John Sterling (1938-2026): The Singular, Sonorous Voice of the Yankees

NEW YORK — “He brought that New York theater to the ballpark,” said Aaron Judge about John Sterling before Monday’s game, offering a perfect summation of the approach of the longtime Yankees broadcaster, who died earlier that day at the age of 87 in Englewood, New Jersey. Dressed in a suit and tie even though listeners couldn’t see him, prone to dropping a reference to a midcentury Broadway musical while celebrating a Yankees home run, and delivering his lines with a booming baritone capable of reaching the cheap seats, Sterling brought a unique and dramatic flair to the job.

His grandiloquent style could be polarizing, his puns agonizing. His personalized calls for each Yankee player’s home runs — from “Bernie goes boom! Bern, baby, Bern!” for Bernie Williams to “Robbie Cano, don’t ya know?” for Robinson Canó to “He sends a Tex message!” for Mark Teixeira — could sound a bit corny at times, his stentorian elongation of the word “the,” as in his oft-imitated “Thuuuuuuuuh Yankees win!” a hammy flourish.

When you root for a team, though, calls like Sterling’s punctuate the high points of fandom and the thrill of victory. Sterling never failed to convey the excitement of the ballpark with his triumphant blasts, but he easily downshifted into a calmer cadence with his partners, most notably Michael Kay and Suzyn Waldman, during more mundane moments. Such conversations are the comforting stuff of summers past, and such enduring presences in the booth offer us yardsticks by which we can measure our lives.

Sterling spent 36 seasons calling Yankees games as part of a 64-year career in broadcasting, which included a groundbreaking role in sports talk radio, time hosting a Yankees pregame show — at one point, doing so alongside the legendary Mel Allen, one of his key influences as a broadcaster — and then regular gigs covering football, basketball, and hockey before he landed his first baseball play-by-play job with the Braves in 1982. In 1989, Sterling became the radio play-by-play voice of the Yankees, beginning a remarkable streak of 5,060 consecutive games called (plus another 211 in the postseason) that ran until mid-2019. When he retired abruptly early in the 2024 season due to health concerns and the job’s travel demands, he was 85 years old. He returned for a late-season cameo that included the Yankees’ first trip to the World Series since 2009 before hanging up his microphone for good.

He joined the Yankees when they were about to hit a low point. The 1989 team went 74-87, the first of four straight losing seasons under four different managers during a span that included managing general partner George Steinbrenner’s suspension from baseball. Half a decade laster, the franchise returned to prominence and then dominance, winning the World Series in 1996, ’98, ’99, 2000, and ’09 while making the playoffs 24 times from 1995–2022. While national announcers called the games for television, Sterling was on the microphone for all of those radio calls.

“He’s synonymous with those five championships,” said Kay when Sterling retired in 2024. Kay served as Sterling’s partner on radio broadcasts for 10 seasons (1992–2001) before becoming the YES Network’s regular play-by-play announcer on television. “If you’re coming into people’s homes, at the beach, the pool or their car, and you’re constantly telling them good news — it made him part of the Yankee firmament. He became a part of forever, because those championships are never going to go away.”

My wife Emma Span, a managing editor for The Athletic who grew up a Yankees fan in New Jersey, fondly recalls her father conjuring up Sterling’s calls of those late-1990s dynasty teams from distant Cape Cod parking lots during their August visits. “Sometimes it was clear, sometimes it was faint and fuzzy, but we would sit there in the dark for hours, the only car in the lot, listening to Sterling’s staticky, sonorous voice. And I still remember those more clearly than most of the ones I actually watched on TV.”

“The rise of Sterling was just synonymous with the beginning of the team’s dominance,” said artist Graig Kreindler, a longtime Yankees fan who grew up in Rockland County in the 1980s listening to the notorious antics of predecessors Phil Rizzuto and Bill White. “The corporate image of the Yankees was very much in line with his voice… very much more professional and put together. Less of a homer, even though he was still a homer. Just a different energy. Somebody you took seriously, ya know?”

