John Sterling, the radio play-by-play voice of the Yankees for more than 35 years, who was best known for punctuating his home run calls with colorful — if not wacky — phrases like “an A-bomb for A-Rod!” (for Alex Rodriguez) and “Robbie Canó, dontcha know!” (for Robinson Canó), died on Monday in Englewood, N.J. He was 87.
His son Bradford Sterling confirmed the death, in a hospital, of complications following a heart attack. He lived in Edgewater, N.J.
Mr. Sterling called more games than any other Yankees announcer — more than his distinguished predecessors Mel Allen, Red Barber, Bill White and Phil Rizzuto. Starting in 1989, Mr. Sterling called 5,420 regular season — 5,060 consecutively until his 81st birthday in 2019 — and 211 postseason games.
He retired abruptly early in the 2024 season, saying he did not have the stamina to continue.
Although he worked exclusively on radio — for WABC, WCBS and WFAN — Mr. Sterling almost always wore a suit and tie to speak to an audience that could not see him. He was polarizing for his mistakes: He sometimes thought long fly balls were home runs, and lost sight of balls hit into the corners of the outfields of stadiums.
But he was popular with Yankee fans. They loved his over-the-top bias toward the team — he could be critical of them, too, when necessary — and his madcap elation at their wins, when he would quiver excitedly in his seat, wave his arms over his head, pump a fist and shout in his baritone: “Ballgame over! The Yankees win! Thuuuuuuuuh Yankees win!”
Mr. Sterling was known for augmenting his signature home run call — “That ball is high, it is far, it is gone!” — with a series of catchphrases, tailored to dozens of players, that could variously be clever, clunky or kooky.
“It’s a Judgian blast!” he’d exult when the slugger Aaron Judge hit a homer. “ All rise, here comes the Judge!”
“Bernie goes boom!” he would say when Bernie Williams, the Yankees’ star center fielder, went deep. “Burn, Bernie, burn!”
For Didi Gregorius, who played shortstop for five seasons, he yelped: “Yes, in-Didi — Didi Gregorius makes Yankee fans euphorious!”
For Gio Urshela, a third baseman, he rhapsodized, “Gio Urshela, ‘The Most Happy Fella’!” and jauntily sang a snippet from the title song of that 1956 Broadway musical.
For the second baseman Gleyber Torres, he declared, riffing on a State Farm insurance jingle, “And like a good Gleyber, Torres is there!”
And for the Japanese slugger Hideki Matsui, he said, “A thrilla from Godzilla!”
Mr. Sterling coined some of the phrases spontaneously, conceived some in advance and got others from writers and fans. They were often replayed on radio and TV stations.
“It became a cottage industry, which was not my idea,” he said in 2017 on “CenterStage,” a YES Network interview show hosted by Michael Kay, his former radio partner. “Now I’m supposed to do one for every player.”
Mr. Sterling’s idiosyncratic style cast him as an outlier among baseball announcers, more in the vein of Harry Caray, who grew increasingly offbeat in his later years as the voice of the Chicago Cubs, than of Vin Scully, the lyrical play-by-play voice of the Dodgers in Brooklyn and Los Angeles.
Mr. Sterling was often a target of criticism, particularly by Phil Mushnick, the sports media columnist of The New York Post, who excoriated him for the incorrect home run calls and miscalled plays. To Mr. Mushnick, Mr. Sterling was a “dishonest, self-promoting clown.”
Mr. Sterling agreed that he could be self-promotional — at least as he defined it.
“If you’re on the air, you are promoting what you’re doing,” he said in 2019, when the HBO program “Real Sports” profiled him. “It is your voice, you’re calling the plays and you’re calling it in your style.”
He added: “I’m not going to change.”
Hart Seely, a creator of a Sterling-inspired blog — It is high, it is far, it is . . . caught! — had a more nuanced appraisal.
“Some people, most of them not Yankees fans, think that because the Yankees are a flagship franchise, they should have a network-level announcer who is never a homer,” Mr. Seely told The New York Times in 2011. “But the truth is, when the Yankees do something wrong, John rips them, like any psychotic Yankees fan. At the same time, like a true Yankees fan, when they win, John cannot control himself. The joy bursts from his breast.”
