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Who really said it

If people don't want to come to the ballpark, how are you going to stop them?

Not originally Yogi Berra — the joke starts with Sol Hurok Sol Hurok 1888–1974 · Russian-American impresario
Disputed: the ballpark phrasing is Berra’s own published wording, but the joke is documented from Sol Hurok a decade before anyone hung it on Yogi. In copyright

This exact ballpark wording really is Berra’s — it is printed in his own The Yogi Book: I Really Didn’t Say Everything I Said!, which is the citation Wikiquote attaches to it, at page 36. But the joke was not his to invent. On August 16, 1952 the columnist Leonard Lyons quoted the concert impresario Sol Hurok: “If people don’t want to come, nothing will stop them.” The earliest citation linking any version of the gag to Berra is from 1962, and Wikiquote files this line under Disputed for exactly that reason.

Last verified 6 Aug 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

For presentations

Put it on a slide

Disputed credit — copy with the correction

“If people don't want to come to the ballpark, how are you going to stop them?” — Yogi Berra, The Yogi Book: I Really Didn't Say Everything I Said! (Workman), p. 36, the citation Wikiquote gives for this exact wording. The joke is older: Sol Hurok, quoted by Leonard Lyons in The Post-Standard (Syracuse, NY), 16 August 1952 — "If people don't want to come, nothing will stop them." The earliest citation linking the joke to Berra is from September 1962; Quote Investigator concludes Hurok originated it.

The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Yogi Berra. Use the credit shown above instead.

Can you use it?

Still under copyright (rights held by The estate of Yogi Berra and Workman Publishing / Hachette Book Group (for The Yogi Book, 1998, where this wording appears); the rights holders in Leonard Lyons’ 1952 syndicated column for the Hurok original). A short, credited quote is generally fine for talks, teaching, and internal decks; for commercial, published, or large-scale reuse, get permission.

Image direction — grounded in this quote’s real context; paste into your image tool

In context

Evoking the world of Sol Hurok — Russian-American impresario. Theme: "If people don't want to come to the ballpark, how are you going to stop them?". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Minimalist

Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "If people don't want to come to the ballpark, how are you going to stop them?". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Provenance

The paper trail

The wording here
The Yogi Book: I Really Didn’t Say Everything I Said! by Yogi Berra (Workman, New York), page 36 — the citation Wikiquote attaches to this phrasing. Wikiquote dates the edition 1997; the Workman printing catalogued by Open Library is New York, 1998. Wikiquote also prints the line without a comma after “ballpark” — the comma shown on this page is editorial.
Earliest documented
“Doings in Rome,” a Leonard Lyons column, The Post-Standard (Syracuse, NY), August 16, 1952 — quoting the impresario Sol Hurok
Earliest Berra link
Times-Picayune (New Orleans), September 13, 1962, reporting Joe Garagiola’s “Banquet of Champions” speech about Kansas City attendance
Berra’s own account
When You Come to a Fork in the Road, Take It! by Yogi Berra with David Kaplan (Hyperion, New York, 2001), pages 40–41

I’m enough of a showman to have learned at least this: If people don’t want to come, nothing will stop them. 1952 · Leonard Lyons column

Sol Hurok, warning the producers of his film biography Tonight We Sing, as quoted by Leonard Lyons on August 16, 1952. Note what is not here: no ballpark, and no “how are you going to stop them.” Those are Berra’s, and in this phrasing they arrive decades later.

Quote Investigator’s full chronology

How a showman’s line became a baseball line

  • 1952 — Leonard Lyons’ column of August 16 in The Post-Standard (Syracuse, NY) quotes Sol Hurok: “If people don’t want to come, nothing will stop them.” This is the earliest instance the specialists have found. Quote Investigator ↗
  • 1959 — LIFE magazine of June 1 runs Joseph Roddy’s Hurok profile, “Impresario Who Booked the Bolshoi,” which carries the line again in the present tense: “When people don’t want to come, nothing will stop them.” Quote Investigator ↗
  • 1962–1963 — Joe Garagiola tells a New Orleans banquet on September 13, 1962 that his boyhood friend Yogi said, of the sagging Kansas City gate, “If they don’t want to come out, nobody’s gonna stop ’em.” A year later he glosses it for Arthur Daley of The New York Times: Yogi “merely was saying that no one could force spectators to attend.” Quote Investigator ↗
  • 1998 — Workman publishes The Yogi Book: I Really Didn’t Say Everything I Said! in New York Open Library catalogue record ↗. That book, at page 36, is the source Wikiquote cites for the exact wording on this page — and it still lists the line under Disputed ↗.
In copyright

Nothing in this chain is old enough to be public domain in the United States. The wording on this page appears in a book first published in 1998, and the earliest documented form of the joke is a newspaper column from August 1952 — both long after the 1931 cutoff. Short quotation with attribution, as here, is ordinary fair use; reprinting the surrounding pages is not.

Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.

Fact-check

Berra said it. Hurok said it first.

This is not a fabrication. Yogi Berra really did say versions of this line, and this particular phrasing is printed in his own book. It is a priority problem: the joke was already in circulation under someone else’s name a decade before anyone tied it to Yogi.

Yogi Berra the wording is his

The exact sentence on this page is cited by Wikiquote ↗ to The Yogi Book: I Really Didn’t Say Everything I Said! at page 36 — and Wikiquote still files it under Disputed, because of what came before it.

Sol Hurok earliest documented

Leonard Lyons’ column of August 16, 1952 quotes the impresario warning the producers of his own film biography: “If people don’t want to come, nothing will stop them.” A June 1959 LIFE profile carries it again, per Quote Investigator ↗.

