Through Ups and Downs, Yankees' John Sterling Remained One of a Kind

The longtime announcer—who retired abruptly this week—amassed his share of detractors during the past six-plus decades in the booth. But he remains beloved for his unwavering passion.

Yankees announcer John Sterling announced his retirement on Monday after 35 years calling the teams' games. / Bob Karp/Staff Photographer

When I think of John Sterling, I think of my neighborly view of him just before the first pitch of a game at Yankee Stadium late last season. I was in the television booth next to John while broadcasting the game for MLB Network. A glass partition separated us.

When I glanced to my right, of course I was not surprised to see John resplendent in a blue pinstriped suit with wide lapels, silk tie and gold pocket square. For every one of 162 games every season, and any subsequent postseason, Sterling dressed for radio as if appearing on television. Rain, cold, heat, humidity … didn’t matter. He brought his sartorial “A” game every day.

What did surprise me was seeing Sterling engrossed in a weathered, dog-eared paperback book. Was he checking a last-minute statistical fact? A biographical nugget about the starting pitcher? Upon closer inspection I was surprised and delighted to see that Sterling was engrossed in a noir murder mystery novel, replete with an illustrated cover with a suspicious figure in a fedora lurking in the shadows.

Perfect, I thought, as a smile bloomed. Here was this man who seemed from another time and place—though always current with his information—and a je ne sais quoi that alchemized his apparent stiff-collar formality into something so endearing as to be your favorite uncle at the Thanksgiving table. A huge fan of Broadway musicals, soap operas, ascots, French cuffs, moving the runner over and, as I delightfully discovered just prior to first pitch, noir detective fiction, Sterling is a Damon Runyon character come to life. Quintessentially New York. An American original.

After 64 years as a broadcaster, the past 35 seasons as the lead radio voice of the New York Yankees, Sterling, 85, suddenly announced his retirement on Monday, effective immediately. The team will honor him before its game Saturday against the Tampa Bay Rays. He leaves as a baseball treasure.

As only baseball radio broadcasters can become, because of the plethora of games and the portability of sound as we move about through the season’s summer months—cars, barbecues, porches, beaches, etc.—Sterling is the beloved soundtrack of a generation. Moreover, his timing, like his suits, was impeccable. He also is the soundtrack of the greatest dynasty of the free agent era, still behind the microphone in the many historic October nights while the team’s television broadcasters yield ground to the national rightsholders.

Set aside whatever you think of his technical merits as a broadcaster. To judge Sterling by a Newhouse School technocratic rubric is to measure Harry Caray by his pronunciations, Albert Einstein by his coif or Bob Dylan by his vocal range. The very point of Sterling is his originality—and his authenticity.

Sterling joined the Yankees in 1989 after a stint calling games for the Braves. / Alexander Lewis / MyCentralJersey via

It may seem to his many critics—and, lo, has the modern world launched too many of the genus with increasing bile—that Sterling is self-aggrandizing, especially given his trademark, over-the-top personalized home run calls. Those critics are wrong. John Sterling perfected the art of being John Sterling. What seems pretentious to a hater is his essence, and as humans we can never go wrong with being the best version of our authentic selves.

Sterling grew up loving the sound of his voice and the power within it. Raised on the East Side of Manhattan, Sterling was only six or seven years old when he knew what he wanted from life. His father, Carl Sloss, an advertising executive, was listening to the family radio console in the mid-1940s when suddenly John heard a booming voice announce, “Live from Hollywood, it’s ‘The Eddie Bracken Show!’”

John was thunderstruck. Bracken was a film and Broadway star with his own radio show. But little John didn’t want to be Bracken. He wanted to be that guy with the clarion of a voice who introduced Bracken. (It was either John Wald of NBC, who had the duty in 1945, or Jimmy Wallington of CBS, who held the role the next two years.) Fortunately, Sterling was blessed with a deep, soothing and versatile voice to make his dream real.

Sterling reminds me of a line from a CBS producer, Kevin O’Malley, about Bob Costas that appeared in a 1986 SI feature about Costas: “He probably wants to be an announcer for a living more than anybody I’ve ever met.” To be what they dreamed, Costas and Sterling did not invent that announcer, they simply unveiled what was within—even if they did so with opposite styles.

In that same SI feature, Costas said, “The people I admire are those who have crafted careers and on-air personas on their own terms, not according to what the Great Broadcasters Handbook says or what the trend of the moment is. You know a guy I love? Charles Kuralt. He invented himself. No one sitting in a network executive’s office said, ‘Get me a rumpled guy who’s bald and has a kind of avuncular demeanor.’ He did what he did, which was something out of the ordinary. He didn’t say, ‘All right, this is what a broadcaster does; now how can I make myself like that?’ He is himself, and that’s what he sells.”