Sterling’s run with the Yankees encompassed the entire careers of Hall of Famers Derek Jeter and Mariano Rivera, who were central to those championships. He called the no-hitters of Jim Abbott (1993), Dwight Gooden (1995), and Corey Kluber (2021), as well as the perfect games of David Wells (1998) and David Cone (1999).

Recently, Sterling battled heart issues. He suffered a heart attack in early January, underwent bypass surgery, and remained bedridden. On his ESPN radio show on Monday afternoon, Kay revealed that Sterling had suffered heart failure about a week earlier.

Before Monday night’s game against the Orioles at Yankee Stadium, the team paid tribute, with a three-and-a-half minute video and a moment of silence accompanied by Kay and Waldman laying a bouquet of flowers at home plate. Judge and manager Aaron Boone both shared their memories of Sterling with reporters, the team wore caps with Sterling’s initials on the back, and the Bleacher Creatures chanted his name in their first-inning roll call.

After the Yankees won 12-1 to complete a four-game sweep of the Orioles, they punctuated the victory with a clip of Sterling’s iconic “Thuuuuuuuuh Yankees win!” call over the public address system. In his pregame press conference, Boone told reporters he regularly imitates that call himself:

“When we win, I still do this. My coaches look at me like I’m nuts, I don’t know if they know what I’m doing, but as soon as that final out is made, and I get up to shake players’ hands, I go, ‘Ballgame over. Yankees win. Thuuuuuuuuh Yankees win!’ And I shake it all my coaches’ hands, so I got goosebumps thinking about that.”

Here at FanGraphs, we have a special affection for Sterling, despite the fact that he was hardly a numbers guy. “I don’t get bogged down by these stupid statistics,” he said in a 2017 interview with the New York Post while describing his broadcasting style as “from the seat of my pants.” On August 30, 2020, the Yankees rallied from down 7-2 in the seventh inning against the Mets to win the first game of a doubleheader, 8-7. During the next night’s game, Sterling entered the pantheon with his aside, “I don’t know who FanGraph is,” before citing that our site projected the Mets as having 99.8% odds of winning the previous day’s first game through our Win Probability Added measure.

I don't know who fangraph is pic.twitter.com/59VypfZNgQ

— John Sterling Calls (@JSterlingCalls) August 31, 2020

The phrase ended up on FanGraphs t-shirts. Meanwhile, signature Sterling lines such as “That’s baseball, Suzyn,” and “You can’t predict baseball, Suzyn,” are peppered throughout this site’s articles and chats, and all over social media. Multiple websites have logged his home run calls, and numerous best-ofs sprung up in tribute on Monday.

Particularly for me, a transplanted New Yorker who preferred the much more serene Vin Scully, Sterling’s theatrics were an acquired taste. Like generations of New York baseball fans before me, I eventually warmed to him, coming to appreciate his made-for-broadcasting voice, his enduring quirks, and his tireless work ethic. He exuded a love of the game and for his job, took the high road in the face of criticism, and within the industry was renowned for his accessibility and for treating people well. You might say he had a sterling reputation.

…

John Sterling was born John Sloss on July 4, 1938, to parents Carl Sloss (an advertising executive) and Gladys Hodov Sloss, and grew up on Manhattan’s Upper East Side along with his older sister, Jane. In a 2018 profile by the New York Post’s Andrew Marchand, Sterling explained that his father “wasn’t very child oriented,” adding, “We were kind of in an era when men didn’t show emotion to other men.” The young Sterling looked for reasons to get out of the family’s apartment, and by the time he was nine or 10 years old, he and his friends often went to Yankee Stadium, the Polo Grounds, and Madison Square Garden on their own. A voracious reader, he studied the popular entertainers of the day, gathering information on the likes of Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, and Frank Sinatra the way some kids collect baseball cards.

“When I was that age, I knew every actor, every singer, every impressionist, every comedian,” Sterling told Marchand. “I knew what singers worked for what record companies. They were like ball clubs to me. I knew what actors worked for what studio.”

