Yogi Berra: Man, Myth, and Baseball Legend

00:00:31 Speaker 1: The rig Veda is an ancient Indian collection of Veda Sanskrit hymns. It's impossible to know exactly when the Rigveda was composed, but most scholars agree that it probably happened sometime between one thousand and nineteen hundred BC. According to Hinduism, however, it transcends all time and doesn't have a beginning or an end, Consisting of one and twenty eight poems that are grouped into ten smaller books called mandalas. The collection was actually passed down from generation to generation through spoken word for centuries. So if you think you're really good at the game telephone, think again. It took hundreds of years before someone decided to actually write down the Rigveda around approximately three hundred BC. Did I mention that it's really important? Yeah. The Rigveda is one of the four Vedas, the most sacred religious texts in Hinduism, the world's oldest religion. According to many, Hinduism is the third largest religion in practice today, with more than one billion followers around the globe, though most are in India. Now, if you're worried that you accidentally hit spirituality dot MP three instead of sports dot MP three. Just stay with me here. We will get to the sports soon enough. The Rigveda also contains the first ever use of the word yoga, derived from two Sanskrit roots. This use of yoga best meant yoking, joining, coming together, and connection. The practice of yoga meant to find great harmony between the human mind and body, man and nature. Soon took on a life of its own, becoming not just a major philosophy within Hinduism, but Buddhism as well, albeit with many differences. More recently, as in the last two hundred years or so, yoga has entered the West, which many credit to Swami Vivekananda, a famous Indian Hindu monk who demonstrated yoga at the eighteen ninety three Chicago World's Fair. In America today there's now goat yoga, hot yoga, normal yoga, and probably a fair amount more. I'm missing. I haven't heard of cold yoga, but I'm sure that's a thing. And that's because the practice of yoga dropped most of its religious connections as it was adopted in the West, but it did still retain its connection to spirituality, which was a growing concept in America. Thanks to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Threaux, and many other practitioners of yoga are called yogis, and their depictions vary depending on which Indian religion and sect you're talking about. In our Western media, these yogis were commonly portrayed in stereotypical fashion back in the day as old, somewhat wise but also a little foolish, meditative guides that gave you vague but slightly true answers to your questions. And that's because the underlying tones of mysticism and much of Eastern philosophy and religion are often treated in a somewhat whimsical fashion in America. One thing that's not whimsically treated in the United States, however, is baseball, and that brings us to today's topic. Probably the most famous yogi in American history, even though he was not technically a yogi in practice or on his birth certificate. I'm talking about Lawrence Peter Bearra aka Yogi Bearra, the five foot seven, left handed generation Italian American who is one of the greatest baseball players of all time, and yet that greatness on the field is probably overshadowed by his lovable personality. And legendary quotes called yogiisms that ended up making him one of the most quoted figures, not just athletes, of the last one hundred years. And that's without even mentioning the whole Yogi Bear lawsuit. So sit back, relax, and get ready to hear how Bear's mythical Yogi like quotes somehow surpassed his baseball accomplishments, even though a lot of those quotes were actually kind of fake. I'm Will Gatchell. This is Sports Dot MP three and let's get into it. Last year, federal authorities announced charges against a group of nine burglars, and they weren't just any old robbers. They were charged with a string of thefts worth millions of dollars that stretched back more than two decades, hitting over twenty museums and other locations across four states. And what exactly had they stolen? A Jackson Pollock painting, an Andy Warhol silk screen, and a ton of sports memorabilia, including nine of Yogi Bearra's ten World Series rings, which had been stolen from Yogi Bearer's museum and Learning center in New Jersey in twenty fourteen. Fortunately, bearro always wore one of the rings on his finger, so he was able to keep that. Unfortunately, the other nine were never to be seen again. According to Tommy Trada, one of the burglars, he put the nine rings on his finger after stealing them, took them off, melted down the collection of rings worth at least a million dollars and priceless in what they conveyed, and sold it to a pawnshop for twelve thousand dollars. I could go on and on about how much of a slamball that guy and the rest of the thieves are, but I'll spare them the publicity and save myself the trouble of having to mark this as an explicit episode. Instead, I'd like to stress the fact then I'm talking about nine of Barra's ten World Series rings. That's more than any of the other Yankees' greats like Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle, and Babe Ruth. In fact, it's the most ever in MLB history. Yogi didn't become one of the best catchers and players of all time for just one reason alone, but one of his most defining traits was his ability to get contact on almost everything that was