Monthly Archives: April 2024

The Orioles are the team to beat in the AL East. What a difference a few years make, eh?

Let’s Go Yankees!

In the spring of 1998 I was living alone in a small apartment in Long Beach, California. The internet was as awkward as a teenager back then, full of promise but lacking any direction or purpose. Radio stations were just beginning to stream their live content on line, and since Major League Baseball had not yet caught up with the technology, game broadcasts were available for free to anyone with an internet connection.

I quickly established a baseball driven routine. I’d get home by four or five o’clock each evening, log into AOL.com, and open their distant ancestor to today’s MLB Game Day. A tiny window no larger than two or three  postage stamps would keep me updated on the Yankee score as pixels danced across a miniature diamond to show me which runners were on base. Next I’d navigate my way to WFAN to listen to their live feed of that night’s game, not for a minute missing the irony that all this cutting edge technology was giving me nothing more than baseball fans had been enjoying for the previous eight decades — a simple radio broadcast.

Nineteen ninety-eight was a good year to be a Yankee fan, and as I listened to one win after another that spring, I came to know and love the deep tones of John Sterling. His radio partner in those days was a young Michael Kay, and while they worked well together, there always seemed to be the slightest bit of tension between them, with the younger Kay latching onto his three innings of play-by-play in the middle of the game with desperate ambition — or perhaps I was just imagining that.

Sterling, however, was the opposite of desperate. Perhaps it was a holdover from his brief time in Atlanta calling Braves games, but there was something in Sterling’s voice that brought to mind a tall glass of sweet tea, as unhurried as a summer afternoon. As such, his pairing with Suzyn Waldman, which began in 2005, made much more sense than his previous partnership with Kay.

Sterling and Waldman, he 85 and she 77, were often derisively referred to as Ma and Pa Kettle for their folksy banter and nostalgic view of the game, but none of that ever bothered me. I’ve been watching the Yankees on YES for about twenty years now, but one of my greatest pleasures is still listening to a game on the radio as two voices spin a description of the game unfolding before them.

Last week I got in the car and quickly found the game on the satellite radio, but someone different was talking to Suzyn, and it didn’t feel right. I wondered why Sterling would be taking off a home game, but now we know. John Sterling announced his retirement from broadcasting on Monday afternoon, and the booth will never be the same.

Sure, he’s tricked me dozens of times into celebrating a home run as he launched into his signature call (“It is high! It is far…”) only to have the ball fall harmlessly into a fielder’s glove at the warning track, but there’s far more that I’ll miss.

Each one of us has punctuated an important win by singing along, “Ball game over! Yankees win! Thuuuuuuuuh… Yankees! Win!” And don’t we all have a favorite individual home run call? (My favorite: “Downtown goes Frazier!” Simply a work of art.)

We’ll all miss those things, and if we’re being honest, we’ll even admit to missing his cranky nostalgia. “In my day, Suzyn, that ball was simply a ground ball to the shortstop, but now there isn’t a shortstop. There just isn’t a shortstop anymore!” Sure, sometimes it might’ve felt like you were listening to the game with your parents, but that wasn’t a bad thing.

I miss John Sterling already. I’m sure we’ll see him around from time to time, perhaps throwing out a first pitch or coming back to emcee Old Timer’s Day, and his trademark call will likely echo through the Stadium after Yankee wins for years to come, but it’s the natural progression of things. Veterans leave and younger players come along to replace them. That’s baseball, Suzyn.

[Photo Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.]

When I was a boy my dream was to attend a double header. A Yankee double header would’ve been the best, but to be honest, it was just the idea of sitting through two nine-inning ballgames that appealed to me. It seemed like Nirvana; it turned out it was just as unattainable.

I was the only hardcore baseball fan in my family. My parents would oblige my obsession by taking us to games often enough, but seven hours at the ballpark? That was a bridge too far. And by the time I was old enough to set my own agenda, the doubleheader had gone the way of the dodo. First it was the owners realizing they were giving away too much baseball, so they invented the split doubleheader — clear the park after the first game, take new tickets for the second. Then it was the players, who just didn’t want to do it anymore, and suddenly they were gone. The last scheduled traditional doubleheaders were in 2001.

But then…

Perhaps because baseball traffics so well in nostalgia, a few teams started bringing back the double dip. The Red Sox scheduled a single-admission double header last year, and as part of the 25th anniversary season of Oracle Park, the San Francisco Giants have their own traditional doubleheader planned for this July. The little boy inside me is hopeful, but I know I’ll never get two Yankee games for the price of one. The bottomline-conscious New York Yankees would never give this gift to their fans, and no opposing team would ever sacrifice the revenue they’d lose for giving away a Yankee game for free.

So I’ll have to live with days like today, a day-night doubleheader with the Cleveland Guardians. It’ll have to do.

[Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.]