By Marley Seaman
At more than 4,000 home games over the last 55 seasons - better than half of the team's history - 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.
