Yankees Broadcaster John Sterling Announces His Retirement

Before the Yankees put forth an anemic performance Monday night in their 3-1 loss to the Blue Jays, the news broke that radio play-by-play man John Sterling was retiring at the age of 85 after 36 years in his perch behind home plate at Yankee Stadium. And in Box Score Briefs, some thoughts on the Royals, Bryce Harper, Michael Busch, Mike Trout and Josh Hader.

April 15: Blue Jays 3, Yankees 1

The big news Monday night had nothing to do with the Yankees’ loss to the Blue Jays. A few hours before the game, legendary radio play-by-play man John Sterling and the franchise jointly announced his retirement, effective immediately.

It ends a 36-year career that spanned more than 5,600 Yankee broadcasts including one stretch where he called 5,060 consecutive games before an illness kept him out of the booth on Fourth of July weekend in 2019.

The news came as a shock, but this had actually been in the works dating to last season when Sterling dealt with various health issues and had to miss several games, most coming on the road. This year he had not worked in the booth since April 7 when the Yankees beat the Blue Jays at Yankee Stadium.

“I am a very blessed human being,” Sterling said in a press release. “I have been able to do what I wanted, broadcasting for 64 years. As a little boy growing up in New York as a Yankees fan, I was able to broadcast the Yankees for 36 years. It’s all to my benefit, and I leave very, very happy. I look forward to seeing everyone again on Saturday.”

Saturday, Sterling is expected to appear at a press conference and there are plans to honor him before the Yankees play Tampa Bay in a 1:05 p.m. game.

The two men who have filled in for Sterling most recently have been 37-year-old Justin Shackil and 24-year-old Emmanuel Berbari, though it is way too early to know what the long-range plan is for the position. Will one of them ascend to the throne full-time to work side-by-side with Suzyn Waldman, or might the Yankees look outside the organization for a replacement?

Michael Kay, who was his radio partner for 10 years before Kay became the voice of the Yankees on YES, relayed a conversation he had with Sterling Saturday and Sterling telling him he still loved doing the games and being at the stadium. The part he hated was traveling, not only flying all over the country, but even dealing with getting to the ballpark on a daily basis.

I’m much younger than Sterling, but I’ve been on the road covering the Bills for 35 years and while I’ve traveled just a fraction of what Sterling has, I can concur that the travel is the worst part. Being at the game is great, but getting there is a royal pain in the pass.

In a statement, flagship radio station WFAN said, “Yankees radio will never quite sound the same without the signature voice, wit and humor of John Sterling. To generations of Bronx Bombers fans, he was a beloved companion that when you heard John, you knew it was time for baseball. Though he never wore the pinstripes, except of course for his fine tailored suits, he was one of the most colorful personalities in Yankees history and in all of New York City radio. All of us at WFAN tip our cap and salute our colleague and friend on a truly iconic career.”

The team statement read in part, “Fans find a certain comfort in the daily rhythms of baseball. Day in and day out, season after season, and city after city, John Sterling used his seat in the broadcast booth to bring Yankees fans the heartbeat of the game, employing an orotund voice and colorful personality that were distinctly, unmistakably his own. John informed and entertained, and he exemplified what it means to be a New Yorker with an unapologetic and boisterous style that exuded his passion for baseball, broadcasting and the New York Yankees.”

Before he became a baseball broadcaster, Sterling spent the 1970-71 season as the play-by-play man of the NBA’s Baltimore Bullets. He did Morgan State University football for seven years, and he also spent time as play-by-play man for, among other teams, the NHL’s New York Islanders and the ABA/NBA New York/New Jersey Nets, all while hosting a sports talk show for much of the 1970s.

He moved to Atlanta in 1981 and spent nine years announcing the NBA Atlanta Hawks’ games and six seasons on Atlanta Braves games for Turner Sports before returning to his native New York in 1989 to take over the Yankees’ radio booth.

Sterling had one of the great broadcast voices, and some of his calls through the years have become iconic. There are many who would say he was over-the-top and there was too much schtick to his broadcasts, particularly his contrived home run calls, and I would raise my hand on that. Certainly in his later years he became prone to mistakes and there were times you’d be listening and wondering what the hell was actually going on. But one thing no one doubted was his love of baseball, and his love of the Yankees.

