As a fish-out-of-water Yankee fan on the west coast, it wasn’t until the dawn of the internet that I began listening to Yankee games on the radio. It was the spring of 1998, and Major League Baseball had not yet realized the potential value of their audio and video properties. New York’s WFAN was streaming all of their content 24 hours a day, and that included broadcasts of Yankee games. I still remember the joy when I discovered this.

I was at a crossroads that spring, living alone in an apartment, unsettled in my career, and generally disconnected. I wasn’t spiraling, but I was treading water and could see the vortex in the distance. It was the Yankees that kept me afloat. I’d get home from school each afternoon by 3:45 or so and immediately log into AOL (“You’ve got mail!”) to catch up with old college friends and then click over to WFAN for the game.

Sharing the play-by-play duties back then were John Sterling and Michael Kay. I had never heard of either of them. ESPN hadn’t yet picked up on Sterling’s trademark victory celebration or the home run calls, so it was all new to me, and I loved every bit of it. It helped that the Yankees were winning at a pace we’d never seen before, but Sterling and Kay were a huge part of the draw for me. That small apartment never felt like home to me; some of my boxes were never even unpacked. But when I listened to Sterling and Kay calling a Yankee game, I was home.

By the All-Star break I had fallen in love with my wife-to-be, by August I had moved out, and those daily radio games became a thing of the past. Eventually Baseball took those games away from the radio affiliates, but a couple decades later I found myself listening again, and I didn’t mind paying a few dollars a month for the privilege. Michael Kay had moved on to the YES Network, so now it was John Sterling and Suzyn Waldman, and even though there were times when I cursed Sterling for launching into his home run call on a ball that found a fielder’s mitt a few steps shy of the warning track, I could never bring myself to quit them. Sterling was a connection back to 1998 for me, that summer that changed my life forever (and not just because those Yankees were the best team I’ve ever seen).

John Sterling passed away this morning, but that connection remains for me. The tandem of John and Suzyn, or Ma and Pa Kettle as they were often called, was comfort food at its finest. I felt like I was listening to the game with my parents, if my parents had been Yankee fans. Whenever I found myself in the car while the Yankees were playing and I clicked on SiriusXM to find the game, those two voices were just what I was looking for, even more than the score of the game. Those two voices brought me home.

[Image Courtesy of WikiCommons]