Yogi Berra and the Daily Improviser

I just started reading Yogi Berra: Eternal Yankee, Allan Barra’s new biography of one of the most recognizable names and faces in baseball. Yogi was one of the greatest catchers (many say the greatest catcher) in Major League history. Yet his fame outside of the baseball world rests largely on his trademark “Yogiisms,” paradoxical or tautological observations that approach a Zen-like level of inscrutable wisdom.

Some of my favorite Yogiisms include:

“Nobody ever goes to that restaurant anymore; it’s too crowded.”

“You can observe a lot by just watching.”

“If people don’t want to come to the ballpark, how are you gonna stop ‘em?”

And of course his best-known saying:

"It isn't over til it's over."

One Yogiism bears a particular significance for the Daily Improviser. In describing the tendency of many players to get too far inside their heads when they’re at the plate, Yogi once said:

“You can’t think and hit at the same time.”

I think this perfectly anticipated Steve Zaffron and Dave Logan's concept of mastery, which I’ve explored a number of times in the Daily Improviser blog. Zaffron and Logan, in the book The Three Laws of Performance, describe mastery as “nothing between you and the thing you’re dealing with.”

Yogi’s observation about hitting conveys a sly insight into the nature of mastering a task. As Allen Barra says:

Yogi never said that being able to think wouldn’t help you to hit – quite the contrary. As he phrased it … “You do your thinking before you get up to bat. We used to spend a lot of time before the games talking about certain pitchers, what they threw, and what was the best way to hit them in certain situations…. We just didn’t stand there thinking when we were up at bat."

I think that any performance improviser would recognize the same effect at work with respect to improvising onstage. While offstage, improv performers can endlessly hash over the subtleties and philosophical aspects of their art. Yet once they hit the boards, the best improvisers follow the advice of Viola Spolin:

"Shut off the mind. When the rational mind is shut off, we have the possibility of intuition."

Similarly, the Daily Improviser masters her art by first putting in her thousands of hours of preparation - thinking, analyzing, evaluating, practicing - and then getting into flow with her surroundings as she fluidly and instinctively applies her skills.

In future articles I'll continue to share some Yogi wisdom as it applies to the Daily Improviser. However, as for this article ...

It's over.