John Sloss was born in Manhattan on July 4, 1938, to Carl and Gladys (Hodrov) Sloss. His father was an advertising executive. John grew up on the East Side listening to the radio and admiring the vocal dexterity of stars like Bob Hope, Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra.
“I studied and mimicked everyone — disc jockeys, news readers, baseball and football announcers,” he told The Times. “I used to get teased as a young boy for my deep voice, but I learned I could use it to adapt to different radio styles.”
He briefly attended Moravian College, in Bethlehem, Pa., and Boston University, but when his mother died, he returned to New York City, and took some classes at Columbia University’s School of General Studies.
He gave up his studies at 19 and got an on-air job at a radio station in Wellsville, N.Y., near Buffalo, where he changed his surname to the glossier Sterling. He worked at a series of small stations in the Northeast before moving into larger markets like Providence, R.I., where he was the disc jockey for a rock ’n’ roll program, and Baltimore, where he was the host of a talk show. During the 1970-71 basketball season, he called some Baltimore Bullets (now Washington Wizards) games.
He returned to New York in 1971 to host a talk show on WMCA Radio. Over the next decade he also called New York Islanders hockey games and New York Nets, and later New Jersey Nets, basketball games. In the 1980s, he left for Atlanta to call games for two local teams, the Braves baseball franchise and the Hawks of the N.B.A. (whose star, Dominique Wilkins, he extolled with cries of “Dominique is magnifique!”).
In 1989, when WABC wanted to bring in a new announcing team for the Yankees, it recruited Mr. Sterling to replace Hank Greenwald, and brought in Jay Johnstone as his analyst partner in the booth. After two seasons with Mr. Johnstone, Mr. Sterling worked with Joe Angel for one season, 10 with Mr. Kay, three with Charlie Steiner and the rest, until his retirement, with Suzyn Waldman, who is still in the booth. Mr. Sterling was replaced by Dave Sims.
“He is unto himself, ” Ms. Waldman said of Mr. Sterling in an interview with The Post in 2018. “He is more comfortable in his own skin than anyone I have ever met in my whole life.”
She and Mr. Sterling were nicknamed “Ma and Pa Pinstripe” by Bob Raissman, the media columnist for The Daily News, for their Yankee cheerleading. If something unusual happened in a game, Mr. Sterling invariably reminded Ms. Waldman, “Well, Suzyn, that’s baseball,” or “Suzyn, you can’t predict baseball.”
When Mr. Sterling ended his consecutive games streak in 2019, with Ms. Waldman at his side, it was the first time the Yankees had played without him in the broadcast booth since Don Mattingly was the first baseman in the 1980s and ‘90s. He had called every inning of Derek Jeter’s 20-season career.
“I’m just getting my act together for the second half,” Mr. Sterling said before his four-game hiatus began in July of that year.
His survivors include his two daughters, Abigail and Veronica, who is a triplet with her brothers Bradford and Derek. His marriage to Jennifer Contreras ended in divorce.
An incident late in his career illustrated Mr. Sterling’s maxim about being unable to predict baseball.
In June 2023, he was calling a Yankees-Boston Red Sox game at Yankee Stadium when a ball hit by the Red Sox’s Justin Turner rocketed into the broadcast booth and smacked him over the left eye during the ninth inning.
“Now, the 3-2, swung on, foul, back here,” he said during his play-by-play call. “Ow! Ow! Ow! It really hit me. I didn’t know it was coming back that far.”
A few seconds later, he resumed calling the game: “So once again, it’ll be a 3-2. And Holmes ready to deal. A ground ball to third. Donaldson squares, throws to first, in time. Ballgame over. Yankees win. Thuuuuuuuuh Yankees win!”
Turner later signed the ball, affixed a Band-Aid to it and returned it to Mr. Sterling.
Richard Sandomir, an obituaries reporter, has been writing for The Times for more than three decades.
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