Baldwin's Bob Sheppard, Voice of the Yankees, remembered

The Voice of the New York Yankees, Bob Sheppard, of Baldwin, died on Sunday at age 99. The Herald had the privilege of writing about the beloved stadium announcer in recent years. Here are some of the articles we have written.

'Good evening, ladies and gentlemen' Talking to the longtime voice of New York sports

By Marley Seaman, Sept. 1, 2005

At more than 4,000 home games over the last 55 seasons - better than half of the team's history - Bob Sheppard has introduced each batter, pitcher and fielder from his booth on the loge level behind home plate. He is the public address announcer, and his clear, distinctive tones are as much a part of the team as the pinstriped uniform.

Sheppard is also in his 50th season as the New York Giants' announcer, and spent decades in the same role for the basketball and football teams at St. John's, his alma mater. He has also announced at Ebbets Field and the Polo Grounds, among others.

Sheppard began his career as a high school speech teacher, and was a professor at St. John's into the late 1990s. "I think my teaching has been, or was, more important in my life than public address," Sheppard says. "[Because] teaching was more important than public address announcing in its value to society."

Throughout his tenure at St. John's, he scheduled his classes to avoid any conflict with ball games. Despite his fame, which includes occasional voice recognition in public and a few appearances in sitcoms and movies, Sheppard thinks more of the rewards that teaching has brought.

"I have received many, many letters, phone calls and visits from former students. I've never received a visit, a phone call or a letter from any athlete that I've introduced," he laughs.

His co-workers, however, are very admiring. "He's someone we should all aspire to be more like. I certainly do," says Rick Cerrone, the Yankees' senior director of media relations. Cerrone, who has worked for the team since 1977, says, "It's an honor to be counted among his friends."

 "[Having your name announced by Sheppard] is a great feeling," said Roy White, who played with the Yankees from 1965-1979 and is now the first base coach. "It makes you feel like you are a part of history, like a part of a great tradition."

While Sheppard says he has been close to only one or two of the hundreds of Yankees he has introduced, he was once able to put his classroom experience to work for Reggie Jackson. As Jackson prepared for his 1993 induction into the Hall of Fame, he turned to Sheppard for help in improving his acceptance speech.

"He was not an easy student to work with, but he finally came around," Sheppard recalls. "Especially to the value I preached of brevity. He thought he would like to talk, up in Cooperstown, for 40 minutes" in the July heat. Sheppard, who had been honored by the Hall the previous year, knew that Jackson's audience would have difficulty enduring it.

"Cut [the speech] in half," he told the outfielder. "Twenty minutes at the [most]. And if you don't do that, you don't have any more lessons." In the end, Jackson's speech was 18 minutes long. "And it was good," said Sheppard.

Born in Richmond Hill, Queens, Sheppard first taught at Grover Cleveland High School in Ridgewood, spending four years there. When World War II intervened, he became a lieutenant in the Navy. After 10 months in Aruba, he was sent to the Pacific to prepare for an invasion of Japan.

"On our way to the Philippines for an invasion, the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and the war ended," he remembers. "I was lucky, because I had a wife and three children."

After he returned home, Sheppard became the chairman of the speech department at John Adams High School in Queens, and began teaching during nights and summers at St. John's. He describes his subjects as "voice and diction, public speaking, phonetics, oral interpretation, debate, everything to do with the vocal cords and the articulators. And trying to get young people to speak well. Which is a very difficult job."

Sheppard placed such importance on his teaching duties that the first time the Yankees asked him to be their announcer, he turned them down: The afternoon ball games would have conflicted with too many of his classes. The following season, the team called again, but this time offered to find a replacement for afternoon games during the school year. And so 1951, which marked the end of the DiMaggio era and the beginning of the Mantle era, also ushered in the age of Bob Sheppard.

The Yankees contacted Sheppard after he spent a season as the public address announcer for the short-lived football New York Yankees. That team, in turn, had offered him the job after his first professional employer, the Brooklyn Dodgers football team, folded. The Dodgers discovered him when he announced a charity football game in Freeport.

In 1956, the New York Giants football team began playing their games in Yankee Stadium, and Sheppard handled public address duties for them as well. The team moved out in 1973, landing in Giants Stadium in New Jersey in 1976, and he made the move with them. When there is a conflict between a Yankees and a Giants games, backup announcer Jim Hall will take the football game.

With the Yankees and Giants, Sheppard has seen two Super Bowl victories and 13 World Series championships. He introduced Don Larsen the day Larsen pitched a perfect game in the 1956 World Series. He announced the name "Roger Maris" on October 1, 1961, when Maris hit his then-record 61st home run of the season. Sheppard called Reggie Jackson's name before each of his three home runs against the Dodgers in the 1977 World Series, and he was behind the microphone for the football game dubbed "The Greatest Game Ever Played" between the Giants and Colts in 1958.

On May 22, 1963, the Yankees played the Kansas City Athletics, and Sheppard watched Mickey Mantle smack one of the most storied home runs in Yankee history against pitcher Bill Fisher.

