For Yankees fans, John Sterling was ours

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

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’s 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’ fans.

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’s 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’t 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’re generally able to recognize what he meant to Yankee fans, as they themselves probably have that announcer for their own team. Sterling was ours.

John Sterling was never going to be a Vin Scully-type “voice of baseball.” Towards the end of his career, if you could’ve measured it, Scully probably had a near universally positive approval rating. Yes, he was only broadcasting Dodgers’ 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.

For various reasons, Sterling wasn’t that. His style with the personalized home runs calls and random show-tune references wouldn’t 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’t always going to play well to people who aren’t invested in listening to him.

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.

I don’t 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’m not saying that to put him down while writing a piece in praise of someone else, but Sterling was not the same.

Considering his famous “The Yankees win!” call after every Bombers’ victory, Sterling definitely seemed to prefer that to Yankees’ losses, but he wasn’t 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 “ran the bases like drunks” has been circulating. He wasn’t going to sugarcoat things going poorly. However, that wasn’t 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.

Also in many of the tributes that you’ve seen, the people who knew him all talk about that he really was a kind and wonderful man. 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’t 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.

Sure, it would be nice if Sterling got the level of national admiration that someone like Scully got. However, he didn’t need it. Sterling had the love of Yankees’ 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’t trade them for anyone else.