{"id":694584,"date":"2026-05-09T18:42:16","date_gmt":"2026-05-09T18:42:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/694584\/"},"modified":"2026-05-09T18:42:16","modified_gmt":"2026-05-09T18:42:16","slug":"remembering-yankees-radio-announcer-john-sterling","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/694584\/","title":{"rendered":"Remembering Yankees\u2019 radio announcer John Sterling"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Monday<\/a>, we got the very sad news that former Yankees\u2019 radio announcer John Sterling had passed away at the age of 87. The announcement was met with sadness from Yankees\u2019 fans, but also from around the baseball world.<\/p>\n

The tributes from Yankee fans are hardly unexpected. Sterling had been the radio voice of the Yankees for over 30 years. Plenty of people, myself included, quite literally grew up listening to him. You may very well watch or listen to your favorite team\u2019s announcers over 100-150 times a year. Even if you never met them, they often can be a friendly voice that you seek out on a daily basis. Sterling was that for a lot of us Yankees\u2019 fans.<\/p>\n

Not that I expected people to be ripping him on the day that he died, but the tributes from around baseball did somewhat catch me off guard. To be frank, Sterling was not everyone\u2019s cup of tea. I can completely understand him driving you mad if you were a neutral or opposing fan trying to listen to a Yankee game on the radio. However, I probably shouldn\u2019t have been caught off guard. Again, people are generally speak well of people who just passed away. Also, while other fans might not have been fans of the way Sterling called games, they\u2019re generally able to recognize what he meant to Yankee fans, as they themselves probably have that announcer for their own team. Sterling was ours.<\/p>\n

John Sterling was never going to be a Vin Scully-type \u201cvoice of baseball.\u201d Towards the end of his career, if you could\u2019ve measured it, Scully probably had a near universally positive approval rating. Yes, he was only broadcasting Dodgers\u2019 games by then, but he had a history of doing national broadcasts, and even after that, fans from around baseball would still tune in to hear him.<\/p>\n

For various reasons, Sterling wasn\u2019t that. His style with the personalized home runs calls and random show-tune references wouldn\u2019t have hit. There was also the fact that, yes, he occasionally misjudged whether a deep fly ball was deep enough to be a home run or not. Those types of things aren\u2019t always going to play well to people who aren\u2019t invested in listening to him.<\/p>\n

Sterling was ours, though, and he was ours because he cared about the Yankees and he cared about the people who care about the Yankees.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t say that in a way to say that he was a homer. Hawk Harrelson for the White Sox was a dictionary-definition homer. White Sox fans loved him, so I\u2019m not saying that to put him down while writing a piece in praise of someone else, but Sterling was not the same.<\/p>\n

Considering his famous \u201cThe Yankees win!\u201d call after every Bombers\u2019 victory, Sterling definitely seemed to prefer that to Yankees\u2019 losses, but he wasn\u2019t trying to run cover for the team when things went against them. In recent days, a clip of him from the 2024 ALCS saying the Yankees \u201cran the bases like drunks<\/a>\u201d has been circulating. He wasn\u2019t going to sugarcoat things going poorly. However, that wasn\u2019t necessarily out of some strict journalistic duty to be neutral, it was more because that was generally what the Yankee fan base listening to him was feeling, and he knew how to read that.<\/p>\n

Also in many of the tributes that you\u2019ve seen, the people who knew him all talk about that he really was a kind and wonderful man<\/a>. I think you could get that sense just from listening to him, but I think that also came across in things like the personalized home run calls. It didn\u2019t matter if you were Aaron Judge or some random injury backup who got called up for a week or two and would be DFAed immediately after that: Sterling was going to give you your moment in the sun if you went deep.<\/p>\n

Sure, it would be nice if Sterling got the level of national admiration that someone like Scully got. However, he didn\u2019t need it. Sterling had the love of Yankees\u2019 fans, and he always seemed content with that. I have a lot of good memories of John Sterling calls over the years, and I wouldn\u2019t trade them for anyone else.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On Monday, we got the very sad news that former Yankees\u2019 radio announcer John Sterling had passed away…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":694585,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2376],"tags":[5,4,1690,62,2548,2547,142,38989,39160],"class_list":["post-694584","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york-yankees","tag-baseball","tag-mlb","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-yankees","tag-newyork","tag-newyorkyankees","tag-yankees","tag-yankees-analysis","tag-yankees-editorials-reactions"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@mlb\/116546092617686418","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/694584","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=694584"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/694584\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/694585"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=694584"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=694584"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=694584"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}