The Voice (One Sixty-Two: Day 80)

Writer’s note: One Sixty-Two is a season-long series of blog posts connecting baseball’s major-league players to life’s universal themes. Just as there are 162 games in a season, so there will be 162 posts in this series. Let’s play some ball.

Day Eighty: Derek Jeter, New York Yankees (via Bob Sheppard)

Now batting, number two, Derek Jeter. Number two.

His voice echoed throughout the vast stadium, bouncing off the façade and into your bones. “Every time you heard it, you got chills,” Derek Jeter said. Truer words were never said.

The man with the voice was Bob Sheppard, and he served as the most famous and most accomplished public-address announcer in America. His booming, eloquent delivery of names and numbers filled Yankee Stadium from 1951-2007, introducing players from DiMaggio to Mantle to Jackson to Mattingly to Jeter. He also worked New York Giants games for 50 years, as well as a host of other teams, from St. John’s University to the New York Cosmos. On Sunday, Sheppard died at home at the age of 99.

There will never be another voice like Bob Sheppard’s, but sadly there are very few stadiums today willing to allow a public-address announcer’s voice to be the dominant sound effect in the park. Most baseball teams have a sound-effects employee who pushes buttons in between each pitch to give us a recording of some pop-culture sound, such as the clapping intro to “We Will Rock You” when the bases are loaded or the sound of a window shattering when a foul ball lands outside the stadium.

We are a short-attention-span nation, and we don’t listen nearly as well or as attentively as we once did. The imagination can do a lot with a perfectly enunciated name – you can hear those names in your head when you’re playing in the backyard, and they can add considerable drama and excitement to the Wiffle ball you’re about to throw.

"A voice that you hear in your dreams, in your sleep," Chipper Jones of the Braves told a reporter when asked about Sheppard.

Our imaginations need these voices, much more than they need the cheap sound effects. When the voices talk to us, they take us places we never thought we’d go. They give us chills.

Every time Derek Jeter walks to the plate at Yankee Stadium, a recording of Bob Sheppard’s voice is played. Every time at bat in the ballpark, Jeter is introduced by this man. Close your eyes, and listen. It’s still magical. Still the stuff of dreams.