The Joy Series: Hometown Announcers

An essay on the voices that help us fall in love with the game of baseball.

John Sterling was both an exceptionally nice man … and the bane of my very existence. This was exactly as it should have been. He lived his life enthusiastically. As a man, he’d greet you always with a smile, with a joke, with a question about your life. How’s your family? Do you have kids? You gonna catch a show while you’re in New York?

As the New York Yankees announcer, he’d turn the volume up to 11 on every single happy thing that ever happened to that pinstriped team I’d been raised to loathe since before the first memories. He’d serenade Giancarlo Stanton. He’d turn Derek Jeter into a demigod. He’d make Mariano Rivera seem even more invincible than he actually was, which was a trick because Rivera was pretty darned invincible already.

And at the end of the night, he’d shout “THUUUUUUHHHHH YANKEES WIN!”

Sometimes in the middle of the night, I wake up in a cold sweat as those words pound through my head.

Calvin Trillin once wrote that “anyone who doesn’t think the best hamburger place in the world is in his hometown is a sissy… and probably a security risk.”

The same is true — even more true — about hometown baseball announcers.

I wasn’t supposed to like John Sterling, the announcer. If I did, he was probably doing it wrong.

See, here’s the thing about hometown baseball announcers: Their styles are never the point. Yes, I might prefer the poetry of a Vin Scully or the homespun wit of Ernie Harwell or the improvisational exuberance of Jason Benetti, but my Cleveland hometown announcer was Herb Score, who started every game by saying, “It’s a beautiful day for baseball,” and then would sometimes forget to give the score for the next five or six innings. But that didn’t matter to me. He was mine! He was ours! For summer after summer, every good thing that happened to the Indians, every bad thing, every pitching change, every failed bunt, every Andre Thornton homer, came through the voice of Herb Score (well, not EVERY thing — he didn’t do every inning — but you get the point). I didn’t care what any Red Sox fan or Orioles fan or Brewers fan thought about Herb. He wasn’t for them. He was for us.

John Sterling understood that as well as anybody. I’m not saying every Yankees fan loved his operatic, celebratory, corny, and over-the-top style; I heard from plenty who did not. But more did, and even those who didn’t came to think of him the way I imagine Philadelphia vegans feel about Pat’s cheesesteak or humorless Chicagoans feel about Second City. Sterling was New York. He was the Yankees. The team doesn’t feel the same without him.

John Sterling kept his enthusiasm. That’s the other thing. When people ask me what I admire most about Bruce Springsteen, the performer, it is that he gives his all every time he performs “Born to Run,” even though he’s performed it 10,000 times by now, even though there can’t be much juice left to squeeze out of it. John Sterling gave his all to every “Giancarlo, non si può de stoparlo” call. He reached deep within himself when shouting, “All Rise! Here comes the Judge!” He never held back when yelling, “It’s a thrilla by Godzilla,” when Hideki Matsui knocked one out.

He seemed to stretch out “THUUUUUUHHHHH YANKEES WIN!” a little longer every time he did it, and he did it for more than three decades.

We’ve lost so many of the local announcers who raised our generations of baseball fans — Vin, Ernie, Hawk, Nuxie, Herb, Jack Buck, Harry Caray, Dave Niehaus, Harry Kalas, Jerry Coleman and now John Sterling, who died yesterday, two months shy of his 90th birthday. They were all different styles, all different voices, and if you happened to be the sort of kid, like I was, who went out to your Dad’s car and scanned the radio dial to listen to any baseball, all baseball, you had your favorites. But if you grew up with just one of them, you felt the connection in your soul.

Of course, I’d prefer it if the Yankees never won another game. But they will, they will win lots of games just like they always do, and when they do, for the rest of my life, I’ll hear John Sterling’s voice. So will Yankees fans everywhere. It will make them a lot happier than it makes me, but that’s how it goes with hometown announcers.