<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
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 \u201963, 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 \u201cIt\u2019s d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu all over again\u201d or \u201cIt ain\u2019t over till it\u2019s over,\u201d two of Yogi\u2019s greatest hits.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Oh, please, you say, he\u2019s a semiliterate goon who spent his adult life reading comic books and playing a child\u2019s game. All I can say is, talent doesn\u2019t 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\u2014and the unique way he expresses it\u2014allows us to see the world with fresh eyes.<\/p>\n
Berra\u2019s 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\u2019s that last-second rescue of sagacity from absurdity that generates our laughter.<\/p>\n
If you meet someone who\u2019s unfamiliar with Yogi\u2019s sayings and you want to get a sure-fire laugh, just repeat his classic \u201cNinety percent of baseball is half mental.\u201d People dismiss this line as laughably absurd because of the Berra \u201cformula,\u201d which in this instance creates a \u201c90 percent\/half\u201d comical paradox. But a closer look reveals the remark as a baseball verity: physical prowess alone isn\u2019t enough.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s how I\u2019d say it: \u201cIf 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.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
That attitude is echoed in one of his less-quoted declarations: \u201cI ain\u2019t in no slump; I just ain\u2019t hitting.\u201d It\u2019s a funny line because a hitter who isn\u2019t hitting is, by most people\u2019s definition, in a \u201cslump.\u201d But Yogi was serious. To him, it wasn\u2019t that simple\u2014over the long season, hitters go through spells when they\u2019re unsuccessful, but a slump is something more insidious. It\u2019s a mental malfunction, an expectation to fail. You\u2019re never \u201cin no slump\u201d if you believe in yourself.<\/p>\n
Another great Yogi-ism concerned a trendy restaurant: \u201cNobody goes there anymore. It\u2019s too crowded.\u201d Remember, this man was sports royalty, a star player in a legendary organization at the peak of its success. Make no mistake: Berra meant, \u201cNobody who matters<\/em> goes there anymore,\u201d though he is too much of a gentleman to have said it out loud. (It also would have spoiled the beauty of the \u201cnobody goes there\/too crowded\u201d paradox.)<\/p>\n Later in Berra\u2019s 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, \u201cIt gets late early out there.\u201d That\u2019s vintage Yogi: the paradox, the concision. Six everyday words that rise almost to poetry.<\/p>\n Last month Yogi\u2019s wife of sixty-five years died. He isn\u2019t seen around much anymore. But his wacky-wise adages will always be with us.<\/p>\n \u2014Tom Stern<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 \u201963, 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1497","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-effective-writing","category-humor"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1497"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1497"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1497\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1497"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1497"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1497"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}