Yogi Berra? Bucky Harris? Eddie Froelich? Apocryphal?
Dear Quote Investigator: The New York Times magazine recently highlighted a quotation from a Hall of Fame baseball player [NYYB]:
“How can you think and hit at the same time?” Yogi Berra once said, which like many of the quotes attributed to the former Yankees catcher, even the malapropisms, contains an essential truth. You can’t think and hit because there’s not time for both.
Did Yogi really say this, or do people simply believe that he should have said it?
Quote Investigator: The evidence is not completely clear because Yogi himself has made confusing pronouncements about this saying. The earliest citation located by QI is an Associated Press newswire story dated August 1, 1947 [MCYB]:
They tell a story about Larry “Yogi” Berra, the New York Yankees’ new No. 1 catcher and his Manager Bucky Harris. Yogi is known as a bad ball hitter and Bucky decided to do something about it.
“Think when you get up there,” he told Berra. “Make the pitcher come in with the ball. Don’t be too eager. Make him get it over. Think. Think.”
Berra went to the plate and took 3 called strikes. He walked to the dugout and sat down.
“How can anybody think and hit at the same time,” he mumbled.
A series of similar stories appeared in newspapers in the late 1940s and 1950s. But when Yogi Berra published an autobiography in 1961 he made a very different claim [YBEF]:
Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between the stories that are true and the ones that are made up. For instance, Bucky Harris is supposed to have told me, when he was our manager in 1947, that I would never be as good a hitter as I should be unless I stopped swinging at bad balls and made the pitcher come in with it. “You’ve got to think when you’re up there,” they say he told me. And after I struck out the next time, I’m supposed to have come back to the dugout complaining, “How the hell can you think and hit at the same time?” But I never said it.
But that is not the last word from Yogi. In 1998 he authored a compact entertaining book called “The Yogi Book” that collected authentic Yogi-isms and combined them with his brief commentary. Berra claimed that the saying was his, but when he spoke it he was not playing for the Yankees [YBYB]:
“You can’t think and hit at the same time.”
If you ask me, this is true with any sport. I said it in 1946 when I was with the Newark Bears playing Triple A. My manager told me not to swing at balls out of the strike zone. He said, “Yogi, next time you’re up, think about what you’re doing.” I struck out in three pitches!
Berra did not mention this episode in the 1961 autobiography when he denied the variant of the tale with Bucky Harris. However, it is possible that some incident in 1946 was the seed for multiple altered retellings in newspapers in 1947 and 1948.
Here are some additional selected citations in chronological order.