Sterling was still quite young when he realized he wanted to be a broadcaster. He listened regularly to The Eddie Bracken Show, a sitcom that ran from 1945–47 on NBC and CBS radio stations. “I didn’t want to be Eddie Bracken. I wanted to be the guy who says: ‘Live from Hollywood!’ he recalled in 2024.

By the time he was 12 or 13, Sterling had a low, booming voice. “I studied and mimicked everyone — disc jockeys, news readers, baseball and football announcers,” he told the New York Times’ Bill Pennington for a 2011 profile. “I used to get teased as a young boy for my deep voice, but I learned I could use it to adapt to different radio styles.”

A self-described “terrible student,” Sterling took college courses at Moravian College and Boston University, but after the death of his mother at age 47, “I was rudderless.” He returned to New York City when he was 19 years old, and took classes at the Columbia University School of General Studies, earning an A in a class taught by WNBC’s program director. That convinced him to begin seeking out his career in broadcasting. He sent out audition tapes, and landed a $60-a-week job in Wellsville, New York, about 80 miles south of Buffalo, in 1960. He changed his name from Sloss to Sterling “because it gave him more shine,” as he told The Athletic’s Chris Kirschner in 2020.

Sterling spent the 1960s bouncing around radio stations in the Northeast, enjoying some success as a morning rock and roll disc jockey on WPRO in Providence, Rhode Island, and then moving on to Baltimore, where he hosted a general talk show on WCBM, at the dawn of the era of audience call-ins. “I had no idea what I was talking about in Baltimore,” he told the Times in 2011. “But I knew how to do a talk show. I argued with nuts who called up.”

After gradually mixing more sports into his show, Sterling talked his way into working alongside Baltimore Bullets radio play-by-play announcer Jim Karvellas during the 1970–71 NBA season. When Karvellas moved over to television, Sterling took over the radio play-by-play. He began calling football games for Morgan State University, an historically black college, and continued to do so up through 1978. By that point, he had moved back to New York City, where from 1971–78 he hosted a Yankees pregame show on WMCA and WINS radio stations. From 1972–78, he hosted a confrontational sports talk show on WMCA, one of the earliest of its type. From a 2018 Sports Business Journal profile by David J. Halberstam:

“John was an opinionated, unyielding and bullheaded host. In retrospect his work was groundbreaking. Sterling’s evening time-slot followed provocative political talk show host, Bob Grant, who had little tolerance for callers questioning his right wing politics. Picking up from Grant, Sterling turned sports talk into public acrimony. He rarely if ever took shots at local teams. His opinions were tendentious, much the way they are today. For whatever reason, then as now, he didn’t and won’t offend teams, especially those employing him.

Sterling was often hilarious too. He had no patience for callers whom he didn’t deem intelligent. If a caller was inarticulate and started spewing nonsense, Sterling would sometimes turn down the caller’s volume into a faint backdrop of unintelligible audio while he himself would ramble… When John finally had enough, he would abruptly cut off the caller, as Grant did. “Give it a rest,” he would say.

Still, Sterling hungered to do play-by-pay, and in order to break in, he took every opportunity that came his way in New York, first for short-lived ventures such as the Women’s Professional Football League’s New York Fillies, the World Hockey Association’s New York Raiders, and the World Football League’s New York Stars. He briefly filled in for Marv Albert on New York Knicks broadcasts, but he wasn’t a hit. When the National Hockey League’s New York Islanders and the American Basketball Association’s New Jersey Nets moved their broadcasts to WMCA before the 1974-75 season, Sterling called games for both — sometimes simulcasting TV and radio — and continued to do so across multiple stations through 1978 for the Islanders and ’80 for the Nets, whom he followed to the NBA. In a preview of what was to come, he gained notoriety for his “Islanders goal! Islanders goal!” calls.

