I am Joan Mach, a retired librarian from Teaneck, N.J.  My husband teaches Creative Writing at the Senior Center and I am the teacher’s  pet.    We have been married 50+ years, and he is officially eligible for sainthood for putting up with me.

It Ain’t Over

Tears wet my cheeks, and I was grateful for the dark theater.  I never expected a baseball documentary to move me so much.  How many people identified with Yogi Berra?  He was everyman.  Short, plain, and chunky Yogi  was dwarfed by DiMaggio and Mantle.  A shy guy from a hard-working immigrant family, he avoided the night clubs and the  night life of Manhattan.  He coped with his Yogi-isms, and was seen as a clown. 

Arguably a better player than his glamourous teammates, he never got the recognition he deserved.    The press seized his Yogi-isms, making him seem unintelligent and uncivilized.   I was a child growing up in Greenfield, Mass. when I heard a school assembly speaker refer to Yogi as “an ape who lives in a tree and makes $20,000.00 a year”.    Yogi was a World War II Navy vet wounded  in the D-Day invasion. For that alone he deserved more respect than  our speaker gave him..   Granted, Yogi was a Yankee and Massachusetts was rabid Rex Sox territory.  Still, our assembly speakers described Nikita Khrushchev more respectfully, and always watched their language in front of the microphone. 

Yogi retains the best hits-to strikeout ratio of any baseball player. Only  12 strikeouts in an entire season? Some players strike out more than that in a week. He earned  three  American League Most Valuable Player awards. 10 World Series rings as a player, 3 more as a coach and manager. His records as a player show amazing skill over decades of play. 

With typical modesty, he explained his hitting prowess: saying he learned baseball by playing with a stick and a bottlecap.    Not much margin for error there.  He made poverty into a virtue, and kept his integrity.    His teammates came to appreciate, then enjoy him.  He was reliable, supportive and a proven winner.  He carried those qualities into the management office.

In spite of his proven ability, he was seen as a joke and a clown.  Yet he was one of the best catchers of all time.  The catcher calls the game, telling the pitcher what to throw.  He is the team’s on-field coach as well as a player.  The vast majority of players who became managers were catchers in their days.  Yogi performed this intellectually demanding job for the legendary Yankee teams of his ear.  He knew his own team well enough to support their strengths, and the opposing players well enough to exploit their weaknesses.  

Yogi Bear was named after him, to the family’s great dismay.  Yet a court ruled he was not entitled to damages when he sued.  People quoted his Yogi-isms as proof he was stupid.  Bill Clinton once quoted  Yogi by sayings “We may be lost, but we’re making good time”, and nobody said Bill Clinton was stupid. Yogi was the favorite philosopher of politicians, from George H. W. Bush and his son to Barack Obama.    His Yogi-isms may sound dumb, but they contain down-to-earth wisdom. 

Di Maggio had nightclubs,  divorces and he abused  Marilyn Monroe.  Mickey Mantle had alcohol, mistresses, and a troubled wife.   Yogi loved his Carmen and their three boys, writing her soppy love letters when they were apart.  His exemplary personal life made no headlines.  The best player with the most devoted family life retained his joker image. 

Bottom line: Yogi’s  contributions as a  Yankee and a role model  were under-appreciated, while attention was focused on more glamorous but less productive  “stars”   I think many people could identify with Yogi on that basis, even though  their life experiences are far removed from big league  baseball.

My husband Joe and I are among them.   We never played big league baseball.  Still, we knew what it felt like to be passed over for less competent workers.  They projected the :image: we lacked, but we did the work. 

When I was working as a lowly part-timer in a law library, earning a few bucks toward library school tuition,  a “consultant” asked me how to improve this facility.  I gave him 30 minutes of my time   plus  a paper I wrote for a class.  I saw his report after his check was cashed.  Every item was one of my suggestions or comments.  I tried to tell my supervisor this, and he said “I’m leaving for a better-paying job.  Fight your own battles”.   When I interviewed for his job, I told this story again and was told “Our consultant was  the Dean of a Law School.   Are  you telling me he couldn’t come up with those ideas on his own?”.  Time and time again, I saw my ideas used but never credited. 

My husband Joe  is a brilliant Harvard Law School graduate.   But law firms wanted to know how much business he could bring in, and didn’t care if his  legal advice was accurate and insightful.  He saw lazy people with half his legal  knowledge promoted past him.  More important, he walked away from a lucrative job rather than compromise his ethics to match the firm’s.  We stood by  each other and focused on our family.  Still, it hurt to be underpaid and underappreciated. 

If Yogi ever felt that way, he never said so publicly. But more than seven years after his passing, the public is  still learning the full scope of who he was and what he contributed — helped immensely by the 2022 movie I cried my way through.  It’s inspiring to think that when it comes to getting the recognition people deserve, “it ain’t  over ’til it’s over.”