Is that not the essence of Sterling? He is himself, and that’s what he sells. Is Sterling a showman, even a bit of a ham? Yes, but a genuine one. He is Broadway John, a devout fan of musicals, stagecraft, lyrics and enunciation. No one has ever emphasized the humble, overlooked article “the” more than Sterling—and not just for his signature “The-uhhhh … Yankees win!’ but even something as prosaic as “the-uh pitch …”

Do you know the origin of his famous “back-to-back and-uh belly-to-belly” call when the Yankees hit consecutive home runs? It is from the lyrics of a calypso folk song, “Jumbie Jamberee,” that was popularized by The Kingston Trio in 1959 as “Zombie Jamboree” and by five versions by Harry Belafonte in the 1960s and 1970s. Another time and place, modernized.

For someone who at one point called 5,060 consecutive games over 30 years, Sterling brought an indefatigable supply of wonder. For that one trait, I am most awed.

The word “wonder” comes from a Proto-Germanic word that in Old English (wundrian) captured what it meant for something to be marvelous, to be the object of astonishment. Even at age 85, Sterling came to a baseball game—or to be more exact, behind a microphone—with wonder. He was perpetually happy to be calling a game. Even last season, when the Yankees were a terribly boring offensive team, Sterling would be awed, not distraught, over the absurdity of giving play-by-play night after night where nothing much happened. Every game, every season, every decade, you could hear astonishment in his voice. What a gift for him and for us.

Unlike Costas, who needs baseball, Sterling needed the microphone more than the game. He would have thrived as the next John Wald, Jimmy Wallington, Don Pardo, Ed McMahon or Bill Wendell. Sterling had spent 12 years calling football, basketball and hockey and hosting various talk and sports rabble-rousing radio shows before Atlanta Braves owner Ted Turner hired him after the 1982 season to replace Darrel Chaney to liven Braves broadcasts. Sterling came home to New York in 1989, when WABC general manager Fred Weinhaus, like Turner, wanted a more upbeat and sponsor-friendly booth. Weinhaus replaced incumbent announcers Hank Greenwald and Tommy Hutton with Sterling, the natural showman, and Jay Johnstone, the practical joker of a former player.

“The best things you do are things that are done extemporaneously,” Sterling said then to Stan Isaacs of Newsday. “I will be dramatic when the situation demands it. I will kid around as well.

“Anything that comes up, I will relate to. This isn’t feeding the world’s hungry, you know. If you don’t talk about controversy, you could sound like a fool. I think fans wait to see if you will talk about such things.”

The Yankees were a bad team when Sterling arrived. He called four straight losing seasons with New York—increasing his run of losing teams to eight years—until the Yankees finally won more than they lost. As the Yankees developed into champions under manager Joe Torre, Sterling rose to the challenge and the attention. He loved how the power of his beloved microphone increased with the rise of the franchise. The more the Yankees won, the more baseball suited him, the more he could emote and take creative license. Brightly lit, this was the Broadway he always wanted. Fans came to anticipate his home run calls like fans of pop stars waiting for new songs to drop.

A good friend, Torre had worked with Sterling in Atlanta in 1983–84, when Torre managed the Braves. Years ago, Torre, ever keenly observant, distilled the essence of Sterling from the arguments over Sterling’s punny, bombastic home run calls.

Sterling and Torre formed a friendship during their shared time with the Yankees, which saw four World Series titles from 1996 to 2000. / Alexander Lewis / MyCentralJersey via

“Are the home run calls silly?” Torre asked. “Sure, but they made me smile.”

Sterling never played the role of the unabashed homer of an announcer, calling out the Yankees’ shortcomings, obvious or not, and thankfully avoiding the awful use of “we.” He did allow friendships to show, such as with Torre, Mariano Rivera and Derek Jeter, and there is nothing wrong or unprofessional about that.

More subtly, attuned Yankees fans could tap into the leanings of his heart as the team rose or fell. Many times, I have tuned into a Yankees game and knew whether they were winning or losing just by the level of energy in his voice, a key barometer when he is not so quick to give score updates.

Baseball and the Yankees will move on without Sterling. The game rolls on like some deep, wide river unbowed by even the biggest personalities in its path. But there will not be another Sterling, not because the modern style conspires against it but simply because of the uniqueness of his personality.

A long time ago, Vin Scully told me the best advice he ever received was from Red Barber, who encouraged him as a young broadcaster not to assimilate the styles of the established stars of the field. “You’ll water your own wine,” Barber warned him. And just as long ago, I learned that the greatest broadcasters are sui generis, a Latin phrase meaning “of its own kind.” Harry Caray never tried to be someone else. Neither did John Sterling.

When you are on the air speaking extemporaneously three hours a night for 162 games a year for 35 years, that’s 17,010 hours of content, a veritable bottomless feeding trough for the trolls waiting to find fault. That’s just the nature of modern media.

That is not, however, where a legacy is found. It is found in how you lasted that long. In Sterling’s case, it was showing up every day dressed for an event with a bounce in his step, a gleam in his eye, an encyclopedic knowledge of Broadway musicals and a yellowed noir detective fiction paperback in his leather satchel. Like Nathan Detroit, Frankie Ferocious and Madame La Gimp, Sterling may seem a Runyonesque invention. But all about him, even as contrived as the most tortured of his home run calls may have been, was real because of the simple joy he exuded from living out a boy’s dream. Few, if any, broadcasters—especially to age 85—enjoyed being behind the microphone more than Sterling. The wonder in his voice never dimmed.