Sterling’s style did not wear well with everybody. The New York Post’s Peter Vecsey was particularly critical of Sterling’s NBA work, his penchant for “inserting himself into every other sentence, the inane self-serving drivel and seeing a game that no one else does, because it’s not the one going on at the moment, or perhaps ever,” as Vecsey recalled for Halberstam in 2018.

In 1981, Sterling moved to Atlanta, hosting sports talk shows — briefly for Enterprise Radio (founded by Scott Rasmussen, son of ESPN founder Bill Rasmussen) and then WSB Radio — and calling games for the NBA’s Hawks on TBS from 1981 to ’89. “Dominique is magnifique!” (or fantastique or terrifique) he’d declare when superstar Dominique Wilkins dunked a ball. Things didn’t always go smoothly; color commentator Walt Frazier complained that he wasn’t being given enough room to get a word in edgewise.

Finally, in 1982, Sterling began calling Braves games, working alongside Skip Caray, Ernie Johnson Sr., and Pete Van Wieren; the broadcasters would switch between television and radio mid-game. New to baseball, Sterling was often ribbed by his more experienced colleagues, and fans complained he was too wordy. One fan even initiated a protest by asking viewers who disapproved of him to send $1 to the American Cancer Society. Nonetheless, he lasted on the job through 1987.

Though he was part of the broadcast team when the Joe Torre-led Braves started the 1982 season 13-0 and went on to win the NL West title for the first time since ’69, Sterling’s most famous call for the team came on July 4, 1985 — or rather in the wee hours of July 5 — in a game against the Mets. The contest, which was preceded by a 90-minute rain delay and interrupted by a 41-minute delay as well, was tied 8-8 after nine innings. Each team scored two runs in the 13th, and the Mets scored another run in the top of the 18th, after Darryl Strawberry and manager Davey Johnson were ejected for arguing balls and strikes. Out of position players, the Braves had to let pitcher Rick Camp — to that point in his career a .060 hitter — bat for himself with two outs and nobody on base. As the Mets waved their outfielders in, Sterling told Johnson, “Ernie, if he hits a home run to tie this game, this game will be certified as absolutely the nuttiest in the history of baseball.”

As if on cue, reliever Tom Gorman — then in his sixth inning of work — got ahead of Camp 0-2, then served up a game-tying homer, after which Sterling went absolutely bananas. “It is gone! Holy cow! Oh my goodness! I don’t believe it! I don’t believe it! Rick Camp! Rick Camp! I don’t believe it! Remember what I just said, if he hits a home run that certifies this game as the wackiest, wildest, most improbable game in history!”

Things would get wackier still, as Camp would allow five runs in the 19th and lose 16-13, though fans who stuck around until the game ended at 3:55 AM were treated to fireworks.

Impressed by Sterling’s call of the Hawks-Celtics Eastern Conference Finals in 1989, WABC general manager Fred Winehouse — who recalled Sterling’s tenure in New York — hired him to become the Yankees radio play-by-play voice, replacing Hank Greenwald. “I got the Yankees job without an audition,” Sterling told Kirschner in 2020. “I didn’t even have an agent. I called a buddy of mine who I had broadcasted the Nets with and who was a former big-time college basketball player and referee, Mike DiTomasso. I said, ‘Would you call this guy? They want me to do the Yankees. I said I would, but would you call them up and make a deal?’ Sure enough, Mike called and made a deal.”

Sterling was initially paired in the booth with Jay Johnstone (1989–90) and Joe Angel (1991) before Kay joined him in 1992. Those were lean years for the Yankees, but they had begun laying the groundwork for their success later in the decade. Williams debuted in 1991, one year after the Yankees signed Rivera out of Panama and drafted both Andy Pettitte and Jorge Posada; in 1992, they drafted Jeter.

It’s not clear when Sterling began customizing his home run calls for Yankees players — by that point, he already had his signature, “That ball is high, it is far, it is gone!” call — but it’s generally agreed that what he chose for Williams, a reference to the 1976 song “Disco Inferno” by the Trammps, was the first one to catch on.

