Sweeny Murti reflects on his time with WFAN and covering the Yankees

Covering baseball on a daily basis is both a privilege and a grind. So Sweeny Murti always understood when people asked what kept him at it for so long.

“First of all, nobody had offered me a better job yet,” he said with a laugh in an interview with Newsday two weeks after leaving WFAN as its Yankees reporter.

“Second, it’s a job, but I like to think I can take a few moments every day, it might only be 30 or 60 seconds, or it might be longer than that, and take a look around at what I’m doing and say, ‘Yeah, OK, this is pretty cool.’ ”

Here he was, the son of Indian immigrants who grew up a Phillies fan in a small town in Pennsylvania dreaming since age 12 of getting into radio, and there he would see them — the New York Yankees, taking batting practice a few feet away as he prepared to go on the air.

He felt fortunate, but all the while “understanding that maybe it wouldn’t last forever. And I guess that part hasn’t lasted forever, officially now.”

Murti, 52, interned at WFAN at age 20, started working at the station full-time at 22 and had been covering the Yankees for 22 years.

He declined to discuss the specifics of his departure, but an industry source said the primary driver was that the job was to be changed from full- time to a part-time, seasonal one in recognition of the fact that the role of beat reporter had become less central to the station’s programming than in the past.

That would have been a difficult change for Murti to accept at this stage of his career. After spending his adult lifetime at the station, it was a jolt.

“It’s very emotional for me because this is all I’ve known,” he said. “I haven’t done anything longer in my life, except be a Murti.”

He was single when he began at WFAN, married his wife, Jessica, in 2010, and now has an 11-year-old daughter and a 9-year-old son.

“All I wanted to do is be on the radio,” he said. “Baseball is my favorite sport. I ended up spending 30 years at the biggest radio station in the country and 22 years talking about the biggest baseball team. And that was coming to an end.”

It helped that Murti received an outpouring of support from colleagues, friends and listeners. He called it “a waterfall.”

“It was pretty overwhelming,” he said. “I’m not naive. I expected some reaction. But I didn’t come close to anticipating what I was getting.”

Murti marked a career highlight last June 30 when he called a Yankees game in Houston for WFAN, filling in for John Sterling.

Before that game, he spoke on the station about what the moment meant for him, in part because he set his own path as a first-generation Indian-American.

He credited his father, Vedula, a retired economics professor, and his mother, Santha, for accepting what appeared to be a challenging and unlikely career ambition.

“I think at first my parents were a little thrown off by it,” he said, “but they quickly came to understand what it was about it that I enjoyed, how passionate I was about it. And they were baseball fans, too.

“It’s like I said on the air that day when they were talking about doing the game: I’m living the American dream, dude. I’m a son of Indian immigrants. And here I am. I’m going to do a play-by-play broadcast for the New York Yankees. I mean, holy cow!”

What’s next?

For WFAN, it will be hiring a new reporter, likely one who also will fill in for Sterling for some road trips.

As for Murti, “It’s a great question,” he said.

He said he has some possibilities in the works but declined to detail them.

“I’m really proud of the fact I was able to last here and the fact that I’m pretty certain I’m going to get to stay in this business still,” he said.

“I’m not a creature who likes change, like probably most men are wired, I think. But I’m confident that there are things here that are going to work out for me.”

In the meantime, he has that waterfall of support to ride through the uncertainty, along with contributing roles on SNY and MLB Network.

“It really just kind of hit me that I think I did what I was setting out to do,” he said. “I was setting out to make a career here and be able to have some sort of impact in the job that I was doing.

“The fact that, like, friends and colleagues and fans alike were all texting me these or tweeting at me or whatever, all these wonderful things, it was a little bit of an emotional ride.”

By Neil Best

neil.best@newsday.com@sportswatch

Neil Best first worked at Newsday in 1982, returned in 1985 after a detour to Alaska and has been here since, specializing in high schools, college basketball, the NFL and most recently sports media and business.