Film Review: ‘It Ain’t Over’: Yogi Berra Documentary Is a Home Run

PG | 1h 38 m | Sports, Documentary | May 12, 2023

As a football fan, I was always primarily aware of the late Yogi Berra as an American cultural icon. My baseball-fan dad also knew the man born as Lorenzo Pietro Berra for the legendary New York Yankee ballplayer he was. Sports documentary “It Ain’t Over,” Sean Mullin’s somewhat hagiographic tribute to Berra, lays it all out for everyone to finally be able to separate where the athlete Yogi Berra ended, and the  cultural phenomena Yogi Berra began. Much like “Facing Nolan,” it’s jam-packed with stories from family members, fellow major league players, and celebrities who collectively raise a glass to the iconic sports hero.

Since Yogi Berra’s overall reputation had grown to mythic proportions in America over the years, Mullin aims to separate man from myth, and in doing so, allows us to see the chronically unsung athleticism and talent that were the true foundation of the Berra myth.

Yogi Berra (center) in the documentary “It Ain’t Over.” (Getty Images/Sony Pictures Classics)

Unsung?

The documentary opens with the 2015 Major League Baseball All-Star Game, which itself opened by honoring the four ostensibly greatest living baseball players: Hank Aaron, Johnny Bench, Sandy Koufax, and Willie Mays. These four had been determined by 25 million fan votes.

Meanwhile, watching the game at home on TV was 90-year-old Yogi Berra, who had more MVP awards than Aaron, Bench, Koufax, and Mays. Plus, plus!!—more World Series rings than Hank, Johnny, Sandy, and Willie combined!

Watching with him was Yogi’s granddaughter, Lindsay Berra, who was thinking, “How was my grandfather left out of this line-up?!” It was that moment that generated the impetus to put a documentary out there that explained how Yogi Berra’s status as a cultural icon came to eclipse his legacy as one of the greatest baseball players of all time.

Beginnings

As mentioned, Yogi began life as Lorenzo Pietro Berra, in the Italian section of St. Louis. His immigrant dad was less than thrilled about his son’s baseball obsession, but the boy could hit. His teammates eventually nicknamed him “Yogi” due to his predilection for sitting cross-legged on the ground while waiting his turn at bat.

Berra signed with the New York Yankees in 1943 rather than his hometown St. Louis Cardinals, but his path to baseball glory, in true Hero’s Journey fashion, led through the killing fields of World War II. Before setting foot in Yankee stadium, 18-year-old Berra signed up to man a rocket boat during the Normandy D-Day invasion, despite not knowing how to swim. This situated Berra firmly as a member of the “Greatest Generation” and formed his core values and perspectives. After being tasked with such life-changing experiences as fishing dead bodies out of the surf, Yogi famously said, “Baseball isn’t hard. War is hard.”

It’s not widely known, but the catcher position in baseball is akin to football’s quarterback—the catcher is all-knowing (as hilariously portrayed by Kevin Costner’s character Crash Davis in “Bull Durham”). Yogi didn’t start out as a catcher, but learned the art and the craft of catching from the legendary Bill Dickey. Yogi was also one of the Yankee’s best hitters, swatting home runs in both his first game and second games.

Yogi was highly intelligent and knew how to run a game. He kept a long list of every player’s strengths and weaknesses in his head, which allowed him to signal his pitchers to throw mostly perfect pitches against all of the Yankee opponent hitters. In 1956, when Don Larsen pitched his perfect World Series game, it was all compliments of Berra’s catcher signals  from behind home plate—Larsen didn’t shake off Berra off even once.

Yogi’d also famously swing at everything coming across home plate, or in and around it—and still managed to have one of the lowest strikeout rates in the league, which was due to having almost super-normal, fast hands.

