Bob Sheppard, Voice of the Yankees, Dies at 99

Bob Sheppard, whose elegant intonation as the public-address announcer at Yankee Stadium for more than half a century personified the image of Yankees grandeur, died Sunday at his home in Baldwin, on Long Island. He was 99.
His death was confirmed by his son Paul.
From the last days of DiMaggio through the primes of Mantle, Berra, Jackson and Jeter, Sheppard’s precise, resonant, even Olympian elocution — he was sometimes called the Voice of God — greeted Yankees fans with the words, “Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Yankee Stadium.”
“The Yankees and Bob Sheppard were a marriage made in heaven,” said Paul Sheppard, a 71-year-old financial adviser. “I know St. Peter will now recruit him. If you’re lucky enough to go to heaven, you’ll be greeted by a voice, saying: ‘Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to heaven!’ ”
In an era of blaring stadium music, of public-address announcers styling themselves as entertainers and cheerleaders, Sheppard, a man with a passion for poetry and Shakespeare, shunned hyperbole.
“A public-address announcer should be clear, concise, correct,” he said. “He should not be colorful, cute or comic.”
Sheppard was also the public-address announcer for the football Giants from 1956 through 2005, first at Yankee Stadium and then at Giants Stadium in the New Jersey Meadowlands.
He signed a new two-year contract with the Yankees in March 2008 but was not at the stadium that season, when he was recovering from illness that brought a severe weight loss. His longtime backup, Jim Hall, replaced him.
Sheppard did not feel strong enough to attend the ceremony marking the final game at the old Yankee Stadium on Sept. 21, 2008, but he announced the Yankees’ starting lineup that night in a tape recording. His recorded voice still introduces Derek Jeter at the plate, a touch the Yankees’ captain requested to honor Sheppard.
“He’s as much a part of this organization as any player,” Jeter said Sunday. “Even though the players change year in and year out, he was the one constant at Yankee Stadium. He was part of the experience.” Sheppard was the chairman of the speech department at John Adams High School in Queens and an adjunct professor of speech at St. John’s University while becoming a New York institution as a public-address announcer.
“I don’t change my pattern,” he once said. “I speak at Yankee Stadium the same way I do in a classroom, a saloon or reading the Gospel at Mass at St. Christopher’s.”
On May 7, 2000, Bob Sheppard Day at Yankee Stadium, the Yankees outfielder Paul O’Neill reflected on Sheppard’s aura.
“It’s the organ at church,” O’Neill told The Record of Hackensack, N.J. “Certain sounds and certain voices just belong in places. Obviously, his voice and Yankee Stadium have become one.”
Robert Leo Sheppard, who was born on Oct. 20, 1910, gained a passion for his calling while growing up in Queens.
“My father, Charles, and my mother, Eileen, each enjoyed poetry and music and public speaking,” Sheppard told Maury Allen in “Baseball: The Lives Behind the Seams.” “They were very precise in how they spoke,” he said. “They measured words, pronounced everything carefully and instilled a love of language in me by how they respected proper pronunciation.”
Sheppard played first base at St. John’s Prep and at St. John’s University, where he was also a quarterback.
While he was in high school, two Vincentian priests put him on the path toward a career in speech education.
“The combination there of one, the fiery orator, and the other, the semantic craftsman, probably presented a blending I wanted to imitate,” he once recalled.
Sheppard earned a bachelor’s degree in English and speech at St. John’s and a master’s degree in speech from Columbia before serving as a Navy officer during World War II. He became a speech teacher at John Adams upon his return and served as the public-address announcer for the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Yankees of the All-America Football Conference.
He was hired by the baseball Yankees in 1951, and soon fans were hearing Sheppard’s pronunciation of “Joe Di-Mah-ggio.”
“I take great pride in how the names are pronounced,” Sheppard said. He seldom entered the clubhouses, but made certain to check directly with a visiting player if he had any doubt on the correct way to pronounce his name.
“Mick-ey Man-tle” was a favorite of his, but as Sheppard once told The Associated Press: “Anglo-Saxon names are not very euphonious. What can I do with Steve Sax? What can I do with Mickey Klutts?”
He enjoyed announcing the name of the Japanese pitcher Shigetoshi Hasegawa and the names of Latin players, particularly pitcher Salome Barojas and infielder Jose Valdivielso.
Sheppard feared he would trip over his pronunciation of Wayne Terwilliger, an infielder who played at Yankee Stadium with the Washington Senators and Kansas City Athletics in the 1950s. “I worried that I would say ‘Ter-wigg-ler’ but I never did,” he recalled.
But there was at least one flub.
When the football Giants played their first game at the Meadowlands, against the Dallas Cowboys in October 1976, Sheppard told the crowd: “Welcome to Yankee Stadium.”
On Bob Sheppard Day — during his 50th year with the Yankees — he was honored at a home-plate ceremony in which Walter Cronkite read the inscription on the plaque being unveiled for Monument Park behind the left-field fence. It stated in part that Sheppard “has announced the names of hundreds of players — both unfamiliar and legendary — with equal divine reverence.”
George Steinbrenner, the principal owner of the Yankees, said in a statement: “For over a half-century, fans were thrilled to hear his unforgettable voice and players were thrilled to hear his majestic enunciation of their names. Bob Sheppard was a great member of the Yankees family and his death leaves a lasting silence.”
He leaves behind his second wife, Mary; two sons, Paul and Chris; and two daughters, Barbara and Mary. His first wife, Margaret, the mother of all four children, died in 1959. He also leaves four grandchildren.
Sheppard had his imitators, most notably the ESPN broadcaster Jon Miller.
“One day when my wife and I were down in St. Thomas, we went into a restaurant,” Sheppard told The Village Voice in 2002. “I told the waitress, ‘I’ll have the No. 1. Scrambled eggs, buttered toast and black coffee. No. 1.’ My wife looked at me and said. ‘You sound like Jon Miller’s imitation.’ I wasn’t conscious of the fact that I was ordering the same way I’d introduce Billy Martin.”

