It’s for you, Mr. Sterling.
Number 22, Juan Soto, electrifies the Bronx with a 3-run homer against the Rays. Image courtesy of @Yankees
On Tuesday night, a colleague and I ate too many damn wings at a Korean place people queue up in the cold for. I had the most impossible deadline hanging over my head, and wound up staying up so late I caught the Yankees in Toronto. It’d already broken that long-time radio announcer John Sterling — who’s been calling Yankee games on the radio since 1989, and who also called every last game Derek Jeter ever played — would make a formal announcement to retire by the end of the week. Sterling did so on Friday. On a picturesque afternoon in the Bronx, Saturday, the organisation honoured him with a retirement ceremony. (The Yanks of course went on to drop the second game of a homestand against the Tampa Bay Rays. You couldn’t have written it up worse if you were Ernest Hemingway.)
A year ago today I made my now annual attempt to quit Yankee fandom before finding myself drawn back by all the old familiar things. It’s a great comfort to know that certain elements of this billion-dollar franchise will endure, whether you’re changing continents or fading in and out of (sigh) relationships. The no-beard policy is only resented by fans who I guess don’t much consider, or have never had to, what it was like to live in another time. When I hear the YES network’s stinger in between commercials I’m transported quite magically to a place — I presume the 90s — when MTV, Michael Jordan and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles dominated at least portions of pop culture; people gave speeches or sought forgiveness from inside phone-booths; and when Madonna did not date the Captain Derek Jeter.
Michael Kay’s voice is really actually the one I’ve lived with these last 15, on-and-off years of baseball fandom — Sterling’s I’ve mostly caught on the morning highlights. I liked to think Kay sounded like old New York, that once the business of baseball was concluded upon a spring or summer night he took off his mic and commuted across town to help close up a beloved pizza shop, in the ‘old’ Brooklyn or somewhere. Sterling’s rare gift was not so much that he sounded like an artefact from the golden age of sports broadcast: it’s that he made so many Kodak moments feel like we were watching Jeter and Stanton and Judge crush, or Rivera and Pettitte and Sabathia deal, for the very first time. Or like time in general hadn’t moved at all; it never felt less than novel with Sterling, if it had to do with winning baseball.
Nostalgia is at the heart of the enduring, highly specific appeal of the sport. Even when you’re halfway across the world from it all, there’s an impenetrable warmth and safety to a ball-park. We can all stay young and foolish in there, goof around like children waiting for the ice-cream truck (his name is currently ‘Juan Soto’) to come around. With a commentator like Sterling delivering pronouncements that channeled everything from silver-age comic books to the Notorious B.I.G., you could celebrate several layers of resistance to change: baseball as a whole’s, even for its own good, its marketability; the Yankees’, even when they held onto a prospect or a bad contract for way too long; and our own as taxpayers, when damn near everything in life demands that we surmount some challenge or other, every single day.
Even a person my colour is able to romanticise baseball’s past despite the societies outside baseball stadia (and for a long time within), which were much less discreet about how they administered hatred. The escape of the game, the language and ceremony and size and (yes) the length of it, enable full-fledged retreat from deadlines, inflation, medical reviews, neglected text messages, and therapy. Inside the big saccharine conspiracy of baseball reside yet more delicious joys like Sterling, who always sounded like a news man with a typewriter, a trilby, a pipe, and reliable suspenders, seeking the silver lining for humanity amongst the leads. He found and shared them in strikes and home-runs, and made damn sure seemingly eccentric names like Higashioka, Gleyber, and Cano (“Robbie Cano!/Don’tcha know!”) didn’t sound that eccentric at all. Sterling made sure all of us belonged in the lexicon of the community we’d built to escape an insatiable, relentless, needlessly cruel world. I’m grateful that I still get to luxuriate in Mike Breen’s sheer timing when I watch the Knicks — Martin Tyler’s pure statesmanship on the occasional Champions’ League night, or upon a rainy one in Stoke — and I have categorically altered viewing priorities on NFL Sundays just to swoon at Jim Nantz and Tony Romo on CBS. All these pillars of sports media excellence are embodied somehow in the musicality and playfulness of Sterling, who beamed across our immediate universe the exact spirit of Yankee baseball: the brash but clean-shaven optimism, Judge and Jeter cracking the tension inside the Bronx Colosseum eventually, and Sinatra washing over the details of the war with ‘New York, New York’.
John Sterling exiting the booth less than a month into a new season is a painful reminder that change can be sudden and rude. I presume, for Yankees fans, that it’s even harder to embrace when all you’ve ever done is win.