“It wasn’t meant that way. I just happened to do something for Bernie Williams. He hit a home run, and I said, ‘Bern, baby, Bern!’ And it kind of mushroomed from there,” Sterling said at the time of his retirement. “But it never was intended for every player, because, frankly, I’m not smart enough to do something for every player.” His most famous call of a Williams home run — and one of his most famous calls, period — was probably for the walk-off shot the center fielder hit in Game 1 of the 1996 American League Championship Series against the Orioles.

“Most of these calls just come to mind in the moment and come falling out of my big fat mouth,” Sterling said in 2020. He didn’t run them by his broadcast partner. “He would never tell me,” Waldman recalled for WFAN’s Evan Roberts and Shaun Morash on Monday. “And sometimes if you listen to some of them, you’ll either hear me laughing — or you’ll hear a dead silence. But some of them I laughed hysterically.”

Eventually, the home run-fueled nicknames became “a cottage industry,” as Sterling termed it. Fans would write in with suggestions, and players would even ask him what he’d say, or lobby for changes. Nick Swisher once went to the back of the team’s airplane to complain to Sterling that he didn’t like “Jolly Old Saint Nick,” and so for his next home run, he became “Swishalicious!”

Some of the more familiar calls included “The Bam-Tino” (for Tino Martinez), “The Giambino” (for Jason Giambi), “An A-Bomb from A-Rod” (for Alex Rodriguez), “Jorgie juiced one!” (for Posada), and “El Capitan! It’s a Jeter jolt!”

“All rise! Here comes the Judge” was just one of his many plays on Aaron Judge’s name. Sterling was… judicious when calling the current Yankee captain’s AL record-setting 62nd home run in 2022, eschewing the puns for almost a minute in favor of placing the slugger’s feat in perspective:

Some of Sterling’s home run calls incorporated foreign language, such as “El comedulce! Bobby Abreu is as sweet as candy!” “Una celebración for Edwin Encarnación!” and “Giancarlo, non si può de stopparlo!” (“You cannot be stopped!”) for Giancarlo Stanton; he consulted with a friend at the Berlitz Academy of Foreign Languages for that one. Sometimes the foreign language would get strained, “Pardon my Franchy, he just homered in the right field seats!” (for Franchy Cordero).

Musicals from Broadway and the silver screen were a recurring theme. “Gio Urshela! The most happy fella!” referenced the title song of a 1956 Broadway musical. “Sir Lancelot rides to the rescue! C’est lui! C’est lui!” (for Lance Berkman) called back to the 1967 musical Camelot. “He’s something sort of Grandish! The Grandy Man can!” (for Curtis Granderson) mashed up a reference to the 1947 musical Finian’s Rainbow with one from the 1971 film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. “This is the dawning of the age of Gregorius!” for Didi Gregorius, referred to the song “The Age of Aquarius” from the 1967 musical Hair. “Bye Bye, Birdie. The Birdman of New York strikes again!” for Greg Bird, wedded references to a 1963 musical and a ’62 drama.

References to advertisements seeped in to an almost uncomfortable degree. “And like a good Gleyber, Torres is there!” may be the nadir, but he also had “Nobody beats the Rizz!” for Anthony Rizzo, “The Yankees run on Duncan,” for Shelley Duncan, and “There’s a Ford in the Yankees’ future. Mike is Ford tough,” for Mike Ford.

And sometimes, Sterling just concocted puns worthy of groans. There was, “He opened his Golden Gates and hit it into the seats! Hey! It’s a Ben Francisco Treat!” as well as “Benny! Molto Benny! It’s raining Bennies from Heaven!” for Andrew Benintendi, “You can bet on Betemit. For the Betemit of the Yankees, Wilson hits it out!” for Wilson Betemit, “Aaron’s the Judge, but Brandon’s the Drury!” for Brandon Drury. And so on.