thrown at him. He commonly swung at and hit pitches that were way outside of the strike zone, which threw off opposing pitchers and helped him become one of just two players ever to hit at least three hundred and fifty home runs while striking out less than five hundred times. And that takes us to the place where Lawrence Peter Barrow would first hone his legendary skills, the same place where he would receive his iconic nickname, a Saint Louis neighborhood called the Hill. He grew up playing baseball, hockey, and soccer, among other sports, in the close knit community, befriending future Major leaguers including Joe Garagiola and Jack McGuire, among others, and they'd play a sandlot version of baseball that featured broomsticks for bats, bottle caps for balls, and a rather strict one strike and you're out policy. Bear himself has said it definitely helped him focus on contact overpower, though he would develop power later and when he started playing real baseball through the American Legion, he would sit on the ground with his legs and arms crossed in between innings, leading a fellow American Legion teammate and future major Life for the Giants named Bobby Hoffman to say that bearer looked like a Yogi from the movies. The name stuck. By the time Yogi was sixteen, he was clearly the most talented player in the area, and it wasn't that surprising. His three older brothers had all shown promise, but they had all stopped playing to work for their father at their father's insistence. To state the obvious, Yogi frequently skipped out on work to play baseball, and with the help of his brothers, was able to convince his father to let him pursue a professional career in the sport as long as Yogi sent his father all the paychecks he earned. And so he and Joe Garagiola tried out for their local Major League team, the Saint Louis Cardinals. By the end of the tryouts, the two had both been offered professional contracts by the Cardinals general manager branch Ricky. There was just one issue. Yogi's signing bonus was two hundred and fifty dollars and Joe's was five hundred dollars, and what can best be described as a Plankton style scheme from SpongeBob Ricky had purposefully offered Yogi less money knowing that he would turn it down. And that's because Ricky was about to become the general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers and he wanted to sign Yogi once he got to Brooklyn. But it seems like he never actually told Yogi that, and the teenager was too talented for that to work anyway. He signed with the New York Yankees after one of his coaches from the American League contacted them about offering a contract to the young superstar. The signing bonus was five hundred dollars, but his career with them would quickly be put on halt by World War Two, which would see Yogi enlist in the Navy at eighteen years old, survived D Day at the Utah and Omaha Beaches and receive an honorary discharge in nineteen forty five. Yogi was called up to his first major league game towards the end of the nineteen forty six season. In his first game as a Yankee, facing the Philadelphia A's, he'd start his legendary career with nothing less than a home run. Yogi would then hit another home run the following game and cement his status as a member of the team by the end of the year. By the end of the nineteen forty seven season, the Yankees would win the World Series, giving Bera his first ever championship, and the hitting sensations catching skills, which were being developed by former catcher turned coach Bill Dickey, would soon reach even higher peaks starting around the end of nineteen forty eight, when a man named Casey Stangele became manager of the Yankees, and it definitely didn't seem like a perfect fit on paper. The new manager had a poor reputation and had never led a Major League team to finish in the top half of the standings before. In Major League Baseball, the teams are split into two leagues, the National and American, and up until nineteen sixty, the Sports Championship the World Series was played between the team from each league with the best regular season record, called the Pennant. The nineteen forty nine season, stangles first in charge, would see him defy all expectations and actually beat out the rival Red Sox for the Pennant. The Yankees would then go on to defeat the Brooklyn Dodgers in the World Series, giving Yogi bearra his second championship and setting up one of the most dominant decade long runs in Major League sports history. When Yogi first joined the Yankees, his manager often referred to him as the Ape, and while some might play it off as an allusion to his appearance, he wasn't the first Italian American during the time to face prejudice or be called that. Still, Yogi always fought fire with kindness and empathy, and that warm hearted nature, paired with his tendency to say extremely witty, if not silly, statements, made him wholly unique compared to other more conventional stars like Joe DiMaggio. When you take all of those traits and paired with winning a record five straight World Series from nineteen forty nine to nineteen fifty three, you end up with a famous baseball superstar. But Barrow wasn't done. He would win the Most Valuable Player award in not only nineteen fifty one, but nineteen fifty four and nineteen fifty five too, and he'd go on to win four more championships before he retired in nineteen sixty three, and then unretired, and then re retired again for good in nineteen sixty five. It would take way too long to list