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Pregame
I'm not sure I've met a baseball announcer who seemingly knows everyone like the energetic, always-on-the-move Suzyn Waldman.
"When you say I know everybody, I don't know everybody, but I know people who do know everybody," she told me on my podcast in 2022.
She's humble, but my eyes don't lie. Every time the Yankees face the Royals, I watch her work the clubhouse, gathering details and passing on information about the players. I often say that I keep getting older, and the athletes I cover keep getting younger. When I began working with the Royals, I was in my thirties, ten years older than the players. Now in my fifties, I'm connecting with the next generation of twentysomethings every day. Suzyn is still mastering it in her seventies. The Yankees radio color commentator is an inspiration to women who are finally making progress after being ignored for generations in sports broadcasting. But it's not just the amazing women in my profession who try to be like her.
I find myself wanting to emulate Suzyn, too, because she's a master storyteller. I watched her track down Kansas City's twenty-four-year-old first baseman Nick Pratto to polish a story before the game one night. Then on to Jose Cuas, the former-FedEx-driver-turned-Royals-reliever and winner of the Tony Conigliaro Award. It's given to a "Major Leaguer who has overcome adversity through the attributes of spirit, determination, and courage that were trademarks of Tony C." the former Red Sox outfielder whose career was cut short by a beanball in 1967. Conigliaro passed in 1990, and Suzyn was a friend of Tony C's. She wanted to make sure Cuas knew about the man before he played at Fenway later that summer because he would be asked about it by the Boston media. Of course, she knew Tony C. She knows everybody.
As I watched her at work and listened back to her appearance on my podcast, Rounding the Bases, I thought to myself, I've done this a long time, and I have so much room for improvement. Suzyn Waldman is proof it's never too late to chase a dream.
Game
Suzyn Waldman attended Red Sox games as a kid. Dreams of broadcasting for the Yankees? No chance. Nor the Sox or any team, for that matter.
"I grew up in the '50s. I mean, there were no women doing this. You never thought about it."
Sitting and chatting with Suzyn in the Yankees radio booth on a Sunday morning in July 2023, I told her I wanted to write a chapter about her in this book. I passed on the story of my mom, and when I shared the challenge my mother faced in being told she had two options, Suzyn finished my sentence.
"Teacher or nurse," she said, not the least bit surprised about the limited options. Her early career path resembled my mom's as far as an interest in the arts, and like my mother, Suzyn also started a second act later in her thirties that never fit her childhood dreams. She loved all sports but aspired to sing and act on Broadway, which she did.
"I worked a lot. I never became a star. I never became what I wanted to be. But I worked constantly. And as the music was changing, and I wasn't changing with it, I figured I'd better find something else to do. And I didn't want to be somebody's mother for the rest of my life on stage or to be the queen of revivals."
Her love of sports never diminished, and she managed to leverage her musical and theatric abilities into performances that eventually opened up a new stage.
"I always sang the national anthem in the '70s any place we were. It wasn't because I realized I was going to get on television. I just wanted to go to the ballgame wherever I was. And that was the way to do it for free."
One of her best friends, because Suzyn's always known people who know people, was longtime Red Sox announcer, the late Ken Coleman. Coleman introduced Waldman to the man creating WFAN in New York, the first twenty-four-hour all-sports radio station. Suggesting Suzyn knew more about sports than anyone he knew, Coleman encouraged her to submit a demo. Hired to do sports updates, Suzyn admits she had no idea what she was doing initially but thought she could figure it out. The criticism came immediately for a thirty-nine-year-old rookie who happened to be a woman when no women were in sports.
"I heard one of the owners of WFAN say, 'Get that smart aleck bleep off my air and afternoon drive, the one with the Boston accent, get her off.' And Jim Lampley was the host that day. It was the first day, and I looked up, and he said, 'Just keep going,' and that's what I did."
Like the Energizer Bunny, she kept going and going, even as she faced roadblocks every day. Not from players she covered at Yankees and Mets games, although there was some pushback, but more from her colleagues and competitors. She sat in the press box in Yankee Stadium in 1987 with no one talking to her for the full year.
"The radio people thought I was taking a job away from a real reporter, meaning male . . . I was middle-aged when I realized that nobody wanted women around in sports. And then it became, 'No, no, no, you're not going to tell me what to do.' Listen, I made it through twenty years of theater. I could do anything if I did that. Sports broadcasting makes theater look like nursery school."
She's tough and resilient but also human, meaning being the only woman then came with a price. In today's day and age, the disgusting comments aimed at so many of my female colleagues come via social media, a reminder that sexism and discrimination still exist in a world of progress. For Suzyn, she took it all as the lone woman, including death threats in 1998, which meant she needed a police detail.
"I'm still scared, scared to go into crowds. And I still wonder where that guy is . . . I was never alone, from the time I hit the players' parking lot till the time I left. And if I got to the players' parking lot and my car was started, that meant they got another bomb threat."
Yankees bullpen coach John Stearns used to start her car. To this day, she bumps into detectives who say, "Ms. Waldman, I just want you to know I was one of your guys back then." So many protected her that she couldn't name them all.
While most of her challenging times originated from the media, the players she covered accepted her and followed the lead of Yankees stars like Don Mattingly, Dave Winfield, Ron Guidry, and Dave Righetti, who embraced her. Going into other clubhouses didn't guarantee her that same protection. She remembers walking out of a clubhouse in Toronto in the 1980s, shunned by a Blue Jays player. Ira Berkow wrote about the moment in The New York Times on July 20, 1989:
Two years ago, Suzyn Waldman, of WFAN, was in the Toronto Blue Jays' locker room after an important game in the division race. Several reporters were interviewing George Bell, the Toronto left fielder. When Waldman moved into the group, Bell began to scream obscenities in Spanish and English about a woman in the locker room, and said he'd cut off the interview.
Waldman still recalls the details thirty-five years later, including the heartwarming elements displayed by one of Bell's teammates.
"As I'm walking out, trying not to cry, I hear this voice, and I turned around, and it was Jesse Barfield, who was the right fielder on Toronto. And he said, 'I went three for four today; don't you want to talk to me?'"
Toronto traded Barfield to the Yankees in 1989 and a lifelong friendship between Suzyn and the outfielder exists to this day. She continues to push forward, forging new connections daily at ballparks decades later. Always the performer, she never views any day as the same. The same could be said about theater, and while Broadway followed a script eight times a week, she found something different every time.
"It doesn't matter that you're saying the same lines; you have a different audience, you have different feedback, maybe the guy that you're talking to had a fight with his wife. So you have to react to that. It's the world you get up to every day. And it's never the same, or it shouldn't be the same. And all it is is in your mind. And so it never gets boring."
I told Suzyn I couldn't get up and sing or act on stage and would crumple in fear given that opportunity. My daughter Ellie has those skills, but not me. I sang "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" at Kauffman Stadium in 2008 and bombed. My lack of theatrical skills match my ability to hit a baseball (swing and a miss), yet it does not mean I'm incapable of taking a different stage as a storyteller. This, she pointed out, makes me a performer. And in a day of analytics, artificial intelligence, and the ability to have any information we want at our fingertips, the human element still matters in all professions.
"If we lose the stories, all we have is computer games out there," she passionately stated. "And you have to remember why do we cheer for people? Why do we want a team to win? How many people do you know that can tell you the stories of Whitey Herzog and the World Series, and the stories with the Yankee-Kansas City games and the fights on the field and all of that? That's what people remember forty years ago; that's what's important. And if it's just, 'Yeah, they won 4-2 and it was a pretty good game.' No, that isn't what keeps it going."
Suzyn's longevity in the game stems from her genuine interest in people. Her curiosity is a skill that applies to almost any profession. "I try and talk to...
