Tag Archives: john sterling

That’s Baseball, Suzyn

While I have a lot of writing forthcoming on my recent travels, I would be remiss if I did not pause to acknowledge the great John Sterling, the New York Yankees’ radio play-by-play man for the past 36 years, who sailed into retirement this past week. His abrupt departure is the end of an era. His voice was the background to countless childhood summer nights, his easy cadence and soothing baritone carrying a Yankee fan kid through the ups and downs, a nightly retreat from any school drama or other weighty affairs. After my parents and perhaps Garrison Keillor, no one was heard more in my childhood home.

Sterling was bombastic, a welcome burst of scattershot energy in a franchise that, especially in the Hal Steinbrenner era, has tended toward corporate PR-speak in all other aspects of its managed public image. His personalized home run calls and lengthy “Theeeeeeeee Yankees win” exclamations were both delightful and nutty, sometimes bringing forth an eye roll but always a grin, and the best of them became associated with players long after they left the Yankees. In Sterling’s telling it started with a spontaneous “Bern baby Bern” for Bernie Williams, and it simply took on a life of its own from there. Whether it was an A-Bomb from A-Rod or Jorgie juicing one, a thrilla by Godzilla or Shane Spencer the home run dispenser, the Grandyman showing he can or whatever it was he sang in Italian when Giancarlo Stanton launched one, Sterling calls were an essential part of the Yankee experience.

Sterling brought a relentless exuberance to the job. Blessed with a sterling silver voice box, he seemed ageless, smoothly bringing us the action night after night, including a Gehrig-esque iron man streak of 5,060 games without missing one over a 20-year stretch. He was a professional, and while he clearly wanted the Yankees to win, he had no reservations in calling out failures, and he would give other teams their due when they deserved it. Not once did I ever get the impression he was not enjoying himself immensely. He found the job he was meant to do, and he did it with panache. There was a hint of pretense, as he dressed himself up in fancy suits for the radio and took the Yankee tradition he loved very seriously. But always did his job with the respect and the humility to recognize, even after all those years, what a fortunate man he was to be able to do what he did for so long.

Yes, details were never his strong suit. When I spent chunks of my free time in online Yankee fan spaces back in high school and college, I created a statistic, the FSHRC (Fake Sterling Home Run Call), to track the number of times he drove us all insane by launching into his home run call before ultimately being wrong. (“It is high! It is far! It is…caught at the wall.”) He had little patience for modern analytics, and his pop culture references were, charmingly, stuck on 1950s Broadway. Sterling was a true original, doing it his way and no one else’s, and that was that.

Over the past two decades Sterling developed a brilliant rapport with Suzyn Waldman, the groundbreaking color commentator who shared many of Sterling’s loves and frustrations, able to insert her insights and gently needle him while still maintaining the ethos of the broadcast. They became an indelible pair, to the point where I just sort of assumed that, 30 years from now, if I were to dial up a Yankee broadcast I would hear the two of them, either sighing and philosophizing their way through a tough game or brimming with pride if the team were to win. His sudden departure a few weeks into this season was a surprise, especially since he looked and sounded the same he always had, even a couple months short of 86. But 64 years of broadcasting and 36 years of Yankee baseball meant Sterling knew that nothing was ever predictable, always ready with his line to explain the absurdities before him: “That’s baseball, Suzyn. You just can’t predict baseball.” Nor, indeed, life.

A marathon baseball season carries on, and after the requisite Yankee Stadium pomp and celebration, Sterling will fade into the background. But some people are not replaceable, or at least not with the same style, the same delight, the same firm, confident voice. As I read various homages to Sterling came out this week, a line from The Grand Budapest Hotel came to mind: “His world was gone long before he entered it. But he sustained the illusion with a marvelous grace.”

As A-Rod’s World Turns

New York Yankees radio broadcaster John Sterling, a jovial if somewhat pompous fellow well-suited for the Yankee ethos, is known for his personalized, colorful home run calls for each Yankee batter. Over the past ten years, he has used two different calls on Alex Rodriguez’s 302 homers in pinstripes, one of which now seems more apt than Sterling ever could have guessed: “Alexander the Great Conquers Again!”

A-Rod’s story is, indeed, like that of the famed Greek king. For years he was baseball’s golden boy, the hero who seemed destined to shatter the all-time home run record. He conquered Seattle, he conquered Texas, and won himself the richest contract in the history of American professional sports. When he was traded to the Yankees—baseball’s greatest stage—it looked like one last step to securing his spot on the baseball Acropolis.