“The biggest compliment I can give anybody is that he’s an original,” Waldman said during the pregame show Monday night. “There will never be another John Sterling, there just can’t be. Every day was a unique, funny, strange, wonderful experience.”

Here are my observations:

➤ Sterling would have appreciated that Monday’s game at refurbished Rogers Centre took only two hours, 23 minutes to complete, but he would have hated everything else about it.

➤ Luis Gil was pretty awful in his third start. He had zero command and catcher Austin Wells was performing gymnastics behind the plate trying to catch his wild pitches as Gil walked five men in the first two innings. That gift-wrapped Toronto a 2-1 lead and it was shocking that it wasn’t worse but the Jays’ offense did nothing else. They had just four hits and went 1-for-10 with runners in scoring position.

➤ Because the Yankees had played three games in the previous two days, Aaron Boone had a short bullpen and needed to ride it out with Gil. The young righty was able to grind through five innings but he allowed another run in the third when Bo Bichette singled and scored on a two-out double by Alejandro Kirk. Gil finished with seven walks and six strikeouts and threw 99 pitches, 48 of them balls.

➤ The Yankees offense was pathetic as it could not solve Chris Bassitt. He gave up three straight singles to Gleyber Torres, Alex Verdugo and Oswaldo Cabrera in the second inning and that was the only run New York scored. Bassitt went 6.1 innings and allowed four hits and two walks with five whiffs. In four career starts against the Yankees, Bassitt has a 1.00 ERA with 31 strikeouts across 27 innings. “He’s nasty,” Cabrera said. “He’s a really nice pitcher. Everyone can see because he has too many pitches to beat you up. We tried to battle, but we know he’s a really good pitcher.”

➤ The Yankees had one hit, a single by Anthony Volpe, after the second inning. Aaron Judge went 0-for-4 and is now down to .194; Wells was 0-for-3 and is down to .103; Trent Grisham was 0-for-2 and still doesn’t have a hit as a Yankee; even Juan Soto stunk as he went 0-for-3. Just an ugly, ugly night and now the Yankees have lost two in a row for the first time this year.

Here are the highlights. And by the way, as you see, I’m back to providing the YouTube highlights. I didn’t like the MLB Game Story highlights I started the season with.

2024 Survey Results

I just want to thank those of you who filled out my annual survey. Out of more than 1,200 subscribers, there were only 237 responses, so I wish there had been more, but it was enough to get a sense of what you like and don’t like about Pinstripe People.

About 77% read every Pinstripe People which was great to see, and 95% said your reading schedule is flexible and that’s great because with the daily editions, I really can’t get those out by the usual 7:30 a.m. In fact, the reading times were almost identical, but the slight leader was 30% read it around lunch time, and when it goes out at 7:30, 25.7% read it immediately.

On the Pinstripe Past editions, 54% said they read them depending on the topic and 39% read them all and really enjoy them. The question about expanding the history stories to include all of baseball was almost a dead split, with 50.2% saying yes to that idea, so I will do some of that, starting Wednesday actually.

As for 2009 Yankees: The Last Championship, 73% said they enjoy when I take a deep dive into one season like this, and with Hardball Hyperbole last year. The addition of the weekday daily edition with news around MLB was a strong yes with 79% of you in favor of that.

And then on the question about whether you would pay for the newsletter if I ever charged a subscription fee, it was basically a one-third split: 33.3% said yes, you would pay because you recognize the time and effort, plus the quality of the content; 36.3% answered with a maybe; and 30.4% said no, you wouldn’t pay.

I’ll include the survey link one last time here because I still want to hear from more voices so I encourage those who haven’t filled it out to please do so. Here’s the link: https://forms.gle/iCHc8ant3ZVBHz8e9

⚾ It’s a little early to be making proclamations about any team, good or bad. Well, OK, maybe it’s not too early to say the White Sox, Rockies and Marlins are a three-way dose of awfulness. But is it possible that the Royals might actually be pretty good?

