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Who really said it

So I'm Ugly. So What? I Never Saw Anyone Hit with His Face

Spoken by Yogi Berra 1925–2015 · Hall of Fame catcher, New York Yankees
Verified In copyright

The quip is genuinely his. The earliest printing Quote Investigator documents is the Berra chapter of sportswriter Milton Gross’s 1948 book Yankee Doodles, and Berra printed it himself in The Yogi Book (1998) and When You Come to a Fork in the Road, Take It! (copyright 2001). Only the neat modern wording is new — the closing clause is his word for word, but the punchy “So I’m ugly. So what?” opener replaces the set-up he actually used.

Last verified 7 Sep 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

For presentations

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Verified quote & credit

“It don’t matter if you’re ugly in this racket. All you have to do is hit the ball and I never saw anybody hit one with his face.” Yogi Berra, quoted in Milton Gross, Yankee Doodles (Boston: House of Kent Publishing Co., 1948), 115. The tidy modern form now in circulation, “So I’m ugly. So what? I never saw anyone hit with his face,” is a later compression of this; its closing clause matches Berra’s own wording in When You Come to a Fork in the Road, Take It! (Hyperion, copyright 2001), 112.

Can you use it?

Still under copyright (rights held by Estate of Yogi Berra; Workman Publishing and Hyperion (Berra's own books); House of Kent Publishing Co. (Milton Gross, Yankee Doodles, 1948)). A short, credited quote is generally fine for talks, teaching, and internal decks; for commercial, published, or large-scale reuse, get permission.

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In context

Evoking the world of Yogi Berra — Hall of Fame catcher, New York Yankees. Theme: "So I'm Ugly. So What? I Never Saw Anyone Hit with His Face". 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 "So I'm Ugly. So What? I Never Saw Anyone Hit with His Face". 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 1948 printing

Earliest documented printing
Yankee Doodles
Author & publication
Milton Gross · House of Kent Publishing Co., Boston, 1948 — chapter “Beauty’s Only Skin Deep,” quote page 115
Spoken by
Yogi Berra, catcher, New York Yankees
Berra’s own printings
The Yogi Book (Workman, 1998), page 112; When You Come to a Fork in the Road, Take It! (Hyperion, copyright 2001), page 112

When they remind him that he’s ugly, Yogi has a pat answer. “It don’t matter if you’re ugly in this racket. All you have to do is hit the ball and I never saw anybody hit one with his face.” 1948 · Yankee Doodles, p. 115

Milton Gross, Yankee Doodles (1948), page 115, as transcribed by Quote Investigator from a paper copy.

Digitized book
The Yogi Book (Workman, 1998) at the Internet Archive
Quote Investigator: the 1948-to-2001 citation trail

How the line is documented

  • 1948 — the earliest documented printing. Sportswriter Milton Gross gave Berra a chapter in Yankee Doodles, his collection of New York Yankee profiles, and recorded the reply Berra kept ready for teammates who called him ugly: all you have to do is hit the ball, and he never saw anybody hit one with his face. Quote Investigator verified the page on paper ↗
  • The book is real and datable. An independent catalog record confirms Gross’s Yankee Doodles as a 245-page volume published in Boston by House of Kent Pub. Co. in 1948 — so the cited quote page falls well inside it. Open Library edition record ↗
  • 1949–1955 — it spreads, and the words move. Collier’s Weekly printed “I never saw nobody hit one with his face”; an Associated Press profile in 1952 and Grantland Rice’s column in 1953 each carried their own variant; and The American Mercury in 1955 traced the retort back to bench-jockeying from Birdie Tebbetts. The citations are laid out in order ↗
  • 1998 and 2001 — Berra claims it himself. He gives the short form in The Yogi Book, the book he assembled specifically to sort what he had said from what he hadn’t, and the fuller version in When You Come to a Fork in the Road, Take It! The Yogi Book is digitized at the Internet Archive ↗
In copyright

Berra’s own retellings are plainly in copyright — The Yogi Book (Workman, 1998) and When You Come to a Fork in the Road, Take It! (Hyperion, copyright 2001). For the 1948 first printing, Milton Gross’s Yankee Doodles, we have not established whether the US copyright was renewed, so we have not established that it entered the public domain either — treat the line as in copyright. Quoting the sentence with attribution is ordinary fair comment; reproducing 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

What’s wrong with the version you’ve seen

Nobody else is claiming this line, and the attribution to Berra is sound. What has drifted is the wording — which matters here, because the sentence everyone quotes is not the sentence anyone recorded.

