Yogi Berra Is Dead. Endearing Baseball Figure A Factor In American Sentimentality Towards the Sport

Former New York Yankee catcher and manager Berra was 90. He was inducted into the baseball industry's “Hall of Fame.” He was also a part of ten so-called World Series Championships won by the team. (Only U.S. teams that are part of the cartel named Major League Baseball are actually allowed to compete for the series, so “World” is simply false.)

Who couldn't like Yogi Berra? A charming clown who was catnip for sportswriters, Berra, a former catcher and later manager in baseball, was given to utterances that amused by being blindingly obvious or displaying a fractured logic.

Let's revisit some of Berra's funny utterances that were made into memorable sayings by media repetition:

“You can observe a lot by just watching.” -Can't argue with that.

“If you come to a folk in the road, take it.” -Uhh, could you be more specific?

“We made too many wrong mistakes.” -And not enough right ones, apparently.

“Baseball is ninety percent mental and the other half is physical.” -Well, math wasn't his strong point. Let's grant that.

“You better cut the pizza in four pieces because I'm not hungry enough to eat six.” -Okay, ratios are confusing to the math-challenged.

“I usually take a two-hour nap from one to four.” -Like I said, weak on math. On basic arithmetic, come to think of it.

“We have deep depth.” -That's the best kind of depth, too.

“You've got to be very careful if you don't know where you are going, because you might not get there.” -Kinda true, in a Mobius-strip-logic sort of way.

“Pair up in threes.” -He did have his own concept of math, remember.

“You wouldn't have won if we'd beaten you.” -Unarguably true.

“Even Napoleon had his Watergate.” -Indeed. Funny thing, that.

“I don't know (if they were men or women fans running naked across the field). They had bags over their heads.” -He shoulda tooken* his own advice and just watched them to observe a lot. (*Yeah, I channeled a bit of Yogi's penchant for grammatical malapropism there.)

“Why buy good luggage, you only use it when you travel.” -I don't see anything wrong with that one, actually. If by “good” one means overpriced brand-name luggage.

“It's like déjà vu all over again.” -No list of Yogisms is complete without that masterpiece of redundancy. Or complete until it's finished. But what if the déjà vu you experienced was of a previous episode of déjà vu? A mental roomful of mirrors? It'd be like you're seeing yourself seeing yourself, if you get what I mean. You can't look in a mirror without a mirror.

And then there's the ever-useful- “It ain't over 'till it's over.” -Actually a good thing to remember in some situations.

But this next one makes me wonder if our oh-so-trustworthy establishment media might have made up a few of “Yogi's” utterances, or at least “perfected” them: 

“I never said most of the things I said.” -Clearly he was grammatically challenged. Read that as “the things attributed to me,” and it makes perfect sense, of course. [ESPN has posted a video with a talking head insisting that Berra did so say the things he denied saying. Is this a case of the media protesting too much?]

Berra could almost seem like a wise fool. Another character whose existence as a media character, Casey Stengel, another media-concocted character, similarly came across as an offbeat player/baseball figure who was innately likable and charmingly idiosyncratic. [Stengel had some things to say about Berra, such as "He'd fall in a sewer and come up with a gold watch." Sounds like a comment that speaks volumes about Berra's favor with the Gods of Social Good Fortune.]

These characters, real people who were also creations of the baseball business and collaborating sportswriters and broadcasters, helped create and perpetuate the sentimental feelings people have towards the game. Along with “baseball lore” and sports pieces “recalling” decades-old games and characters and “legends” (perhaps literally legend), all this has created a cloud of sentimentality around professional baseball, which attracts people, cements fan loyalty, and manufactures an ersatz community. Hence you see people wearing baseball caps on city streets to proclaim their local loyalty and give themselves a feeling of belonging, even though they actually exist in a state of alienation in an atomized urban environment. (I have been observing this first-hand for decades, just by watching. You can see a lot that way.) But all they're really doing is consuming an entertainment product (while politicians pick our pockets to buy billion dollar stadiums for billionaire team owners).

And distracting yourself from the important business of politics and economics and the structure of the society you live in.

But hey, go ahead and kick back and watch a game. Nothing wrong with entertainment and leisure, in moderation. Promoting obsession with sports- that is, not with playing or genuinely participating, but with voyeuristic spectating- is the business of ESPN, “sports” radio yak shows, the sports sections of newspapers and sports mags like Sports Illustrated. There's a huge and profitable industry around sports in general, which also serves a political function of distraction and neutralization of a large part of the populace.

“A lot of guys go, 'Hey, Yog, say a Yogi-ism.' I tell 'em, 'I don't know any.' They want me to make one up. I don't make 'em up. I don't even know when I say it. They're the truth. And it is the truth. I don't know.”

So long, Yogi. You'll live on in our hearts forever. (That's not really true. We're all gonna be dead someday. Just like you. But you'll “live on” as long as there's a U.S. media and it chooses to flog “your memory”- actually their maudlin rehashings of the legend they created around you. Assuming there's a buck to be made.)

I checked three sites for quotes, and all had the same 50 ones, only in different orders. Which adds to evidence that “Yogi Berra” wasn't just an actual person, but also a media concoction.

There isn't even consensus on how tall he was- a basic fact. A commentator who's “met him a million times” says he was 5'7”. Elsewhere his height is cited as 5'8”.

Keep in mind that much sports commentary and lore is literally legendary, that is, apocryphal or mythical- plus U.S. media is generally unreliable.

The simplest list is at “Yogi Berra's 50 greatest quotes,” Detroit Free Press.

For the same quotes and career overview, there's “Yogi Berra quotes: ESPN.com celebrates the wit, wisdom of a baseball legend.”

The rightwing tabloid rag New York Daily News, owned by Canadian Jewish real estate billionaire and ardent Zionist propagandist Mortimer B. Zuckerman grouped the quotes by topic, and has a timeline of Berra's life and career. “Yogi Berra's most famous quotes: The wit and wisdom of the late Yankees legend.”

For the same (but fewer) quotes, with the addition of quotes by other ballplayers about Berra, see “Yogi Berra Quotes,” Baseball Almanac.