirrel Nut Zippers was nominated for a Grammy for Best Recording Package at the 44th Annual GRAMMY Awards.
Doret's studio, which he shares with his wife, illustrator Laura Smith, is in Pasadena, California.
Prior to his lettering work for the Yogi Berra stamp issued in 2021, Doret designed and illustrated four stamps for the 2015 Summer Harvest issuance, and created the art for the 2001 Federal Eagle stamped envelope.