Wisdom of Yogi Berra

April means major-league baseball is back, so I want to talk about Yogi Berra, who played for the New York Yankees from 1946 to ’63, when they were perennial World Series champs. His name is familiar to everyone. He has given the culture more memorable epigrams than have some of our most esteemed wits. I rarely go a week without hearing “It’s déjà vu all over again” or “It ain’t over till it’s over,” two of Yogi’s greatest hits.

Berra, who is about to turn 89, grew up in a working-class neighborhood in St. Louis. Because he talks like a kid off the streets, he is often mistaken for a lovable idiot. However, his best sayings have a profundity that belies such an appraisal. Yogi has been blessed with a wit and wisdom both rare and sublime.

Oh, please, you say, he’s a semiliterate goon who spent his adult life reading comic books and playing a child’s game. All I can say is, talent doesn’t discriminate between rich and poor, or educated and uneducated. As surely as were Mark Twain and Will Rogers, Yogi the everyman philosopher-poet has been given a rare gift. His vision—and the unique way he expresses it—allows us to see the world with fresh eyes.

Berra’s formula is elegantly simple: He establishes a premise and then promptly sabotages it, making listeners squirm until they recognize the unmistakable logic, even insight, behind the thicket of nonsense. It’s that last-second rescue of sagacity from absurdity that generates our laughter.

If you meet someone who’s unfamiliar with Yogi’s sayings and you want to get a sure-fire laugh, just repeat his classic “Ninety percent of baseball is half mental.” People dismiss this line as laughably absurd because of the Berra “formula,” which in this instance creates a “90 percent/half” comical paradox. But a closer look reveals the remark as a baseball verity: physical prowess alone isn’t enough.

Here’s how I’d say it: “If you want to succeed at baseball, in nine cases out of ten staying focused while banishing doubts and distractions from the mind is half the battle.” Note that I needed four times as many words as Yogi did. His unforgettable seven-word one-liner imparts its Zen-like philosophy with none of the heavy-handedness of my paraphrase.

That attitude is echoed in one of his less-quoted declarations: “I ain’t in no slump; I just ain’t hitting.” It’s a funny line because a hitter who isn’t hitting is, by most people’s definition, in a “slump.” But Yogi was serious. To him, it wasn’t that simple—over the long season, hitters go through spells when they’re unsuccessful, but a slump is something more insidious. It’s a mental malfunction, an expectation to fail. You’re never “in no slump” if you believe in yourself.

Another great Yogi-ism concerned a trendy restaurant: “Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.” Remember, this man was sports royalty, a star player in a legendary organization at the peak of its success. Make no mistake: Berra meant, “Nobody who matters goes there anymore,” though he is too much of a gentleman to have said it out loud. (It also would have spoiled the beauty of the “nobody goes there/too crowded” paradox.)

Later in Berra’s career, he switched from catcher to left fielder. Around World Series time one year, speaking of the difficulty of fielding in the autumn darkness, he said, “It gets late early out there.” That’s vintage Yogi: the paradox, the concision. Six everyday words that rise almost to poetry.

Last month Yogi’s wife of sixty-five years died. He isn’t seen around much anymore. But his wacky-wise adages will always be with us.

—Tom Stern

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