out all of Yogi's playing championships, awards, and records. His role as a catcher and strategist during Don Larson's perfect game against the Dodgers and a World Series Major League Baseball's only ever perfect postseason game is worth a documentary alone. And that's without even getting into his coaching career, which led to three more World Series rings. Instead, we have to talk about an anthropomorphic animal character that first appeared on television in nineteen fifty eight. Yong Than was always the silly cartoon character famous for catchphrase is like I'm smarter than the average bear, and hey, hey, hey has more than just a name similar to Yogi Bearra. The Bear's entire shtick, so to speak, was loosely modeled off of the media's perception of Barra. At the time, bears on field accomplishments had made him one of the sport's biggest stars, Yet the media had turned bearristardom into something bigger, something that transcended just sports, and it all revolved around Yogi isms, the most famous of which you've definitely heard before. It ain't over till it's over. If you're out a fork in the road, take it. If you can't imitate him, don't copy him. And that's where things get a little complicated, because Yogi actually didn't say a lot of these yogisms. Barra was an intelligent man, and he was really well known early on to have a quick wit and memorable turns of phrase. But as his baseball stardom vaulted to new heights, some reporters and journalists were annoyed to find that Bara was much more a normal man than a mythic quote creator, and so they took matters into their own hands or pens and fabricated some of his more famous sayings. If there was ever a media event with Barra involved, you better believe that anything interesting or wise said by anyone there would probably end up attributed to Yogi. And it didn't just stop there. He would become a brand ambassador for tons of different brands, including you Who, Chocolate Milk, and a lot of that played up this role as a lovable, if not somewhat silly, but wise guy a lot like Yoda from Star Wars. And remember Yogi's childhood friend and former MLB catcher, Joe Garagiola. He also had a role to play. In a two thousand and nine book called Yogi Barra Eternal Yankee, written confusingly by a man named Alan Barra and I'm serious, Bara writes about Joe's role. Quote. Through decades of telling Yogi stories, many real and some apocryphal, to audiences of millions during Joe's days at NBC, he undermined the perception of Barra as a great player and competitor and replaced it with the image of an amiable clown who was lucky enough to have been around when the Almighty handed out Rosser spots on winning teams. I don't mean to imply that was Joe's intention, but the stories repeated endlessly on television and paraphrased in newspapers and magazines, and then in subways, in offices and in bars, created a pseudo Yogi that took on a life of its own, a caricature of a real man. End quote. Yogi didn't like this public perception of himself, and he definitely didn't like Yogi Bear, at least not at first. He's quoted in a nineteen sixty three article stating, quote, television is big enough for both me and Yogi Bear. I was going to sue the Yogi Bear program for using my name until somebody reminded me, Yogi is in my real name, It's Lawrence. End quote. It's worth noting that the creator of Yogi Bear the cartoon has stated that Yogi Bear's name is actually Lawrence too, so there's that. And some reports do claim that Bear actually might have attempted to sue the show's creator in nineteen fifty eight, but that remains a mystery, and he did eventually seem to lean into this persona at least towards his later years. A couple visiting his museum walked up to him and asked him to come up with a yogism on the spot. He reportedly replied, if I could just make him up on the spot, I'd be famous. Yogi bearra the baseball player is one of the sport's winningest players of all time, and no one can ever take that away from him. Yogi Berra the human being was, by all accounts, one of the most forgiving, hard working, and nicest humans out there. His words to Jackie Robinson when they first met during a baseball game were quote, thank you for your service to our country. Welcome to Pro baseball end quote Yogi Berra, The character is harder to define. That era is an American icon that borders on folklorish or mythic levels, infinitely quotable, transcending sports to enter every day vernacular and coming full circle to almost embody similar qualities to the mysticism we associate with Yogi's and yoga. The same nickname he was given just because he looked sort of like one while sitting on a baseball field and coming full circle reminds me of a quote that Yogi Berra, who passed away after ninety years of extraordinary life in twenty fifteen, may or may not have said, but will forever be attributed to him. It's deja vous all over again. And on that note, this episode is all over again. I know the again didn't really fit, but it felt right and it does actually make sense. If you're listening to this a second time, and whether you did listen to this just once or multiple times, thank you so much for listening to this episode of Sports Dot MP three. Please make sure to share this with your friends. Hit the follow button if you haven't already, on whichever podcast platform you're listening to this on, and stay tuned for another episode in two weeks time. This has been Will Gatchell and I'll be back soon. Peace, don't, don't, But it's not a