There are voices that belong to a city the way a skyline does — inseparable from the place itself, impossible to imagine without it. For 36 years, one of those voices was John Sterling, who died on May 4 at 87. Born John Sloss on July 4, 1938, Sterling grew up on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. He was, from the very beginning, a New Yorker in the fullest sense — theatrical, opinionated, louder than he needed to be, and absolutely certain of his place in the world. As a boy, he was transfixed not by the performers he heard on the radio, but by the announcers. “I didn’t want to be Eddie Bracken,” he once recalled. “I wanted to be the guy who says: ‘Live from Hollywood!'” He knew before puberty exactly what he was going to do with his life.
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He started his radio career in 1960 at a small station in Wellsville, New York, a long way from the Bronx in more ways than one. He briefly attended Moravian College, Boston University, and Columbia before leaving school to pursue radio full-time, beginning his broadcasting career in Baltimore. He came to New York as a talk show host with WMCA in 1971, then spent years lending his voice to the Islanders and the Dr. J-era Nets before heading to Atlanta for most of the 1980s, covering the Hawks and Braves for Turner Sports.
“This is one of the lucky things that happen in our nutty business,” he said of what happened next. “I got a phone call in September of ’88 … and he said, ‘Would you like to do the Yankees?‘ I never auditioned for the Yankees. What a nutty business. I didn’t apply for it and I didn’t audition, and I got it right away.”
He made the most of his luck. Sterling was the radio voice of the Yankees for parts of 36 seasons, announcing 5,651 games from 1989 through 2024, covering 24 trips to the postseason, eight World Series appearances, and five championships. The Cal Ripken Jr. of radio, Sterling called 5,060 consecutive games before finally taking a short break in July 2019. He called every at-bat of Derek Jeter’s career and every inning of Mariano Rivera’s. A 12-time Emmy Award winner and three-time finalist for the Ford C. Frick Award, he was nicknamed “Pa Pinstripe” by the New York Daily News — and he wore it like a second pinstripe uniform.
But Sterling wasn’t universally beloved. He knew it, but he didn’t especially care. His home run calls (“An A-bomb! For A-Rod!”) struck many listeners as somewhere between inspired and deranged. His drawn-out victory cry — “The Yankees win! Thuuuuuuuh YANKEES WIN!” — accompanied by the full-body “Sterling Shake,” was mocked as widely as it was celebrated. Most famously, after the Yankees lost the 2017 ALCS, Fox Sports analyst David Ortiz (aka “Big Papi”) gleefully flipped the call on its head, bellowing “Theeeeee Yankees lose!” to the barely-concealed agony of Alex Rodriguez seated beside him. The clip went viral and became a recurring ritual for Ortiz, repeated with evident delight for years afterward when the Yankees would lose in the playoffs.
When I moved from western Massachusetts to New York City for high school, our dorm rooms didn’t allow televisions. So I turned to radio — and one of the voices I heard most was Sterling’s, calling Yankees games on WCBS. As a Red Sox fan, I “hate-listened” the way others hate-watch: compulsively, irritably, unable to stop. I hated the home run calls (“IT is high! IT is far! IT…IS…GOOONE!!!”). I hated the nicknames. And, with a passion that surprised even me, I hated that elongated, bombastic “Yankees win! The…….YANKEES WIN!” routine.
But something funny happened over the years. I found myself, grudgingly, coming to admire what Sterling was actually doing. Nobody called a game with more love for his team. Nobody sustained that level of enthusiasm — game after game, season after season, for over three decades — with more consistency or commitment. Sterling scarcely masked his affinity for the Yankees. We could tell just by the pitch of his voice whether the Yankees were winning or losing. That wasn’t a flaw. That was the whole point. He wasn’t a neutral observer. He was a fan with a microphone, and he never pretended otherwise. As Harry Caray once told him: “John, all the guys are great. We just have different styles.” Sterling savored that. “And no one,” he added, “has a more different style than I have.” Even a Red Sox fan could appreciate that.
Sterling considered himself “a very blessed human being,” noting that he had lived out a childhood dream of broadcasting on the radio for more than 64 years. “It’s your medium,” he once said of radio. “You do what you want. You have to paint the picture, which I love doing.”
Daniel Ross Goodman is a Washington Examiner contributing writer and the Allen and Joan Bildner Visiting Scholar at Rutgers University. Find him on X @DanRossGoodman.