"I did see Mickey hit one that almost cleared the roof in right field," Sheppard says. "There's a facade hanging down, and he hit one one night, and it bounced off near the facade. And according to legend, no fair ball has ever been hit out of Yankee Stadium."

Some fans and historians have speculated that Mantle's home run was still rising when it hit the facade, and that it would have traveled some 620 feet otherwise. That would have made it one of the longest home runs ever hit, although Sheppard is skeptical of the estimates. "I think things become kind of fairy tale as the legend grows and grows," he says. "But I saw it, I was there. And the fact that it hit near the roof was tremendous, just tremendous."

In 2001, Cerrone says, he asked Sheppard, "How many games would you say you've missed in 50 years?" After a few moments' deliberation, Sheppard said the answer was five, and listed each one.

Cerrone himself became an emergency substitute that season. During an afternoon game on against Cleveland on Saturday, June 2, Sheppard became too ill to finish a game for the first time in his career. The cause was laryngitis. Cerrone took over in the fifth inning, and also announced at the following game, which the Yankees lost.

"It was kind of odd," Cerrone remembers. "Bob is the gold standard."

Sheppard is also known for his elegant eulogies, and Cerrone had to read Sheppard's tribute to Gene Woodland, who played for the team in the late 1940s and early '50s.

Before his announcing career began, Sheppard was an athlete himself, playing football and baseball at St. John's. While he was "not great" as a first baseman, he says, he met with substantial success on the gridiron. After his graduation, the southpaw was voted the best quarterback to ever play at the university.

In the years that followed, he moved to Baldwin, where he has lived for 70 years, and joined a semi-professional football league. He spent two seasons of Sundays with the Valley Stream Red Raiders, and two with the Hempstead Monitors. "I got the big sum of $25 a game," he recalls.

For 10 years after college, Sheppard supplemented his teaching income by working as a lifeguard in Rockaway, earning five dollars a day throughout the summer. His sports career ended after he decided that the risk was too great. A serious injury would have stopped his teaching and his athletics.

Sheppard has long said that he enjoyed saying Mantle's name more than any other. He liked the name because of the alliterative double M and the strong ending. Decades after Mantle's retirement and 10 years after his death, Sheppard still holds a special place in his heart for Mantle.

"I think he might have been the most explosive baseball player that I have ever seen," Sheppard remembers. "He could get down to first base as fast as anybody I have ever seen play the game. He could run like a deer, and that was something that stands out about him. Power and explosiveness."

Sheppard's great love, however, is his wife, Mary, with whom he has spent "44 heavenly years," he says. He also has four children, four grandchildren, and seven great-grandchildren.

The voice of a champion Baldwin's own Bob Sheppard reflects on a lifetime as the voice of the Yankees

By Zack Richner, Oct. 24, 2002

      For 52 years, Sheppard has been the public address announcer at Yankee Stadium. It is his resonant voice that introduces each batter as they stride towards the plate; it is that voice that reverberates across a half-century of Yankee history.  

      Though his voice is known to Yankee fans around the world, Sheppard can be found right here in Baldwin.

      Robert Leo Sheppard grew up in Queens rooting for the New York Giants. An intelligent and athletic young man, Sheppard attended St. John's University, where he played first base for the varsity baseball team and quarterbacked the varsity football team for four years, missing only one game, due to the death of his father.

      It was at St. John's that Sheppard realized his love for speech and sports and knew that he wanted to continue with his two passions.

After graduating, Sheppard became a semi-pro quarterback, but it was speech that he returned to.  With a master's degree and two honorary doctorates in speech, Sheppard became a professor of speech at his alma mater.

      In the late 1940s, Sheppard volunteered to do the public address announcing for a charity football game at Freeport Stadium. The game was between two All-America Conference teams, the New York Yankees football team and the Chicago Rockets.

      At that time, many baseball teams also owned football teams of the same name. After the game, Sheppard learned of an opening as public address announcer for the Brooklyn Dodgers football team. Sheppard went for an interview and was hired on the spot -- it turned out that the interviewer had been at the charity game in Freeport and heard him at work.

      Unfortunately, the Brooklyn Dodgers football team folded after that season. It didn't take long, however, before the other football team in town, the New York Yankees, approached Sheppard to do their announcing. Sheppard took the job, and before long was asked to do Yankee baseball.

     Sheppard declined the offer in 1950, because his teaching schedule would not permit his attendance at most of the games. A year later, the Yankees made him an offer he could not refuse: Sheppard could do as many games as his schedule allowed, as long as he provided someone to do the games he could not attend. Sheppard agreed to take the part-time job on a temporary basis. And so in 1951 began a new era in the life of Bob Sheppard and New York Yankee baseball.

      Around this time, Sheppard moved to a small house in Baldwin.  He recalls how quiet Long Island was back then. As the Sheppard's family grew to two sons and two daughters, the Sheppards moved to a bigger house in Baldwin, where he and his wife continue to live in to this day.

      Sheppard has become a fixture at Yankee Stadium, a tremendous part of the climatic experience.

