New York Yankees radio announcers John Sterling and Suzyn Waldman are going to remain as the voices of the franchise on radio for the foreseeable future. WFAN announced new multi-year contracts for “Ma and Pa Yankee” before the start of the 2016 season.
Via CBS New York:
WFAN announced on Friday that play-by-play man John Sterling and analyst Suzyn Waldman have signed new multi-year contracts.
“Yankees baseball on the radio provides a soundtrack for the summer, and it would be unimaginable to listen to the Bronx Bombers without these two iconic broadcasters,” said CBS Radio New York senior VP and market manager Marc Rayfield. “This is a special year, particularly as John closes in on his 5000th consecutive broadcast, an ironman feat almost as remarkable as Cal Ripken, Jr and Lou Gehrig’s legendary streaks.”
WFAN has served as the flagship station for the 27-time world champions since 2014. Sterling and Waldman have worked together for the last 11 years.
“We’re thrilled Yankees fans will continue to hear this legendary broadcast team that has been together for more than a decade. John and Suzyn are as much a part of Yankee tradition as Babe Ruth, Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle, Derek Jeter and Yogi Berra,” said Mark Chernoff, CBS Radio VP of sports programming and WFAN program director.
While the WFAN announcement goes with the vague “multi-year” description for the new contracts, last month the New York Daily News reported that the pair were in negotiations on new two year deals.
Sterling and Waldman may not be the classic, by-the-book announce team – they certainly have their idiosyncratic tendencies. (To critics of the pair, that might be the nicest way you could describe their on-air performance.) They’re not Ernie Harwell and Vin Scully, but who is? Sterling and Waldman are definitely synonymous with the Yankees, though with well over a decade calling Bronx Bombers games together. And in baseball, maybe more so than any other sport, it’s that relationship between the announcers and the fanbase that matters most over the course of a 162 game schedule.
For dedicated Yankees fans, after listening to 5,000 games of John Sterling my guess is that you’d probably get accustomed to that voice to the point where you might feel lost without it, peculiar home run calls and all.
At the very least, we’ll get to look forward to two more years of classic clips like these…
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