Trustful. Tenacious. Genuine. That's Suzyn Waldman on the Yankees scene for the last 35 years

Gerrit Cole was just 18 years old, but he still remembers.

Cole, a lifelong Yankees fan, was on a conference call in 2008 with reporters who cover the team, the usual routine for the club’s top draft pick.

He heard a voice.

“It was on a landline conference call, it was like the first or second question, and I was like, ‘Oh my God,’ ” Cole said this spring. “I recognized her voice right away.”

It was Suzyn Waldman’s voice.

Cole, who chose to attend UCLA and would not pitch for his childhood team until signing with the Yankees before the 2020 season, smiled.

“It’s just one of those moments where it was like, ‘Oh, this is a big deal. I know this lady,’ ” Cole said. “’She’s asking me questions and I’ve been listening to her for years now.’”

Waldman, 77, has been a pioneer in the male-dominated field of sports journalism in a career that has spanned over 35 years. She will be in the booth for yet another Yankees home opener on Friday afternoon as an analyst alongside John Sterling, her radio partner for a 20th season.

Her age, and the implications that come with it, are neither relevant nor applicable.

Watching Waldman work the clubhouse during pregame or postgame availability is to observe a whirlwind of purpose, slowing down not an option.

“She’s non-stop,” said Meredith Marakovits, the YES clubhouse reporter since 2012 who in that time has become close friends with Waldman. “She has a tenacity that a lot of people do not have in this business.”

So, start here: As veteran broadcasters across sports cut back on their travel schedules for various reasons, often health-related, Waldman isn’t.

She plans on doing all 81 on the road, all 81 at home.

“I have a lot of energy,” Waldman said with a laugh, speaking in a late-spring training interview with Newsday.

'More than just baseball stuff'

That is no surprise, to either those Waldman covers now or covered in the past.

“She’s going to outwork you and out-relationship you and she’s going to always be there,” Buck Showalter, who has known Waldman since 1987 when he was managing the Yankees’ Single-A team in Fort Lauderdale, said recently from his home in Dallas.

As Cole put it: “Her work ethic is special. It’s visible. I think there’s a mutual level of respect in that regard.”

But something else.

“You could always trust Suzyn,” said Joe Girardi, now a YES analyst whom Waldman covered as a player with the Yankees (1996-99) and as a manager (2008-17). “And that was more than just baseball stuff.”

It is the “more than just baseball stuff” that has keyed Waldman’s longevity and her ability to get behind-the-scenes stories from those on the inside others can’t.

Just about everyone in the sport refers to the 162-game regular season as “the grind,” and it lends itself to seeing players, and even coaches and managers, as automatons. Waldman has long focused on the fact they’re “human beings” first.

It is something players, managers, etc., pick up on. Trust generally follows.

“She’s so sweet and nice and I feel like caring for the players,” Anthony Rizzo said.

Which should not be misinterpreted.

“She can be tough, now,” Showalter said. “Be untruthful or BS her and it won’t end well.”

When Aaron Judge says of Waldman, “She’s one of us,” it is easy to cherry-pick the comment and dismiss it because people would naturally dismiss her relationships as a product of being too closely attached to the team.

But trust isn’t an automatic byproduct of that status, and the game is littered with team broadcasters players view in the keep-at-arm’s-length category.

So when Judge in the same sentence says, with a serious tone, “I’d take a bullet for her,” it’s not easily dismissed.

“It starts with how she’s treated me from the very first time I walked through this clubhouse,” Judge said. “She treated me like a New York Yankee.”

Anthony Volpe first used the word “genuine” in describing Waldman. He grew up a Yankees fan, as Cole did. He spent numerous nights in the car with his dad after practices or games listening to Yankees games on the radio.

Shortly after signing with the Yankees, Volpe and his father, Michael, toured the Stadium and met a number of people.  “I think the only picture my dad took with someone that whole day was with Suzyn," Volpe said.

Said Mets bench coach John Gibbons, the two-time manager of the Blue Jays who first met Waldman in 2002 when the organization promoted him from minor-league coach to big-league first-base coach: “She’s a pioneer.”

From Broadway to the ballpark

There was, of course, another career before her early days in sports media. Waldman was an established Broadway performer — she starred opposite Richard Kiley, for instance, in "Man of La Mancha," one of many high-profile roles.

