By Elizabeth Muratore Special from the IBWAA
This article appeared in the IBWAA's newsletter, Here's the Pitch, on December 14, 2023 and is being shared with permission.
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New Yogi Berra Movie Celebrates The Man Behind The Motto
Baseball fans love to debate which baseball movies are the best. From “Field of Dreams” and “Bull Durham” to “Moneyball” and “42,” there are hundreds to choose from spanning decades of filmmaking. I’ve seen a lot of scripted baseball movies, but for whatever reason, I have not seen too many baseball documentaries, even the seminal ones like Ken Burns’ “Baseball.”
If you’re looking for a new baseball movie to enjoy that straddles the line between heartwarming baseball movie and informative documentary, I highly recommend “It Ain’t Over,” a new documentary about Yogi Berra that premiered last year in theaters and was recently added to Netflix.
“It Ain’t Over” tells the life story of the storied Yankees backstop, from his time growing up in an Italian-American immigrant neighborhood in St. Louis to his historic return to Yankee Stadium in 1999. Along the way, there are loving tributes, tales from times gone by, and of course, plenty of “Yogi-isms,” which made the 10-time World Series champion even more of a pop culture icon than he already was.
As a lifelong baseball fan and frequent visitor to Cooperstown, I was quite familiar with Berra’s career accolades. As a Mets fan, I’ve always held him in high regard for taking over as manager when Gil Hodges passed away suddenly in 1972 and leading the 1973 Mets to within one game of a World Series title. Berra is also one of my uncle’s all-time favorite Yankees (he even had a pet bird named Yogi who used to watch TV with him), so I appreciate him in that respect as well.
What the movie did open my eyes to was how much Berra’s presence in pop culture has, to an extent, overshadowed his incredible achievements on the field. Beyond the cartoonish persona, the iconic sayings, and the years of memorable TV commercials, Berra easily lays a claim as one of the greatest catchers of all time.
From 1948 through 1962, Berra was an All-Star and received MVP votes every single season. He won three American League MVP Awards, including back-to-back honors in 1954 and 1955. He hit .280 or better in 10 of his 19 seasons, and his 358 career home runs rank fourth all-time among MLB catchers. In 1956, Berra caught the only perfect game in World Series history, and over his career he threw out 49 percent of attempted base stealers.
Perhaps his most incredible offensive achievement, by today’s standards: Across 8,364 career plate appearances, Berra struck out just 414 times, or just under five percent of the time. He never struck out more than 38 times in a single season, and over 151 games in 1950, he fanned a mere 12 times. Of course, the game was different in Berra’s day than it is today, but nevertheless, he was still one of the most skilled players in MLB history at simply putting the bat on the ball.
And yet, incredibly, he wasn’t a first-ballot Hall of Famer! In 1971, Berra’s first year of Hall of Fame eligibility, he received just 67.2 percent of the vote, well shy of the 75 percent needed for induction. The BBWAA voters came around in 1972, when 85.6 percent of them elected Berra into the Baseball Hall of Fame.
Berra was not only larger than life and one of the most decorated catchers of all time, he was also beloved by all who knew him. I teared up multiple times throughout the movie during particularly heartfelt tributes, and I was inspired to learn more about someone who carried himself with such class while spending his entire career in New York. The baseball world is quite small, and with a figure like Berra who knew both Babe Ruth and Mariano Rivera, there are even more stories about Berra floating around than there are Yogi-isms.
I also enjoyed learning more about Berra’s complex relationship with his son Dale, who he briefly managed in the Majors, and about his 14-year hiatus from Yankee Stadium. Even this Mets fan couldn’t help but marvel at the incredible timing of David Cone throwing a perfect game with Berra and Don Larsen in attendance at Berra’s first game back at Yankee Stadium on July 18, 1999. Some mystical baseball things are bigger than the team you root for.
In “It Ain’t Over,” Berra’s granddaughter Lindsay points out how her grandfather’s status as a pop culture symbol has built his brand up tremendously over the years, but has also somewhat obscured his playing accomplishments and, she feels, led to his exclusion from honors such as the “Greatest Living Players” ceremony at the 2015 MLB All-Star Game. Berra’s military background (he was in the Navy during World War II and was in combat for the D-Day invasion) and lengthy coaching and managing tenure are other important pillars of his career, yet the “Yogi Bear” cartoons that Berra inspired have, over time, crafted Berra’s lasting image into one of a caricature rather than a skilled baseball tactician.
But through movies such as “It Ain’t Over,” and through the Yogi Berra Museum in Montclair, N.J. (which I have yet to visit, but fully intend to one day), Berra’s lasting legacy can celebrate both his wit and his winning ways.
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Elizabeth Muratore is one of the editors of the Here’s the Pitch newsletter. She also works as a homepage editor for MLB and co-hosts a Mets podcast called Cohen’s Corner. Elizabeth is a lifelong Mets fan who thinks that Keith Hernandez should be in the Hall of Fame. You can follow her on Twitter @nymfan97.