Joe Garagiola transmitter

Berra’s boyhood friend and fellow catcher-turned-broadcaster was the one telling the story from podiums. A September 13, 1962 Times-Picayune report of his banquet speech is the earliest link of the gag to Yogi; in October 1963 he explained it to Arthur Daley of The New York Times. See Quote Investigator ↗.

Verdict: the ballpark words are Berra’s, but the joke is Sol Hurok’s — in print in 1952, a decade before it was first attached to Yogi. Quote Investigator names Hurok the originator ↗.

Context

Why this one keeps getting pinned on Yogi

Yogi Berra is one of the internet’s great quote magnets, and he knew it — the subtitle of his own quotation book is I Really Didn’t Say Everything I Said!. An attendance joke drifts toward him almost automatically, because the shape of the line is the shape of every Yogi-ism: a sentence that reads like a tautology until you hear the shrug inside it.

But this one had a previous owner. Sol Hurok spent half a century selling seats for singers and ballet companies, and the fatalism is his: you can advertise, you can paper the house, you cannot make people show up. What Berra did was move it from the concert hall to the ballpark — in the 1960s citations, specifically to the thin crowds watching the Athletics in Kansas City.

You can advertise, you can beg. You cannot make people show up.

Read the full story

Quote Investigator’s chronology runs: Leonard Lyons’ column of August 16, 1952 in The Post-Standard of Syracuse, quoting Hurok on his own film biography Tonight We Sing; Joseph Roddy’s LIFE profile of June 1, 1959, “Impresario Who Booked the Bolshoi,” which reprises the line; then, on September 13, 1962, a Times-Picayune report of Joe Garagiola addressing a “Banquet of Champions” for young ballplayers, passing on his friend Yogi’s quip about the sagging Kansas City attendance. A 1963 Celebrity Register entry for Hurok carries the showman’s version yet again.

Berra himself was open about it. In When You Come to a Fork in the Road, Take It!, written with David Kaplan and published by Hyperion in 2001, he wrote that he thought he first said it about the poor attendance in Kansas City, and that he said something like it again to Bud Selig during Selig’s spell as interim commissioner, when the gate was falling under the threat of a strike. He was, in other words, describing a line he had reused — not one he had coined.

The clipped question form on this page — “how are you going to stop them?” — is the version that ended up on mugs and t-shirts. It does not appear in any of the mid-century newspaper citations; the source Wikiquote gives for it is Berra’s own The Yogi Book, page 36, in the Workman edition Wikiquote dates to 1997 (Open Library catalogues the Workman printing as New York, 1998).

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

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Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Quote Investigator: “If People Don’t Want to Come, Nothing Will Stop Them”quoteinvestigator.com

The anchor investigation. Full chronology — Hurok in 1952 and 1959, Berra via Garagiola in 1962 and 1963, and Berra’s own 2001 account — concluding that Hurok was the originator.
Wikiquote: Yogi Berra (Disputed)en.wikiquote.org

Carries this exact ballpark wording in its Disputed section, cites it to The Yogi Book at page 36, and notes the 1952 Hurok priority and the 1962 first attribution to Berra.
Quote Investigator: every Yogi Berra investigationquoteinvestigator.com

QI’s archive of lines credited to Berra — including “Nobody goes there anymore, it’s too crowded” and “I say hardly any of those clever things that are attributed to me.”
The Yogi Book — catalogue recordopenlibrary.org

Library record for the 1998 Workman printing of the book this wording comes from: Workman Publishing, New York, 127 pages, ISBN 0761110909, LCCN 97052802.
Sol Huroken.wikipedia.org

Biography of the impresario the joke actually starts with: April 9, 1888 to March 5, 1974, Marian Anderson’s 1939 Lincoln Memorial concert, the Bolshoi Ballet’s first US tour in 1959.
Yogi Berraen.wikipedia.org

Biography of the man it gets credited to: Yankees catcher from 1946 to 1963, with a final four-game season for the Mets in 1965, ten World Series titles as a player, and a lifetime of Yogi-isms he only half claimed.

The man the joke actually starts with

Who was Sol Hurok?

Sol Hurok

1888–1974 · Russian-American impresario

Sol Hurok was the twentieth century’s most famous concert impresario — the man behind the “S. Hurok Presents” billing that carried Marian Anderson, Arthur Rubinstein and a parade of Russian dancers onto American stages. Born in the Russian Empire on April 9, 1888, he emigrated to the United States in 1906 and was naturalised in 1914; he arranged Anderson’s landmark Lincoln Memorial concert in 1939 and, after decades of trying, brought the Bolshoi Ballet to America in 1959. He talked about the box office with the fatalism of a man who had spent fifty years selling tickets: you can advertise, you can beg, you cannot make people show up.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Earliest documented source

Leonard Lyons, “Doings in Rome,” The Post-Standard (Syracuse, NY), August 16, 1952, quoting Sol Hurok: “If people don’t want to come, nothing will stop them.” Earliest documented attribution of the joke to Yogi Berra: Times-Picayune (New Orleans), September 13, 1962, reporting Joe Garagiola’s banquet speech. Chronology per Quote Investigator, “Quote Origin: If People Don’t Want to Come, Nothing Will Stop Them,” October 30, 2014. The ballpark wording quoted here is cited by Wikiquote to Yogi Berra, The Yogi Book: I Really Didn’t Say Everything I Said! (New York: Workman Publishing), 36 — Wikiquote dates that edition 1997, while Open Library catalogues the Workman printing as New York, 1998.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘If people don't want to come to the ballpark, how are you going to stop them?’?” Last verified 6 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/if-people-dont-want-to-come-to-the-ballpark-how-are-you/

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