>Mariano is great in all the respects you mention, but in those respects I'd put Yogi before Mariano.
>Besides his baseball accomplishments, Yogi coined an entire language!

Re Yogi, I suspect some of the quotations attributed to him are apocryphal. A great player, though, a three time MVP. "You could look it up." (That wasn't Yogi, it was Casey Stengel). When I was working in St. Louis a couple of years ago I made a pilgrimage of sorts to "The Hill," the Italian area where Yogi and Joe Garagiola grew up.

A couple of my favorite quotes attributed to Yogi:

"It ain't over till it's over."
"That place is so crowded no one goes there any more."
"Baseball is 90% mental and the other half is physical."