It Ain’t Over
Written and directed Sean Mullin 
Rated PG
Runtime: 109 min
Opening in New York and LA May 12

by Daniel Pecoraro, Contributor

It Ain’t Over begins with a very clear premise: America forgot how good a ballplayer Yogi Berra was. At the 2015 All-Star Game in Cincinnati, Hank Aaron, Johnny Bench, Sandy Koufax, and Willie Mays were named the four best players still alive at the time. Lorenzo Pietro/Lawrence Peter “Yogi” Berra, he of ten World Series rings as a player (and another three as a coach), fifteen straight years of being named an American League All-Star, and an absurd fifteen-season run of receiving MVP award votes (a streak second only to Aaron), earning three MVPs, wasn’t to be found. 

That set Yogi’s granddaughter, Lindsay, to reclaim the legacy of Yogi-the-baseballer, which had been subsumed by Yogi-the-American-Icon, a cottage industry that began on social media and MLB.com and presents itself now in It Ain’t Over. Lindsay Berra serves as the Executive Producer, primary narrator, and one of a legion of talking heads in the documentary. But as I watched the Sean Mullin-directed feature, I couldn’t help but wonder: who is this movie for?

If it’s for “the youth of America” (as Yogi’s longtime manager Casey Stengel used to put it), I think it missed the mark. It Ain’t Over is a nostalgia-drenched 109 minutes of Berra hagiography. Starting in the Italian enclave of the Hill in St. Louis, where Yogi played American Legion ball and won a contract with the Yankees (his childhood friend and neighbor Joe Garagiola got signed by the hometown Cardinals, who wouldn’t give Yogi the same bonus), the film makes a steady march through every era of Berra’s career. We see his peerless career for the Yankees, bridging the DiMaggio and Mantle eras of the team and making the World Series virtually every year. We see Jackie Robinson steal home in the 1955 World Series (Yogi went to his grave saying he blocked the plate and Jackie was out…sorry, Yog, he was safe), and Yogi calling Don Larsen’s perfect game to win the world series the next year. After retirement, we see Yogi win the AL pennant in his first year, though he’s unceremoniously fired after the World Series, and then two NL pennants and another World Series ring as a coach and manager for the Mets. (Side note: I was a little shocked by the Gil Hodges erasure in the Mets-era section of the doc, as if Yogi led the Miracle Mets all on his own.) We see a return to the Yankees as a coach supporting Billy Martin, winning his 13th and 14th rings in consecutive seasons. And we see Yogi’s one last chance to manage the Yanks, and his son Dale, in 1984 and ‘85, and an unceremonious firing, with an assistant GM (rather than Steinbrenner) breaking the news. 

And throughout, but especially post-1985 amid Yogi’s self-imposed exile from Yankee Stadium, we get the commercials and the Yogiisms, some of which weren’t genuine Berra lines. In fact, It Ain’t Over (from “it ain’t over ‘til it’s over”) seems to have stemmed from the un-Yogiismic “you’re not out of it until it’s mathematical,” one of the film’s few revelations. Which leads to the film’s second issue: in the effort to recontextualize Berra’s career as a ballplayer, it still leans on the larger-than-life presence of Berra as a cultural figure. I think it comes down to the fact that, after fifty years in retirement amid an era well before the multi-million-dollar contracts we see today, Yogi needed to have a regular run of endorsements and appearances, with the cultural footprint to match. 

Following its theatrical run, I can see It Ain’t Over having a regular presence on the MLB and YES Networks (it’s basically an oversized version of the latter’s Yankeeography series). The problem is that, for the seasoned baseball fan, there’s not a lot new to learn from this feature. There’s the debunking of some of the quotes, and a bit more light shed on the Suzyn Waldman-brokered reconciliation between Berra and Steinbrenner, but after that I didn’t learn anything new until the mid-credits scenes (we learn Yogi’s, now owned by a niece, is an Airbnb, and that a NY Waterway ship christened the Yogi Berra was one of the ships rescuing passengers following the Miracle on the Hudson). And I think for all audiences, what ought to be two hours well spent with Yogi Berra end up becoming a sluggish retread on a legendary figure.