Among the many interviewees remarking about Berra’s on-field achievements are three members of latter-day Yankees royalty (Don Mattingly, Derek Jeter, Mariano Rivera); three managerial Joes—Joe’s Torre, Maddon, and Girardi; two broadcasters (Vin Scully and Bob Costas) and one super-fan (Billy Crystal).

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Yogi famously jumps on Don Larsen after Laron's no-hitter in "It Ain't Over." (Getty Images/Getty Images)

The short, stocky, crinkly-faced Berra (he actually had a strong resemblance to the Rolling Stone’s crinkly-faced Keith Richards) didn’t “look like a Yankee.” Despite his heroics on the field (such as the fact that in one season he hit 28 home runs against only 12 strikeouts for the entire year, and caught pitcher Larsen’s perfect game) the media tended to portray Yogi as a clown. 5-foot-7, with rounded shoulders, Berra didn’t fit the classic, 6-foot-two, lean, handsome, All-American, golden-haired baseball player.

Deeply humble and self-deprecating, the good-natured Berra tended to just play along with media mockery. His now-classic Yogi malapropisms, such as, “You can observe a lot by watching,” or “If you can’t imitate him, don’t copy him,” and the one for which he is most well-known and for which the film is named—“It ain’t over till it’s over”—only served to further his image as a comic figure.

Bigger Than Baseball

Later in life, the man who had a Hanna-Barbera, picnic-basket-swiping cartoon character more or less named after him (Yogi Bear) segued from catcher to pitchman, hawking everything from insurance to beer, which endeared his lovable persona, with his peculiar turns of phrase, to a broader swath of the public than just sports fans, and imbedded him permanently in Americana.

What other baseball player, indeed, what other professional athlete’s seemingly simple-minded yet profoundly wise sayings have entered the American lexicon to the same extent as Yogi Berra’s? The myth grew bigger than the man at times, yet it’s revealed by an ad writer that some of the Yogi-isms weren’t even his.

But Berra’s on-field achievements are legend: Ten world championships, three-time league MVP, catching the only perfect game in World Series history—his impact on Yankee and baseball history can scarcely be matched. After his playing career ended, he even went on to manage both the Yankees and other-side-of-town Mets to pennants. As one talking head puts it, the World Series seemed to follow Yogi around.

‘It Ain’t Over’ 

“It Ain’t Over” succeeds most in shining a light on a storied baseball career that often gets overlooked by the man’s subsequent cultural status: Yogi really was bigger than baseball. He became an institution unto himself; a humble and rather adorable man of deep integrity, widely embraced by Americans regardless of region, religion, race, political persuasion, or even team loyalty.

However, to avoid the hagiography and the cloying tribute of an ending, perhaps a little more conflict would’ve been good. Berra’s infamous feud with Yankee owner George Steinbrenner, where Berra for years refused to set foot in Yankee Stadium so long as the team still belonged to the owner everyone loved to hate, is played as just another lovable quirk. Berra once summed up his relationship with the controversial Yankees owner as “We agree different.” And though one of Berra’s sons mentions that you really didn’t want to see Yogi angry, the film doesn’t dig very deeply into the matter, choosing instead to celebrate the eventual reconciliation of Berra and Steinbrenner.

When Yogi Berra died at age 90 in 2015, the Associated Press announced his passing with the headline, “New York Yankees Hall of Fame Catcher Yogi Bear has died" (which was hastily corrected). This is how a Navy man, injured at Omaha Beach, who didn’t put in for a Purple Heart because it might worry his mother—got treated.

No less than eight Yogi-isms made it into Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, and the film finds room for many of them. All in all, what I appreciated most were the stories about Berra’s love for his wife Carmen, who predeceased him by a year, and their adorable marriage. It’s understandable why more than one of those assembled start to choke up while paying their respects directly into the camera at the end of the film.

Movie poster for "It Ain't Over."

‘It Ain’t Over' Documentary Director: Sean Mullin MPAA Rating: PG Running Time: 1 hour, 38 minutes Release May 12, 2023 (limited) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars