That’s baseball, Suzyn

Iheard this story from former Sen. Jack Danforth many years ago. An ordained minister, he would occasionally conduct evening services at the National Cathedral, which sits atop the highest point in Washington. So it gets the best radio reception in the region.

On summer nights, long before satellite transmissions, a dozen cars would be parked near the cathedral. But their occupants were worshipping a different god than the parishioners gathered inside the sanctuary. They were listening to baseball on their car radios, tuned to the stations back home — in Cincinnati and Cleveland, Detroit and St. Louis — that carried their favorite teams.

I remembered this story recently when John Sterling — who had broadcast 5,631 New York Yankees games over 36 seasons — suddenly retired. I started listening to Yankees games in 1949, when I was 6, and for many fans of my vintage, our love of the game is closely tied to the radio.

“Listening to the familiar cadence of a baseball play-by-play announcer is comfort food for the sports soul,” says my pal Buzz Bailey, a lifelong Red Sox rooter.

We all have our own loyalties — and heroes. I grew up with Mel Allen, a native of Alabama who used to celebrate a “Ballantine Blast” (Ballantine beer was the team’s main sponsor) in his warm Southern accent: “Going! Going! Gone!” But now, when I’m at the ballpark and a Yankee crushes a round-tripper, I rise to my feet and mimic Sterling’s ageless exhortation: “It is high! It is far! It is gone!”

Like so many broadcasters before him, Sterling became a cultural fixture in his home territory. He had kitschy personalized descriptions for each Yankee when he hit a homer (Alex Rodriguez detonated “an A-bomb by A-Rod”) and he engaged his longtime partner, Suzyn Waldman, with endless banter that rippled happily through countless summer nights.

One of his most famous lines was prompted by an unusual or unexpected play. “That’s baseball, Suzyn,” he would intone, and that phrase, which shows up on T-shirts and coffee mugs around New York, sums up any confounding turn of events well beyond the ballfield.

Baseball on the radio is so comforting because it’s so intimate, so personal. You’re simply listening to an old friend tell stories. “My father was almost 50 when I was born, and he lived his entire life without listening to the Red Sox win the World Series,” recalls Bailey. “But he had the radio on every night so that he and I could hear the voice of our team recount every heartbreaking strikeout and error from April through October.”

Baseball is particularly well-suited to the radio. Sports like hockey and basketball are too fast, and football too complex, to be conveyed completely by only a voice. Baseball’s leisurely pace, which drives many younger fans crazy, means that each pitch, each play, can be described, discussed and dissected by knowledgeable announcers — and compared to previous plays that occurred the day, the year, the decade before.

The first radio broadcast of a baseball game occurred in 1921, for the Philadelphia Phillies versus Pittsburgh Pirates, and fan bases were often framed by how far radio signals would carry. Their range defined geographical and tribal boundaries as clearly as rivers or mountains.

Throughout the upper Midwest, for example, Cub Nation was nurtured by a vast network of stations that included WHO in Des Moines, Iowa, where a young Ronald Reagan got his start calling the team’s games in the 1930s.

In the lower Midwest, the St. Louis Cardinals reigned, and my friend Al Hartman was an ardent fan while raising his young family in Memphis, Tennessee. He traveled often for work, and planned evening trips to places like Nashville and Little Rock, Arkansas, to coincide with Cards games on station KMOX.

“There were nights when the games would run long and I would sit out in the motel parking lot to listen until the end!” he recalls. “I find that when I listen to familiar announcers, the game is more personal and there is a bond that I don’t get even when watching it live.”

I’ve had that bond with Allen or Sterling for most of my life, and I still can’t get used to the young voices that are earnestly trying to take over their role. But as Sterling would certainly say, if he heard my complaints, “That’s baseball, Suzyn.”

Steven Roberts teaches politics and journalism at George Washington University. He can be contacted by email at stevecokie@gmail.com.