In the latest edition of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, there is a sports figure who towers above the competition.
Among the nine sayings attributed to one Lawrence Peter Berra, the New York Yankees catcher better known as Yogi, are phrases that may seem nonsensical at first glance, but upon closer inspection offer wisdom for all ages.
“You can observe a lot by looking.”
“It was déjà vu again.”
And of course there is ‘It ain’t over till it’s over’, the title for a new documentary about Yogi’s life.
“It is not over yet” wants to be a correction to the caricature implanted in the cultural consciousness of Yogi as a lovable clown, a malaprop-prone catcher who looked like he had been put together with spare parts. But Yogi wasn’t just a cuddly pitchman for insurance, beer, and hot chocolate, an inspiration for a certain cartoon bear, and a stand-up guy beloved by teammates; he was, the film states, one of the greatest baseball players who ever lived.
“This man has been criminally overlooked his entire life, at every stage,” said Sean Mullin, the film’s director.
The documentary, which opens Friday, is intensely personal, asking the eldest of Yogi’s 11 grandchildren to serve as narrator without pretense of objectivity in the fight for her grandfather’s legacy.
It was a relatively recent crop that encapsulates the film’s defining thesis and delivers the opening sequence. At the 2015 All-Star Game, Major League Baseball honored the four players who were named by fans as the greatest living legends. Lindsay Berra watched with her grandfather that night and remembers getting furious that Yogi didn’t make it.
Mullin and Lindsay Berra stressed in separate interviews that they meant no offense to the four greats honored that night: Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, Sandy Koufax and Johnny Bench. They just fervently believe that Yogi should have been the fifth man to walk the field in Cincinnati that night.
“From the beginning, I always thought I wanted to figuratively bring Grandpa back into the picture with the documentary,” said Lindsay Berra, executive producer of the film.
The filmmakers bundle the statistics and an impressive array of former players and other baseball experts to support their claim. Yogi – who passed away in 2015 at the age of 90 – was a major part of 10 World Series championship teams as a player, more than anyone else. He won three Most Valuable Player awards, played in All-Star games in 15 consecutive years, and in 1956 won the only perfect game in World Series history. And only two Major Leaguers have ever hit more than 350 home runs while striking out less than 450: Joe DiMaggio and Yogi.
The statistic that most impresses Lindsay Berra comes from 1950. That season, Yogi went to the plate 656 times, scoring just 12 times: “That will always be amazing to me, because guys today hit 12 times in a weekend.”
All this passionate lobbying is not just some special family plea. Jon Pessah, who wrote the 2020 biography “Yogi: A Life Behind the Mask” (and does not appear in the film), said the idea that Yogi’s baseball skills have been overlooked is “100 percent true”.
Besides the hitting prowess, Yogi pushed himself to become a great defensive catcher and was an expert at guiding his temperamental pitchers. (During Don Larsen’s perfect play in the 1956 World Series, he didn’t shake off any of the 97 pitches Yogi called.)
“After you study his career, you say, wow, this guy wore the Yankees in the ’50s,” a decade that was a bridge between DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle, Pessah said. “If you look at what he meant on the field and at the plate, he was a force.”
The unfair and incomplete perception of Yogi has a lot to do with his stocky stature and comparisons to his famous teammates. DiMaggio was smooth and polished, and married to Marilyn Monroe; Mantle was the blue-eyed, golden-haired, all-American kid from Oklahoma. Yogi – well, no demeaning or belittling description seemed off limits to the writers who reported on him. Early in his career, an article in Life magazine called him “knock-knead” and “barreled,” and his running style was likened to that of “a fat girl in a tight skirt.” That was all in one sentence.
His first manager called him a monkey. Newspaper and magazine articles compared Yogi’s appearance to that 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?” said Lindsay Berra.
But Yogi ultimately didn’t mind pulling pranks and shrugging them off as just another test of character.
“I think he knew who he was inside,” Mullin said. “There was real trust on a very basic level.”
Growing up as the fourth child of Italian immigrants in St. Louis, Yogi dropped out of school after eighth grade to help support his family, though all he really wanted to do was play baseball. Constantly underrated, he eventually signed with the Yankees. He served during World War II and was in a rocket boat on Omaha Beach on D-Day.
Back from the war, he played on a Yankees farm team for a year before being called up late in the 1946 season. He was in the majors for good.
While he proved opponents wrong with his punching power and improved defense, he also showed deep-rooted integrity. At a time when racism was still thriving in Major League Baseball, despite Jackie Robinson integrating the game in 1947, Yogi showed respect for Robinson and other black players; he later became very close friends with Larry Doby, the first black player in the American League.
But a charmed life — he also had a storybook marriage to Carmen, his hometown sweetheart — doesn’t make for the most dramatic of movies.
To add some texture to his portrait, Mullin explored both Yogi’s greater cultural significance and his personal pain.
Yogi became one of the first celebrities to promote the chocolate milk drink Yoo Hoo, Doodle fish oil, Camel cigarettes and, really leaning into the persona later in life, MillerLite And Aflac insurance. “He never hated the way he was viewed, but he was smart enough to know it made business sense,” Pessah said.
Yogi’s son Dale followed him to the majors, but a promising career was derailed by a cocaine addiction. Rehab didn’t help, and neither did his family’s encouragement. It took an ultimatum given by Yogi during an intervention in 1992.
“You won’t be my son anymore unless you decide to stop doing drugs,” Dale Berra told his father. He has been clean ever since.
The other deep wound in Yogi’s life came in 1985, inflicted by Yankees owner George Steinbrenner. Serving as manager for Steinbrenner was a decidedly unsafe proposition, and 16 games into Yogi’s second season, he was fired. What angered Yogi the most wasn’t the shooting, it was that Steinbrenner didn’t have the guts (or the decency) to deliver the blow himself. Always a man of his word, Yogi vowed never to return to Yankee Stadium until Steinbrenner apologized.
It took nearly 14 years for rapprochement to take place, leading to Yogi Berra Day at the stadium in July 1999. Forty-three years after the perfect World Series play, Don Larsen reunited with his former battery mate to throw the ceremonial first pitch.
Yogi didn’t have a glove with him, so he borrowed one from Joe Girardi, a Yankees catcher at the time. Those who were there that day still marvel at what they saw. David Cone then threw another perfect game for the Yankees. A life well lived had its magic coda.