NorthEast Radio Watch 5/4/2026: Big Week for Noncomm FMs

In this week’s issue… K-Love adds in SE CT – OSM signs on 103.7 – GBH, NEPM move closer – Remembering PA’s Kmetz, CHCH’s McLean

By SCOTT FYBUSH

MONDAY MORNING UPDATE: John Sterling, the Yankees radio announcer whose bombastic, brassy tone was a perfect match for his longtime team, has died.

Born John Sloss, the New York native began his career at WLSV in Wellsville, then rose quickly through the play-by-play ranks at a time when league expansion created huge opportunities for young announcers. In Baltimore, he began calling basketball games for the ABA Bullets in 1970 and football for Morgan State, and by 1971 he had settled in as a go-to announcer for new teams in New York City, most notably the Nets and Islanders, all while working as a talk host at WMCA (570) and as a pregame host for the Yankees.

Detouring to Atlanta for much of the 1980s to host a talk show on WSB (750) and calling Braves and Hawks games, Sterling returned to New York in 1989 to become the Yankees’ radio play-by-play voice on WABC, where the team had spent the last half of the 1980s with a rotating roster of potential successors to Phil Rizzuto.

Sterling stuck, riding out some lean years with the team before becoming the iconic voice of the championship teams of the late 1990s and early 2000s, paired with Michael Kay and Charley Steiner before finding his final and longest partner in 2005 when Suzyn Waldman joined him in the booth. In addition to his radio work, Sterling joined the team’s YES Network as the longtime host of its “Yankeeography” series.

During the height of his Yankees tenure, Sterling didn’t miss a game from 1989 until 2019, including five World Series wins, posting a consecutive streak of 5,060 games on WABC, WCBS and eventually WFAN. His signature calls, including his trademark “it is high, it is far, it is gone” and player nicknames, made him iconic in the world of sports broadcasting and in the New York spotlight, though he tightly guarded his privacy outside the booth.

As he aged and his health diminished, Sterling began working a reduced schedule in 2022, abruptly retired just after the start of the 2024 season, then stirred controversy when he decided to return to the radio booth for the end of the regular season and the postseason, displacing Justin Shackil, who’d been tapped as his successor.

Sterling retired for good after the Yankees’ World Series loss at the end of the 2024 season, with the Yankees choosing Dave Sims to replace him alongside Waldman.

Sterling had suffered a heart attack in January. The 12-time Emmy winner was 87.

*The 32nd anniversary of this column passed without much notice a few months ago – after all these years, what’s one more, right? – but as we look back on how much has changed since the earliest years of “New England Radio Watcher,” there’s one trend that we haven’t commented on very much.

Back then, it was pretty much a given that when a commercial broadcaster put their station up for sale, the buyer would be another commercial broadcaster. This was especially true in the first few years of NERW, which overlapped with the 1996 Telecommunications Act, the lifting of some ownership caps and the move to larger clusters of radio stations increasingly owned by ever-larger companies.

But it’s not 1996 anymore, and the pool of commercial buyers who once bid up prices to astronomical heights just isn’t there anymore in most markets, a reality that was drilled home this past week, when not just one but all three of our top stories turned out to involve significant moves from noncommercial broadcasters.