Yankees Yogi Berra Quotes

It ain't over 'til it's over.

Losing is a learning experience. It teaches you humility. It teaches you to work harder. It’s also a powerful motivator.

New York Yankees: Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris, Clete Boyer, Bobby Richardson, Yogi Berra, and Whitey Ford. The Yankees were playing the San Francisco Giants in the 1962 World Series.

Yogi Berra, the fabled Yankee baseball player and manager, was said to have pointed out, “If you don’t know where you are going, you’ll end up somewhere else.” That is so true about brands; you need to know where they are to end up.

Boy, Whitey, I hope I never see my name up there. To Whitey Ford during scoreboard tribute on opening day to recently deceased Yankees.

In June 1981, a strike shuttered the major leagues for fifty days, the first time in baseball history that players walked out during the season. Determined to make his people earn their keep, George Steinbrenner ordered his major-league coaches into the minors to scout and help mentor the organization’s prospects. Berra drew Nashville, where Merrill was the manager. Merrill was a former minor-league catcher with a degree in physical education from the University of Maine. He began working for the Yankees in 1978 at West Haven, Connecticut, in the Eastern League and moved south when the Yankees took control of the Southern League’s Nashville team in 1980. Suddenly, in mid-1981, the former catcher who had never made it out of Double-A ball had the most famous and decorated Yankees backstop asking him, “What do you want me to do?” Wait a minute, Merrill thought. Yogi Berra is asking me to supervise him? “Do whatever you want,” Merrill said. “No,” Berra said. “Give me something specific.” And that was when Merrill began to understand the existential splendor of Yogi Berra, whom he would come to call Lawrence or Sir Lawrence in comic tribute to his utter lack of pretense and sense of importance. “He rode buses with us all night,” Merrill said. “You think he had to do that? He was incredible.” One day Merrill told him, “Why don’t you hit some rollers to that lefty kid over there at first base?” Berra did as he was told and later remarked to Merrill, “That kid looks pretty good with the glove.” Berra knew a prospect when he saw one. It was Don Mattingly, who at the time was considered expendable by a chronically shortsighted organization always on the prowl for immediate assistance at the major-league level.

That’s what led George to Yogi’s museum in New Jersey in 1999 to apologize in person. It’s the same feeling that led Yogi, a man who had vowed never to return to Yankee Stadium so long as George owned the team, to accept George’s apology. Together they made plans for a grand return, a Yogi Berra Day that July. Before the game, Don Larsen, the Yankees pitcher who threw the first perfect game in Yankees history, during the 1956 World Series with Yogi behind the plate, tossed the ceremonial first pitch to Yogi. A few hours later David Cone finished another perfect game, the third in the team’s history. As if we needed another sign that all was right in the world.

It wasn’t as outside as they wanted. Sisler drove it over the left-field fence. The Whiz Kids were going to the 1950 World Series. They lost. The Yankees of Joe DiMaggio, Yogi Berra, Whitey Ford, and Phil Rizzuto swept them in four games. The Yanks had their second consecutive World Series title and thirteenth overall; the Phillies were still looking for their first. They had scored all of four runs while getting swept in the last all-Caucasian World Series. (Mays, Monte Irvin, and Hank Thompson would play for the New York Giants in the 1951 Series.) Still, they rode the train home to a heroes’ welcome at Philadelphia’s Broad Street Station. The Whiz Kids were National League champions, the youngest club in the league, with better years in store, they thought.