Joe Garagiola Sr. knows more about the 90-year-old life of Yogi Berra than anyone, but he doesn’t know why the St. Louis Cardinals let Berra get away.

“A blind man could see he was the best hitter on the block,” Garagiola said.

The block Garagiola referred to in a telephone interview Wednesday, the day after Berra’s 90^th birthday, was the block on Elizabeth Avenue in St. Louis, in the Italian section known as The Hill, where Berra and Garagiola grew up across the street from each other.

“It was great growing up with him,” said Garagiola, who is nine months younger.

Both became catchers, good catchers, because none of the other kids wanted to catch. “They didn’t want to break a finger on a foul tip,” Garagiola said. “I never thought about that. Yogi didn’t think about it.”

Both signed contracts to play baseball professionally, Garagiola with the hometown Cardinals, Berra with the New York Yankees.

“He was the best player on the block,” Garagiola said. “I thought he was the best player in the neighborhood. Yogi could make any team. It was great to watch Yogi. He could always hit line drives. The first guy picked was always Yogi. It was always ‘I’ll take Yogi’ or Lawdie.”

Berra’s first name was Lawrence. His mother, an Italian immigrant, Garagiola said, couldn’t pronounce Lawrence or Larry and called him an abbreviation he spelled Lawie but pronounced Lawdie.

Playing games in the street in the late 1930s, more softball than baseball because “we didn’t have baseballs,” Berra and Garagiola preceded organized youth league baseball.

“I went to parochial school. Yogi didn’t make high school,” Garagiola said. “His whole life was baseball.” Not as much as he might have liked, though.

“When his mother called him, that’s when the games broke up.”

They played pickup games, with teams alternating selections from among the gathered players.

“I was No. 2,” Garagiola said. “You knew you weren’t going to be picked first. Yogi was going to be picked first. Yogi could hit a ball with a toothpick.”

When the two neighbors began playing American Legion baseball, scouts quickly noticed them. Berra and Garagiola gained even greater attention when they attended several tryouts at Sportsman’s Park in St. Louis, home of the National League Cardinals and American League Browns.

“We walked and hitchhiked to get there,” Garagiola recalled. “We couldn’t get on the bus because we didn’t have any money. Our fathers worked in the brickyards. We’d shag balls and then they called us in to hit. When Yogi got in to hit, he’d stop all the action. Right field was 310 feet, and he’d hit some on the roof of the pavilion or over it.”

Garagiola began playing professionally in 1942, Berra in 1943.

“I signed first with the Cardinals,” Garagiola said. “They gave me a $500 bonus. That’s what Yogi wanted. I don’t know if the Cardinals wouldn’t give it to him or what. I think he got $500 from the Yankees. That’s what Joey got. He always called me Joey.

“The Cardinals knew about him, but I don’t know why they didn’t sign him. They had one scout who watched him play every game.”

It was one of the scouts, Garagiola recalled, who gave Berra his name. “He said, ‘Look at him walking. He walks like a yogi.’ This was when he was 13 or 14.”

None of the scouts, though, doubted Berra’s ability to hit. “There was no comparison with Yogi,” his boyhood friend said. “You could scout him by the sound of the ball coming off the bat.”

But the Cardinals didn’t sign him.

One story behind the Cardinals’ failure to sign Berra is that they offered only a $250 signing bonus, and, indeed, Berra wanted what Garagiola got. Another version takes the explanation a step further.

Branch Rickey was on his way out as the St. Louis general manager, this version goes, and on his way to Brooklyn and wanted to wait and sign Berra for Brooklyn. The $250 offer thus was supposedly designed as an offer Berra could easily refuse.

Had the Cardinals signed Berra, he and Stan Musial would have been one of the greatest dynamic duos of all time. Instead Berra played with Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle, Phil Rizzuto, Whitey Ford, Vic Raschi, Allie Reynolds and Eddie Lopat, among others; won three American League Most Valuable Player awards, played in 14 All-Star games and played on 10 World Series championship teams.

Garagiola enjoyed a smaller share of star teammates and only one World Series championship. The teammates were Musial, Enos Slaughter, Red Schoendienst and Marty Marion with the Cardinals and Ralph Kiner and Dick Groat with Pittsburgh.

With the Pirates he played on a team that lost 112 of 154 games in 1952, and he played with such forgettable players (except by Pirates fans) as Pete Castiglione, Tony Bartirome, Bobby Del Greco, the O’Brien twins Johnny and Eddie and Johnny Berardino, who became better known as Dr. Steve Hardy of the long-running soap opera “General Hospital.”

Garagiola’s time with the Pirates, though, became belatedly beneficial to him in his post-baseball career as a popular and congenial television host, announcer and story teller.

When I initially called Garagiola to talk about Berra’s youth, it was last Tuesday, Berra’s birthday, and he was waiting for a call from his boyhood buddy. I offered to call the next day so I wouldn’t interfere with their call. When I called back the next day, Garagiola said, “I still haven’t heard from him.”

But it reminded him of a story.

“We were going to mass together one Sunday,” Garagiola recounted. “I got to church for once ahead of him for a 7 o’clock mass, or so I thought. He was already there and he said, ‘That’s the earliest you’ve ever been late.’”