The first five years of his tenure in New York complicated the narrative somewhat. He put up some huge numbers, yes, but he also struggled mightily in the playoffs—the only thing that really matters in Yankee lore—and never quite managed to be the model citizen his teammates Derek Jeter and Mariano Rivera were (and are). The scrutiny only increased when he opted out of his contract after the 2007 season, a bungled affair in which Rivera eventually convinced A-Rod to ditch his agent and declare his intent to stay in the Bronx. His new contract—even larger than his earlier record-setting deal—was negotiated directly with the Yankee ownership, went over the head of General Manager Brian Cashman, and locked A-Rod into a Yankee uniform into his 40s.

In 2009, his story grew even more complicated: first, he admitted to using steroids back during his days in Texas. But the supposedly clean A-Rod then went on to carry his team to a World Series title, finally shaking off the ‘playoff flop’ tag. Perhaps Alexander the Great had finally purged himself of his past sins and would be able to build a lasting legacy.

It wasn’t to be. First, his performance began to decline, and injuries started to mount; now, A-Rod has been suspended by Major League Baseball through the 2014 season for his ties to the Biogenesis steroid clinic. Like most all mythic Greek heroes, A-Rod’s quest for greatness has led him to reach too far, and he now must pay the price for his sins. The hero’s hubris has destroyed him.

In a typical twist of A-Rod oddness, the suspension came down on the day he will play his first game for the Yankees in 2013. After an injury rehab stint so long that some suspected the Yankees were trying to keep him off the field intentionally—Cashman, the GM who didn’t really want him back in 2007, at one point publicly told A-Rod to “shut the fuck up” when he seemed to contradict the Yankee doctors—he will finally take the field in Chicago tonight. He will appeal the suspension, which means he’ll be playing for the foreseeable future.

His return will make the next two months a complete circus for a Yankee team desperately trying to stay in the playoff picture. On the one hand, the Yankees’ third basemen this season have been atrocious, and even a shell of a past A-Rod will likely be an upgrade. But despite his real upside in that sense, it is clear that no one wants him here. His team’s front office almost certainly wishes the Commissioner’s Office had gone through with its threat to ban A-Rod for life, thus freeing the Yankees of his burdensome contract. His teammates say all of the right things, but even the unflappable Rivera grew peeved at reporters last night, when the only thing they asked him about was A-Rod’s impending return. A-Rod was never a popular figure with the Yankee fan base, and though 2009 will keep him from landing in the Yankee Ring of Hell with the likes of Carl Pavano and Kevin Brown, he’s now in a purgatory that will require a mythic performance if he has any hope of escaping. And that is his own team: for the rest of baseball he is a pariah, all of the worst suspicions about his questionable character now confirmed.

Even if he puts the Yankees in his back for the rest of this season, even if his appeal is successful, A-Rod’s legacy is now secure. He could have tailed off after 2009 and slumped to an early retirement; while perhaps not beloved, he would have been respected as a pretty good hitter, perhaps worthy of some sympathy both for the media that marked him as a target and his earnest desire to win that messed with his head when he came to the plate in October. Instead, he struck out again, and cost himself even the defenders who were willing to give him breaks through his playoff struggles and off-field escapades (of which I was one). A-Rod is now the player who got a doctor whom he had never to met—a man once disciplined by the state of New Jersey for irregularities in the prescription of steroids—to go on the interview circuit contradicting his team’s claims about his health.

And so the A-Rod saga has now become a full-fledged soap opera; the sort of macabre spectacle that baseball fans will claim to hate all while riveting themselves to each and every new detail. He has become bigger than his team and bigger than the game, but he still stubbornly believes he can win everyone over and reclaim some of that past glory. Most likely he is deluded, though one never truly knows when it comes to legendary figures. Thinking of A-Rod in such abstract terms may be the only way for Yankees fans to cope with their returning third baseman, as they certainly cannot embrace him as they do with their other stars. The man is now a myth, a lesson to us all of the dangers of excess, one whose ongoing story may reveal yet more about the endless human capacity for self-deception. For all the undeserved fixations over the trivial details of A-Rod’s life, for all of the possibly troublesome tactics the Commissioner’s Office used in its push to find itself a scapegoat for the steroid era it so badly mismanaged, he will deserve every boo he hears.