“I never blame myself when I’m not hitting. I just blame the bat and if it keeps up, I change bats. After all, if I know it isn’t my fault that I’m not hitting, how can I get mad at myself?”
Well, Yogi’s reputation was that of a very talented bad ball hitter. Yogi firmly believed he could hit any pitch in his time zone, let alone in the strike zone. He’d swing at almost everything, and would usually get a piece of it.
I heard a former Yankee on a sports talk show say that one time in spring training, he asked Yogi, “What time is it?”
Yogi answered, “You mean now?”
It is often said he might have been the greatest bad-pitch hitter who ever lived. Which is kind of amazing given he didn’t have a lot of reach. Most bad-pitch hitters are guys with long arms, like Vlad Guerrero.
Only two players have ever hit 350 or more homers and struck out fewer than 500 times; Yogi Berra and Joe DiMaggio. His hand eye coordination was off the charts amazing. He never struck out 40 times in a season.
The New York Times headline on his death says he “built his stardom 90 percent on talent and 50 percent on wit,” which is wonderful. Yogisms, you see, seem illogical but are actually true. “It ain’t over 'til it’s over” is a brilliant observation about the sport of baseball, really, and is now far beyond a baseball saying; it’s a fundamental expression for a native English speaker.
As you say, a true “Berra-ism” actually makes sense, even if it sounds odd.
Everyone who ever saw an afternoon game at the old Yankee Stadium knew that the infield was covered in shadows by about 3:30 PM, which is why we all knew exactly what Yogi meant when he said, “It gets late early out there.”
But it’s a more useful way to describe a dull town.
According to the Baseball Hall of Shame, the owners of the Yankees and the Cardinals decided that, regardless of where the teams finished that season, Berra and Keane (who had been named NL Manager of the Year the season before) would be fired. The whole thing was kept secret to the end of the season.
As luck would have it, those two teams wound up in the World Series, with the Cardinals winning after a seven-game thriller. Busch came to Keane after the seventh game ended, hat in hand, to ask Keane to come back the next year–and Keane, who knew what the Plan was, told him what he could do with his manager’s job. Berra didn’t do better–since Miller Huggins, no Yankee manager who lost a Series lasted very long afterward.
For his dirty work Del Webb wound up with a team that could hardly beat the Angels, despite three good pitchers–Jim Bouton, Al Downing and Mel Stottlemyre. The Yankees went into a total tailspin in 1966 and finished last, with Del “Boy Isn’t He a Stupid Executive” Webb kicking Keene loose in favor of Houk!
