Yogi Berra on the Field: The Case for Baseball Greatness

In the most recent version of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, there’s a sports activities determine who towers over the competitors.

Among the 9 sayings attributed to at least one Lawrence Peter Berra, the New York Yankees catcher higher often known as Yogi, are phrases that will appear nonsensical at first, however on additional reflection provide knowledge for the ages.

“You can observe a lot by watching.”

“It was déjà vu all over again.”

And in fact, there’s “It ain’t over till it’s over,” which gives the title for a brand new documentary about Yogi’s life.

“It Ain’t Over” goals to be a corrective to the caricature implanted within the cultural consciousness of Yogi as an amiable clown, a malaprop-prone catcher who appeared as if he had been put along with spare elements. But Yogi was not solely a cuddly pitchman for insurance coverage, beer and chocolate milk, an inspiration for a sure cartoon bear, and a stand-up man beloved by teammates; he was, the movie argues, top-of-the-line baseball gamers who ever lived.

“This guy was criminally overlooked his whole life, at every stage,” mentioned Sean Mullin, the movie’s director.

The documentary, which opens Friday, is very private, tapping the eldest of Yogi’s 11 grandchildren to function a narrator with no pretense to objectivity in preventing for her grandfather’s legacy.

It was a comparatively latest slight that encapsulates the movie’s defining thesis and yields the opening scene. During the All-Star Game in 2015, Major League Baseball honored the 4 gamers voted by followers as the best residing legends. Watching that night time together with her grandfather, Lindsay Berra remembers turning into infuriated that Yogi had not made the lower.

Mullin and Lindsay Berra, in separate interviews, emphasised that they meant no offense to the 4 greats honored that night time — Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, Sandy Koufax and Johnny Bench. They simply fervently imagine that Yogi ought to have been the fifth man strolling on the sector that night time in Cincinnati.

“I always thought from the beginning that I figuratively wanted to put Grandpa back in the picture with the documentary,” mentioned Lindsay Berra, who’s an govt producer on the movie.

The filmmakers marshal the statistics and a formidable array of former gamers and different baseball consultants to again up their declare. Yogi — who died in 2015 at 90 — was a core a part of 10 World Series championship groups as a participant, greater than anybody else. He received three Most Valuable Player awards, performed in All-Star video games in 15 straight years and in 1956 caught the one good sport in World Series historical past. And solely two main leaguers have ever hit greater than 350 residence runs whereas hanging out fewer than 450 instances: Joe DiMaggio and Yogi.

The statistic that almost all impresses Lindsay Berra comes from 1950. That season, Yogi went to the plate 656 instances and struck out simply 12 instances: “That to me will always be astonishing, because guys today strike out 12 times in a weekend.”

All this passionate lobbying will not be mere particular familial pleading. Jon Pessah, who wrote the 2020 biography “Yogi: A Life Behind the Mask” (and isn’t within the movie), mentioned the concept that Yogi’s baseball prowess has been ignored “is 100 percent true.”

Besides the hitting feats, Yogi willed himself into turning into a terrific defensive catcher and was skilled at guiding his temperamental pitchers. (During Don Larsen’s good sport within the 1956 World Series, he didn’t shake off one of many 97 pitches Yogi known as.)

“After studying his career, you say, wow, this guy carried the Yankees in the ’50s,” a decade that bridged DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle, Pessah mentioned. “You look at what he meant on the field and at the plate, he was a force.”

The unfair, and incomplete, notion of Yogi has a lot to do along with his stubby stature and comparisons along with his well-known teammates. DiMaggio was slick and polished, and married to Marilyn Monroe; Mantle was the blue-eyed, golden-haired, all-American boy from Oklahoma. Yogi — effectively, no demeaning or belittling description appeared off-limits to the writers who coated him. Early in his profession, a Life journal article referred to him as “knock-kneed” and “barrel-shaped,” and likened his operating type to that of “a fat girl in a tight skirt.” That was multi function sentence.

His first supervisor known as him an ape. In newspaper and journal articles, Yogi’s seems had been in comparison with these of a gargoyle, a gorilla and an orangutan.

“Can you imagine reporters writing today that someone looked like a gorilla and was too ugly to be a Yankee?” Lindsay Berra mentioned.

But Yogi in the end didn’t thoughts enjoying the butt of jokes, sloughing them off as simply one other take a look at of character.

“I think he knew inside who he was,” Mullin mentioned. “There was a real confidence at a very base level.”

Growing up the fourth baby of Italian immigrants in St. Louis, Yogi stop college after eighth grade to assist help his household, though he just about simply needed to play baseball. Constantly underestimated, he in the end signed with the Yankees. He was drafted throughout World War II and was in a rocket boat at Omaha Beach on D-Day.

Back from the battle, he performed on a Yankees farm workforce for a yr earlier than being known as up late within the 1946 season. He was within the majors for good.

While proving naysayers mistaken along with his hitting prowess and enhancing protection, he additionally displayed deep-seated integrity. At a time when racism nonetheless thrived in Major League Baseball regardless of Jackie Robinson integrating the sport in 1947, Yogi confirmed respect to Robinson and different Black gamers; he later grew to become superb mates with Larry Doby, the primary Black participant within the American League.

But a charmed life — he additionally had a storybook marriage to his hometown sweetheart, Carmen — doesn’t make for essentially the most dramatic of movies.

To add some texture to his portrait, Mullin examined each Yogi’s bigger cultural significance and his private ache.

Yogi grew to become one of many first movie star endorsers, hawking the chocolate milk drink Yoo Hoo, Doodle fish oil, Camel cigarettes and, actually leaning into the persona later in life, Miller Lite and Aflac insurance coverage. “He never resented the way he was viewed but he was savvy enough to know it made business sense,” Pessah mentioned.

Yogi’s son Dale adopted him into the majors, however a promising profession was derailed by a cocaine dependancy. Rehab didn’t assist, and neither did encouragement from his household. It took an ultimatum, delivered by Yogi, at an intervention in 1992.

“You’re not going to be my son anymore unless you make a decision to not do drugs again,” Dale Berra mentioned his father informed him. He has been clear since.

The different deep wound in Yogi’s life got here in 1985, inflicted by the Yankees proprietor George Steinbrenner. Serving as supervisor for Steinbrenner was a decidedly unsafe proposition, and 16 video games into Yogi’s second season, he was fired. What angered Yogi most wasn’t the firing, it was that Steinbrenner didn’t have the heart (or decency) to ship the blow himself. Yogi, all the time a person of his phrase, vowed by no means to return to Yankee Stadium till Steinbrenner apologized.

It took practically 14 years earlier than a rapprochement was brokered, resulting in Yogi Berra Day on the stadium in July 1999. Forty-three years after the World Series good sport, Don Larsen was reunited along with his former battery mate to throw out the ceremonial first pitch.

Yogi didn’t have a glove with him, so he borrowed one from Joe Girardi, a Yankees catcher on the time. Those there that day nonetheless marvel at what they then witnessed. David Cone proceeded to pitch one other good sport for the Yankees. A life effectively lived had its magical coda.