Rivalry divided: Michigan, Ohio State in separate divisions

USA Basketball still treats the world championships like an exhibition series and it shows.

Instead of Kobe Bryant, LeBron James, Dwyane Wade or any of the other members of the “Redeem Team" that won gold in Beijing two years ago, coach Mike Krzyzewski turned up in Turkey with a “B" squad short on height and experience, let alone any familiarity with the international style.

“It’ll be very much a developing team," Krzyzewski acknowledged two weeks ago during a training session in New York. “We hope that we’ll have our best product by the medal round."

Whether that’s true, and whether even this team’s best will be good enough remains to be seen. The Americans face Iran and Tunisia in their remaining preliminary-round games, practically guaranteeing they’ll advance. But their performance in their only tough test in the tournament so far left plenty to be desired.

Kevin Durant, their most reliable scorer, committed seven turnovers in that close win over Brazil and still hasn’t adapted to the way overseas refs view traveling. Derrick Rose, who’s supposed to be running the offense, runs himself into trouble way too often. Even venerable Coach K has caught some heat for his substitution patterns, a feat that would have been nearly impossible with the lineup USA Basketball put together for the last Summer Olympics. But that’s the hand he’s been dealt.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this when former NBA executive Jerry Colangelo took over as team director in 2005, on the heels of the “Abomination in Athens." He hired Krzyzewski and the two promised to change the culture around USA Basketball, which effectively meant securing commitments from the best players available for international competitions and keeping enough of them on the same teams long enough to develop some cohesion.

Colangelo did that by cutting out the selection committee that had final say on his choices and a series of “eyeball-to-eyeball" meetings with every one of the players he wound up choosing and a few who didn’t make the cut. Instead of contacting Kobe Bryant’s agent or his representatives to set up a meeting, Colangelo simply showed up in Phoenix one day when the visiting L.A. Lakers arrived for a game. He greeted Bryant as he stepped off the team bus, wrapped an arm around his shoulders and made his sales pitch as the two walked toward the locker room.

“What happened in Athens made my job a lot easier," Colangelo said at the time. “I’d usually start conversations trying to convey how blessed we all are to represent our country.

“But I rarely got halfway through the preamble, before they’d interrupt me," he added, “and say, ‘I’m in."’

It worked then and will probably work again by the time the 2012 Olympics roll around. But in the meantime, not one of the players he and Krzyzewski expected to provide up-and-coming players with a sense of continuity could be bothered to do the red, white and blue.

That’s left Coach K with a handful of 21-year-olds, only one player with any significant international experience—33-year-old Chauncey Billups and a few post players who are routinely being pushed around by veteran big men from teams that have been playing together for years.

That was essentially the plan going in, to use the competitions between Olympics to begin schooling youngsters such as Durant, Rose and Russell Westbrook to take over from Bryant, James and Chris Paul. But the rest of the world views the Olympics as a second-class competition. To most of them, the world championships matter more, the same way the World Cup is viewed by their soccer-mad countrymen.

Krzyzewski, at least, has gotten into the spirit of things. He treated the team’s final pre-tournament tuneup against defending champion Spain in Madrid like the gold-medal game, piling up minutes for his starters at the risk of having them fatigued once the real games were under way.

But he was determined to find out on the spot whether his players were motivated enough to overcome the problems presented by learning a new style of play on the fly. He got his answer in that win and then again when it counted against Brazil.

“We’ve only been together for a few weeks, and you don’t know until you’re in these situations if we’re going to have the character to win when we can’t hit a shot, when someone’s playing such good defense, and tonight I found that out," Krzyzewski said after the Brazil win.

“So that’s a good thing, a really good thing to find out about our team."

It’s not something you want to rely on every night. But for the moment, it might be the best thing this collection of spare parts has going for it.