John Sterling wasn’t without practice this season before he returned to the radio booth.
“When someone hit one, when [Aaron] Judge hit one, I’m lying in bed, I’ll say, ‘It’s high, it’s far’ …,” Sterling said.
Sterling, the voice synonymous with Yankees baseball, left the bedroom for the ballpark again Tuesday, when he began his short comeback by calling the game against the Orioles for WFAN.
The plan is for Sterling to do play-by-play for the remaining six games of the regular season — all at home — and then the entire playoff run, however long it lasts.
For Sterling, 86, who retired as the play-by-play voice after 36 years and over 5,000 consecutive games, the problem wasn’t working the mic.
As he said Tuesday in an interview with The Post, “I could always talk.” The issue was the travel grind required for a 162-game season.
But this last hurrah — an opportunity offered by WFAN boss Chris Oliviero — shouldn’t be too taxing.
“It’s a little frightening [being back], actually,” Sterling said. “I didn’t want to do this every day.
“Chris asked me, ‘How are you traveling [to the playoff games], are you OK with that? I said, ‘In the playoffs, the most you go away for is three games.’ I think I’m ready. I’ll see.”
Suzyn Waldman, the radio analyst of Yankees games, couldn’t predict her longtime booth partner would be back on the mic, but she understood — better than anybody — Sterling’s love for the job.
“I had a feeling that eventually he was going to miss it,” Waldman said. “Not necessarily come back but I knew he was going to miss it. Because the games were what he loved so much. It was the other stuff. The travel. The 162 games. And he’s entitled at this age not to want to travel. But he’s going to do it now and he’s all excited.”
Waldman and Sterling have endured, informed and entertained together for decades, enjoying a friendship and professional connection based on a shared view of the sport. Meanwhile, the station still hasn’t identified a permanent replacement for Sterling, rotating several potential candidates into the booth this season alongside Waldman.
“We grew up sort of the same generation, we see the same game,” Waldman, 78, said. “And I think we see people on the field. And I think we see people on the field and we see everything about the game because we were brought up learning the game in a different way than how it’s learned now.
“We didn’t look into an iPad and told what the probability was. We watched the way a hitter is hitting and knew what the probability was. We look at the game the same way. I think that’s it.”
Sterling’s shoes are hard to fill.
“John is this generation’s and three generations’ Mel Allen,” Waldman said. “Because generations have grown up with him knowing nothing but John Sterling as the voice of the New York Yankees.”
Even though he’s retiring again from play-by-play duties in a few weeks, Sterling said he hopes to continue a radio career with his own weekly show.
He has to sell the idea to a radio station, and part of the personal significance would be working on the air on Feb. 1 of next year — exactly 65 years after starting his first gig on radio.
“That’s a lot of work,” he joked. “We’ll see. They’ll have to pay me, too, of course.”
