Slump? I ain’t in no slump. I just ain’t hitting.

Yogi Berra, the New York Yankees’ Hall of Fame catcher, became famous not only for his play but for his deadpan, paradoxical quips (“Yogi-isms”) that reporters eagerly repeated. This line is typically attributed to him in the familiar baseball setting of a player being asked about a “slump”—a period of poor performance at the plate. Berra’s remark plays off the media’s tendency to label and psychologize routine fluctuations in hitting. While widely circulated in quotation collections and sports lore as something he said to reporters, I cannot confidently pin it to a specific dated interview or contemporaneous newspaper account.

The joke hinges on a distinction without a difference: in baseball terms, “being in a slump” and “not hitting” describe the same outcome, but Berra rejects the loaded narrative of “slump” as if it were an identity or condition. The line satirizes how language can inflate ordinary facts into diagnoses, and it captures an athlete’s desire to keep failure concrete and temporary rather than psychological and self-defining. As with many Berra-isms, the humor comes from plainspoken logic that collapses a rhetorical frame—reminding listeners that sometimes the simplest description is the truest, even if it sounds circular.