      "I follow a pattern that has become rather closely associated with my name," said Sheppard.

This distinct pattern has been instilled into the hearts of Yankee fans throughout the world. His method never falters -- not even during game seven of a World Series -- which makes Sheppard's style so effective.

      Sheppard prides himself on "the three 'C'" -- clear, concise, and correct. Although in 52 years, mess-ups are bound to happen.  

      "The night that the Giants Stadium was opening," recalls Sheppard, "I had done a baseball game in the afternoon at Yankee Stadium. And when the baseball game had ended, I jumped in my car, and went over to the new Giants Stadium. Seventy-seven-thousand people present, and at the right time I said to the people there, 'Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Yankee Stadium.' There was gentle laughter in the crowd."

      But who came before Sheppard?  

"Nobody knows," he said. "It's a question that has been asked a million times. What I think happened was somebody would do it for a year and drop out, somebody would do it for a year and drop out, there was no continuity. And that's typical of many, many, big league teams.  Public Address announcers rarely, rarely stay any length of time."  

      "I probably have lasted longer than anybody in the history of baseball," Sheppard continued. "In the time, for example, that the New York Mets were founded until today, they probably have had 10 or 15 public address announcers."

       Sheppard sites three main reasons for this: The job doesn't pay well, it is a part-time job, but it has a very demanding schedule. Yet at Yankee Stadium, the same man has become engraved into the Yankee legacy. His voice is as much a part of Yankee Stadium as the facade that graces the top.

      Not only does he do Yankee games, Sheppard also announces New York Giant football games and, up until his retirement as a teacher at Saint John's three years ago, announced SJU basketball and football as well. He has been doing New York Giant games for 47 years and says he loves doing baseball and football games equally.  

"The Yankees are perfect in the summer," said Sheppard. "The Giants are perfect in the winter." But he concedes that the energy of a World Series game can not be beat.

      Sheppard estimates that he has announced between four and five thousand games, and has thousands of memories. Choosing the most memorable from such a long career can prove daunting, but Sheppard recalls Don Larsen's perfect game in the 1956 World Series, Reggie Jackson's three-home run game in the 1977 playoffs, Roger Maris's 61st home run, Mickey Mantle's home run that almost cleared the roof, and the 1958 championship game between the New York Giants and the Baltimore Colts as the gems in history that he has witnessed.

Sheppard has watched many hall-of-famers grace the field, but he has not the slightest hesitation before proclaiming Joe DiMaggio as the best player he has ever seen.  "DiMaggio was marvelous, magnificent, smooth," reminisced Sheppard.

      He would not dispute, however, that Ted Williams was the best hitter of all time, but still thinks that DiMaggio was the better overall player.  

      "I think that DiMaggio was a better defensive player than Ted.  DiMaggio might have been a better baserunner than Ted. I think DiMaggio came through in the clutch a great deal. I'm not sure he did it more than Ted. They are two icons. It's like choosing chocolate ice cream and strawberry ice cream," he said.  

      Aside from DiMaggio, Sheppard says the most intriguing to watch was Mickey Mantle.  

      "For power and speed and versatility, he had a lot of drama to him. Mickey was explosive," he said.

       Another, more infamous, personality also adorns Sheppard's list.  "Billy Martin, I guess, was the most tempestuous as a human being, as a player, as a manager. I loved Billy," he said.

      Nevertheless, Sheppard believes that the teams today are better.  "The players are bigger, are stronger, are faster," he said.

When not at the Stadium, Sheppard loves going to Point Lookout to walk the beach and swim in the ocean. Sheppard occasionally watches Yankee games on television, but like so many other Long Islanders, he does not get the YES network.  

      Sheppard and his wife are very involved at St. Christopher's Parish on Merrick Road. There, the couple are regular lectors at daily mass.

      Even after thousands of games, seeing history in the making on a daily basis still propels him to work, full of suspense, not knowing what sensational play or incomprehensible highlight he will see.  

      "I never get tired of looking at baseball," said Sheppard, "It's still exciting to me after 52 years."

Sheppard: retirement "not official"

Mike Russo, Nov. 27, 2009

Responding to published reports implying that he is likely to retire after a half-century behind the microphone as public address announcer for the New York Yankees, Bob Sheppard told the Herald that nothing has been made official yet.

Reached at their Baldwin home Friday morning, Sheppard's wife, Mary, said she and her husband were frustrated about the perception in the news media that he is retiring -- which includes a report on mlb.com stating that Sheppard will "officially cede control of his microphone to a successor." 

"[Bob] was speaking to somebody recently and had told him that physically, he did not feel that he would be able to continue anytime soon ... he is building up his health right now," Mary said. "People have taken it as official but it hasn't been officially stated. It is not official." 

Sheppard has served as public address announcer for the Yankees since 1951. He stepped aside in late 2007 due to illness. Since that time, rumors have swirled in the media that he either retired or is close to announcing retirement.

A recording of Sheppard's voice is used for Yankee shortshop Derek Jeter's at-bats.