A baseball fan going back to age 4, the Newton, Massachusetts, native during trips with her company would volunteer to sing the national anthem before afternoon baseball games in a given city.

Before a Saturday game in 1979, at long-since demolished Metropolitan Stadium in Minneapolis, former Dodger Wes Parker, in town working for NBC as a broadcaster, overheard Waldman in the dugout talking with a clearly engaged Jim Rice, typically reticent with reporters. Parker asked Waldman if she ever considered a second career as a sports reporter.

An idea took hold, and, in the coming years a slew of “firsts” besides being the first voice heard on WFAN in 1987 followed.

Among the many: first woman to serve as a full-time, seasonlong color commentator for a major-league baseball team; first woman to provide TV play-by-play for a major-league team (though never really given a long enough shot, in terms of time, to exercise her play-by-play muscle). In 2009, when the Yankees won their last title, Waldman became the first woman to call a World Series game on the radio. Her microphone is enshrined in Cooperstown (though, somehow, she hasn’t yet been enshrined in the broadcasters’ wing as a Frick Award winner, that honor presented annually to a broadcaster for "major contributions” to the game).

There was a public battle, too, with breast cancer in 1996.

She was inducted, along with Sterling, into the New York State Broadcasters Hall of Fame in 2016.

She was inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame in 2022.

The word “pioneer” accompanies most stories about Waldman and part of that story is the backlash — from both the public and many in the media — that came with it.

Letters filled with vitriol — including death threats, which in 1989 necessitated Waldman receiving police protection — that unrelentingly poured in; mail with worse than hateful verbiage, envelopes containing used toilet paper, contraceptives and more.

The nights, too many to count, of retreating to her hotel room or to her home in Westchester to cry.

But few knew that.

“She never let them see her lips tremble. Ever,” Showalter said. “She was too tough.”

Those nights are mostly behind her now but the memories, and scars, are permanent. Some of the letters, are too, kept in storage by Waldman.

All of it is a necessary, should-be-told-as-to-not-be-forgotten part of her story.

But focusing primarily on that shortchanges  Waldman to a degree. Because the “hows” of her carving out her own niche can get overshadowed.

Suzyn and Steinbrenner

An oft-told story is how, in the early days of her time on the beat, she all but demanded, via letter — complete with facts and figures showing how many more listeners her radio segments had compared with newspaper readership and the ensuing ad revenues generated for those segments — an interview with George Steinbrenner in January 1988. This after being excluded from the annual Christmas lunch for beat reporters in December.

“I like my women to look pretty and spend my money,” Steinbrenner said shortly after she entered his office in Tampa weeks later.

“I can do that,” Waldman replied. “Now, about your pitching . . . ”

Steinbrenner, famous for, among other things, testing people, laughed. The seeds for a relationship were planted and the two eventually became close. Which didn’t keep Waldman from receiving the same treatment other reporters did when he was upset.

“You’re cut off!” he might bellow before slamming the phone down, angered by something she had said about the Yankees.

A day, weeks later, whatever, all was well.

“I wouldn’t be here without George,” she said.

Her bluntness hasn’t dulled.

“She can ask tough questions, but she’s earned that respect [from players],” Judge said. “You don’t get in the position she’s in without having a little bit of toughness and knowledge of the game and what’s going on and when to ask those questions.”

Said Girardi: “She knows the game. She’s had good relationships with players through the years so she’s able to get a lot of insight from them.”

Not just Yankees.

Hall of Fame manager Jim Leyland, speaking to a reporter from New York this spring in Lakeland, Florida, paused mid-answer to a question about Cole.

“Hey, is Suzyn coming?”

Said Gibbons: “She’s just a good person. [Your] team could be struggling, it’s another crappy day at the ballpark, can’t get out of this rut, she always makes you smile.”

At any road stop during the season, in the American League or National League, Waldman will at some point in the series pop out of the home manager’s office or home clubhouse having just spoken with a player or coach that either has a Yankees connection or is someone she previously had introduced herself to — usually with a crisp, authoritative, “I’m Suzyn Waldman, Yankees radio” — and with whom she’s established a connection.

Her intended “niche” at the start, she said, “was nobody’s going to know these players like I do.”

“I think,” Waldman added later, “people still want the human element.”