In this week’s issue… Yankees hire Dave Sims – Wallace, Maxwell move in NYC – Gray cuts news in Maine – Remembering CT’s Pinto
By SCOTT FYBUSH
*The New York Yankees radio booth has always been a little different from anything else in baseball.
Where else, after all, could a 71-year-old announcer be welcomed as the new kid on the block?
That’s what’s coming in 2025, when the Yankees bring Dave Sims on board as the replacement for the 86-year-old John Sterling, who retired abruptly early in the 2024 season only to return to the mic for the postseason.
While Sims has spent the last 17 seasons with the Seattle Mariners, he’s making a return home. The Philadelphia native was a sportswriter for the Daily News in the 1980s, hosted “Sports Night” on WNBC (660) in the middle of the decade, then co-hosted middays on 660 after it became WFAN, working there from 1989 until 1993 while also calling Knicks basketball on radio. Later in the 90s, he did weekend sports on WCBS-TV (Channel 2) before heading off to do more national TV play-by-play work.
“I can’t wait for Opening Day and to work with my good friend Suzyn!,” Sims said on social media, anticipating his forthcoming WFAN partnership with Suzyn Waldman, Sterling’s longtime on-air partner, herself 78 years old.
As for the next generation of would-be Yankees announcers, they’ll have to wait a little longer: the other voices who took turns in the booth after Sterling’s departure, Justin Shackil, 37, and Emmanuel Berbari, 25, will presumably still be fill-ins, at least until some other team comes calling. The third major voice of the last season, Rickie Ricardo, remains the Spanish-language radio voice for the Yankees, as much as some of us would have liked to have seen him occupy the English-language booth on a full-time basis.
And if you don’t have your Tower Site Calendar, now’s the time!
If you’ve been waiting for the price to come down, it’s now 30 percent off!
This year’s cover is a beauty — the 100,000-watt transmitter of the Voice Of America in Marathon, right in the heart of the Florida Keys. Both the towers and the landscape are gorgeous.
And did you see? Tower Site of the Week is back, featuring this VOA site as it faces an uncertain future.
Other months feature some of our favorite images from years past, including some Canadian stations and several stations celebrating their centennials (buy the calendar to find out which ones!).
We still have a few of our own calendars left – as well as a handful of Radio Historian Calendars – and we are still shipping regularly.
The proceeds from the calendar help sustain the reporting that we do on the broadcast industry here at Fybush Media, so your purchases matter a lot to us here – and if that matters to you, now’s the time to show that support with an order of the Tower Site Calendar. (And we have the Broadcast Historian’s Calendar for 2025, too. Why not order both?)
Visit the Fybush Media Store and place your order now for the new calendar, get a great discount on previous calendars, and check out our selection of books and videos, too!
In this week's episode - It was a longer hiatus than we intended, but Top of the Tower is back with a new spring season of conversations with some of the most interesting people in radio. This week, we continue bringing...
In this week’s issue… Catsimatidis, Shula add signals - Radiodays rocks Toronto - Ex-Bell, Evanov stations rebrand By SCOTT FYBUSH Jump to: ME - NH - VT - MA - RI - CT - NY - NJ - PA -...
Top of the Tower talks with Inrush Broadcast's Rob Bertrand about the future of broadcast engineering as a service
In this week’s issue… Public media faces a CPB-less future - Elections change broadcasters' fates - Another AM goes silent - K-Love buys in PA, Holy Family sells in Mass. - Bell hands off Peterborough stations