This is a franchise that has been terrible pretty much since it shocked the world by winning back-to-back pennants in 2014 and 2015 and winning the World Series in 2015. Those were Kansas City’s only two postseason appearances dating back to 1985, the year it won its first and only other World Series. That’s right, two playoff qualifications in nearly four decades, and since 2018, the Royals lost at least 97 games four times including a franchise-record 106 last year.

However, the Royals are making some early noise with an 11-6 record after Monday’s 2-0 victory over the White Sox. They had a surprisingly active offseason where they actually spent money, topped by the franchise-record $288 million contract they gave shortstop Bobby Witt. That was a clear recognition on management’s part that the weak AL Central is wide open with no truly dominant team, so why shouldn’t they be in the mix? Honestly, I think they’ll fade sooner rather than later, but for now, it’s a fun team.

Witt is a budding superstar and he has certainly responded to the new deal as he’s slashing .314/.368/.657 with an OPS of 1.026. And then there’s aging catcher Salvador Perez who has four homers, same as Witt, and already has 15 RBI, though he got hurt Sunday against the Mets and will miss a few games. And on the mound, starters Cole Ragans (1.93 ERA), Seth Lugo (1.05) and Brady Singer (0.98) have given up a combined 10 earned runs across 11 starts and 67.1 innings as the Royals have allowed a major league-low 48 runs this season.

⚾ The Phillies continue to be a confounding team. They have so much top-tier talent yet they’ve stumbled out to a 9-8 start due in part to Bryce Harper’s struggles. Harper began the season 0-for-11 in his first three games, then had three home runs and six RBI on April 2 against the Reds and everyone assumed that was the breakout.

Nope. Before Monday night’s 2-1 walk-off win over the Rockies, Harper had not driven in a run since April 5 and was in a dreadful 4-for-34 slump over nine games. Finally, he grounded an RBI single through the right side to give the Phillies a 1-0 lead, and then in the top of the 10th, he made a leaping catch of a line drive that saved a run. A few minutes later, Christian Pache delivered the game-winning single for Philadelphia.

Harper is slashing just .197/.290/.393 for an OPS of .683, but he’s just part of the Phillies problems on offense. As a team they have only 30 extra-base hits through 17 games, the fewest they’ve had at this point of a season since 1961 when they also had 30. Nick Castellenos has zero extra-base hits and is hitting just .177.

⚾ While re-signing Cody Bellinger was considered a hugely important transaction for the Cubs, there was always some skepticism about what player Chicago was bringing back. Was it the Bellinger who was tremendous last year in his first season with the team, or the guy who from 2020-22 fell off a cliff with the Dodgers and was one of the worst hitters in MLB?

So far it hasn’t been pretty as Bellinger is hitting just .180, though he does have 10 RBI. However, another former Dodger is picking up the slack as first baseman Michael Busch has been red-hot during the Cubs’ 10-6 start. In the Cubs’ 3-2 victory over the Diamondbacks, Busch homered for the fifth straight game to tie a franchise record shared by teammate Christopher Morel plus Cub legends Sammy Sosa, Ryne Sandberg and Hack Wilson.

“You hit a home run in five straight games, you take notice of it,” said Cubs manager Craig Counsell of Busch, who had just 27 games of MLB experience under his belt before this season, those coming last year with Los Angeles. “He’s off to a fabulous start as a Cub. We’re grateful to have him for sure.”

Busch was traded to the Cubs for a couple of prospects because the Dodgers needed to clear a spot on their 40-man roster, a deal that many felt would allow Busch to flourish and thus far, he has. He’s now slashing .327/.410/.731 for an OPS of 1.141 that ranks fourth in MLB.

⚾ The Angels scored five times in the eighth on a two-run homer by Mike Trout and a three-run double by Matt Thaiss and they beat the Rays 7-3. On the Trout homer, Angels broadcaster Wayne Randazzo honored Sterling with his “It his high, it is far, it is gone” home run call. Nice.

⚾ Astros closer Josh Hader had another meltdown in Houston’s 6-1 loss to the Braves. He came into the game in the ninth even though the Astros were down 2-1, and he proceeded to get hammered for four runs. The man who signed the richest per-year contract ever given to a reliever at $19 million now has a 9.39 ERA and a 1.696 WHIP in nine appearances.