After Kay moved into the television booth, Sterling spent three seasons (2002–04) paired with Charley Steiner. It was Steiner, not Sterling, who called Boone’s pennant-winning walk-off home run off Tim Wakefield in Game 7 of the 2003 American League Championship Series. On Monday, Boone recounted that when he was broadcasting for ESPN, Waldman passed along a tape; Sterling had done a custom recording of his own version of the call as a gift. “In all honesty, I don’t know where the tape is now, I’m sad to say. But I definitely listened to it. Just a neat guy.”

When Steiner left to take the Dodgers’ top radio job after the 2004 season, Waldman took over as the color analyst alongside Sterling. The two had worked together as far back as 1987, when she provided live sports updates while he served as a fill-in host for The Pete Franklin Show on WFAN. When she joined the booth with Sterling, she became the majors’ first female full-time color commentator. The two soon developed a strong chemistry, no surprise given her own background in musical theater. “I call him my older brother. He really was like a brother to me,” said Waldman on Monday. If the pairing sometimes devolved into shtik, well, the same was true of Rizzuto and White.

For Waldman, Sterling’s call of Jeter’s 3,000th hit, a game-tying homer as part of a 5-for-5 day on July 9, 2011, rates as a favorite. Boone cited it on Monday as well.

“When you see someone’s whole career – we met Derek Jeter when he was just 18 years old,” Waldman told Roberts and Morash. “[Sterling] never flinched, the call was absolutely perfect, and he had tears running down his face as he was doing it. Those kinds of things get me. It’s not what he said… it’s that he did it perfectly while he was really emotional about it.”

Sterling remained a lightning rod for criticism, for his verbosity and his mistakes. In later years, he occasionally misjudged whether a fly ball would leave the park. Variants of “That ball is high, it is far, it is gone… but caught” popped up from time to time.

Being something of a technophobe — he carried a flip phone and never had an email account or learned to use the Internet — helped to insulate Sterling, and he declared, “I’m not going to change.” Richard Sandomir, who penned Sterling’s New York Times’ obituary, once complained, “He’s so unlistenable,” but even he came around to a degree. “If I’ve changed my mind at all it is that I recognize his popularity with some Yankee fans and that some of his calls are amusing,” he told Halberstam.

“The phrase is ‘sui generis,’ ” Waldman said of Sterling in 2018. “He is unto himself. He is more comfortable in his own skin than anyone I have ever met in my whole life.”

Sterling was the Yankee booth’s answer to Lou Gehrig, an ironman. He took two days off in September 1989, his first season on the job, to attend his sister’s funeral, then didn’t miss another game until July 4, 2019, his 81st birthday — 5,060 regular season games in a row. Run down by the grind of travel, he took a four-game series off before returning. He continued on the job until April 2024; again exhausted by a schedule that began with the Yankees’ playing their first seven games of the season on the road, he announced his retirement, effective immediately, on April 15. The Yankees honored him with a pregame ceremony, but Sterling returned to the booth for the final week of the season, then worked throughout the playoffs. He hoped the Mets would prevail in the National League Championship Series against the Dodgers, lessening the travel demands.

“I’ll tell you something selfishly,” he told The Athletic. “I can say things a little stronger because I don’t give a f— if people like it or not. If they don’t like it, I’m 86. What are you doing to do to me? I’m praying for the Mets.”

“I hate packing, unpacking, traveling, getting to places, et cetera, et cetera,” he added. “But the games themselves, they’re as easy for me to do as anything I do.”

In all, Sterling called 5,631 Yankees games, including postseason ones. He won 12 Sports Emmy awards and was a two-time finalist for the National Baseball Hall of Fame’s Ford C. Frick Award, its highest recognition for broadcasters, most recently in 2025. For all of the accolades and the criticism, the bottom line is that through his voice, his enthusiasm, and his continued presence, Sterling formed an enduring bond with fans.

“I look at John as one of the closest friends I’ve ever had,” Kay said on ESPN on Monday. “And the funny part is, the people that are listening right now probably feel the same way, because you spent 36 summers with him as the voice of the Yankees on the radio. The good news that he brought you, the five championships that he brought you, all the great moments he brought you, he was your friend. That’s why baseball on radio is the greatest thing of any sport.”