The tidy modern one-liner Compression

“So I’m ugly. So what? I never saw anyone hit with his face” is the form that circulates in quotation books and on quote sites — it is the version a reader brought to Quote Investigator in the first place — but it matches none of the printings from 1948 to 2001. The second half is Berra’s exactly; the “So I’m ugly. So what?” opener stands in for his real set-up, “It doesn’t matter if you’re ugly in this racket. All you have to do is hit the ball.” Quote Investigator sets the wordings side by side ↗

A single perfect dugout comeback Overstated

Retellings usually stage this as one squelch delivered once. Both Berra and the man who first printed it describe a habit instead: Gross in 1948 called it Berra’s “pat answer” to teammates who reminded him he was ugly, and Berra in 2001 called it his “stock answer” whenever he was asked about his looks. Both passages are quoted in full at Quote Investigator ↗

Yogi Berra generally Why check at all

Berra is one of the most quote-magnetised names in American life — enough that he titled a book I really didn’t say everything I said!, and enough that biographer Allen Barra argues a “pseudo-Yogi” was manufactured around him, largely by his friend Joe Garagiola. That is precisely why a line this good deserves a source rather than a shrug. Slate on the invented Yogi ↗

The joke is Berra’s and it was in print by 1948 — but the version you have probably seen is a later tightening of the words he actually used. See the full citation trail at Quote Investigator ↗

Context

Why the line existed at all

Berra came up into a clubhouse and a league full of bench jockeys who had decided his face was the joke. The American Mercury later reported that Birdie Tebbetts got it going by hollering across at him, “Hey, Berra, how does your wife like living in a tree?” — after which opposing players spent a season swinging from dugout roofs and bellowing like Tarzan. By that account it took Berra all season to think up his answer. Quote Investigator reproduces the Mercury anecdote ↗

Knowing the real wording changes what the line is. The version in circulation is a wisecrack. What Gross wrote down in 1948 is a working man’s argument — it doesn’t matter if you’re ugly in this racket, all you have to do is hit the ball — with the face joke as the closing move. Berra treated it as equipment rather than a one-off: Gross called it his “pat answer,” and Berra himself later called it his “stock answer” when people asked about his looks.

It don’t matter if you’re ugly in this racket.

Every wording we can document, in order

1948 · Milton Gross, Yankee Doodles: “It don’t matter if you’re ugly in this racket. All you have to do is hit the ball and I never saw anybody hit one with his face.”

1949 · Collier’s Weekly: “It don’t matter if you’re ugly in this racket … All you gotta do is hit the ball, and I never saw nobody hit one with his face.”

1952 · Associated Press: “It don’t matter what they say. All you have to do in this racket is to hit the ball. I never saw anybody hit one with his face.”

1953 · Grantland Rice: “You don’t hit with your face.”

1960 · Frank Litsky, The Milwaukee Sentinel American Weekly: “But it don’t bother me. I never yet saw anybody hit the baseball with their face. Besides, I like to get kidded; that means they like me. When they stop kidding me, I’m in trouble.”

1998 · Berra, The Yogi Book: “So? I don’t hit with my face.”

2001 · Berra, When You Come to a Fork in the Road, Take It!: “It doesn’t matter if you’re ugly in this racket. All you have to do is hit the ball, and I never saw anyone hit with his face.”

All but the 1960 newspaper wording are transcribed in order at Quote Investigator ↗, which does not cite it; that one is sourced at Wikiquote ↗ — and none of them is the sentence people usually quote.

Explore

Filed under

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

Character Resilience Humility

Go further

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: the citation trail, 1948 to 2001quoteinvestigator.com

The anchor investigation. Transcribes every documented wording from Gross’s 1948 book (verified on paper) through Berra’s own two books, and concludes the quip is genuinely his.
Yankee Doodles (1948) catalog recordopenlibrary.org

Open Library edition record for Milton Gross’s book: House of Kent Pub. Co., Boston, 1948, 245 pages — corroborating the imprint and date behind the quote page.
The Yogi Book, digitizedarchive.org

Internet Archive scan of the 1998 Workman edition of Berra’s own quotation book (127 pages), the volume in which he claims the short form of the line.
Yogi Berraen.wikipedia.org

Life dates, playing record and Hall of Fame election, plus his own complaint that he really didn’t say everything he said.
Yogi Berra on Wikiquoteen.wikiquote.org

Sourced, disputed and misattributed Yogi-isms — including, in the sourced section, a 1960 newspaper wording of this same retort (Frank Litsky, “Stupid, You Say?”, The Milwaukee Sentinel American Weekly, 18 September 1960, p. 7) that Quote Investigator does not cite.
How the Yogi-ism industry got builtslate.com

Biographer Allen Barra and others on Joe Garagiola’s role in circulating invented Berra lines — the reason any Yogi quote is worth checking.

The man who said it

Who was Yogi Berra?

Yogi Berra

1925–2015 · Hall of Fame catcher, New York Yankees

Lawrence Peter “Yogi” Berra caught for the New York Yankees from 1946 to 1963 and played a last season with the Mets in 1965, winning ten World Series titles as a player, three American League MVP awards and eighteen All-Star selections before his election to the Hall of Fame in 1972. He ended up at least as famous for his talk as for his catching — and famous enough that lines he had never said were routinely handed to him, which is why he called one of his own books The Yogi Book: I really didn’t say everything I said!

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Earliest documented printing

Milton Gross, “Beauty’s Only Skin Deep,” in Yankee Doodles (Boston: House of Kent Publishing Co., 1948), 115. Berra’s own later wording: Yogi Berra with Dave Kaplan, When You Come to a Fork in the Road, Take It! (New York: Hyperion, copyright 2001), 112.

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Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘So I'm Ugly. So What? I Never Saw Anyone Hit with His Face’?” Last verified 7 Sep 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/so-im-ugly-so-what-i-never-saw-anyone-hit-with-his-face/

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