LI's Emmanuel Berbari, at age 24, to call Yankees-Pirates series on WFAN
Emmanuel Berbari during his first show on WFAN Radio. Now, at age 24, he'll call his first Yankees game. Credit: Emmanuel Berbari
Emmanuel Berbari’s sportscasting origin story is not unusual.
Cut as a freshman from the Harborfields High School basketball team, he took up a friend’s suggestion to join a new streaming service covering Harborfields sports.
He soon found himself calling a basketball game with no preparation. Why? Someone had to. “I wasn’t good at all,” he said, “but something clicked where I said, ‘This is really cool.’ ”
The unusual part is this: That was less than a decade ago. And on Friday, Berbari will be in the booth calling a Yankees game on WFAN — at age 24.
With John Sterling skipping the weekend road trip to Pittsburgh — as he has done for select trips all season — and Suzyn Waldman off for Rosh Hashanah, Berbari will join Justin Shackil for the radio call.
Berbari usually is Shackil’s backup for pregame and postgame coverage when Shackil fills in for Sterling. Now he has jumped another rung on the ladder.
At 36, Shackil is less than half the age of Sterling and Waldman, but he is an old-timer compared to his weekend partner and fellow Fordham alumnus.
“Emmanuel is talented, smart, works hard, and has a passion to get better,” WFAN program director Spike Eskin said. “He understands and respects the gravity of the Yankees booth and WFAN. He and Justin have incredibly bright futures and I am proud we can be a part of it.”
Berbari’s association with WFAN began as an intern after his freshman year at Fordham — from which he graduated in 2021 — and continued in a variety of roles, including talk show host.
“My boss Spike has been a great mentor to me, and he was looking for new voices,” Berbari said. “That’s when I did my first talk show on the FAN. It’s one of those timing things in life.”
Berbari got baseball reps calling games for the Chatham Anglers of the Cape Cod League and the Hudson Valley Renegades, a High-A affiliate of the Yankees.
It has been quite a ride for a guy who grew up a Yankees fan in Greenlawn. But this weekend will take that to a new level. Berbari is expected to call the middle innings.
He learned of the opportunity last month when Eskin and Chris Oliviero, a senior vice president of Audacy, WFAN’s parent company, called him in for a meeting.
“That’s when they asked me if I’d ever been to Pittsburgh,” Berbari said. “I walked into the office expecting a normal catch-up, but then going zero to 100 learning I was going to be on the Yankees series.”
Berbari has been to Pittsburgh, including to call the 2019 Atlantic 10 women’s basketball tournament, which Fordham won. This weekend will be different.
He was told he had the support of Sterling and Waldman, both of whom he looks up to. The fact he will be working with Shackil, though, figures to ease any potential anxiety.
The two have known each other since Berbari was a college freshman. He said Shackil was a “mentor,” always willing to critique his work and offer career advice.
“It'll be really cool being in that booth and looking to my side and there's Justin,” Berbari said, “because that's somebody who's been with me the whole way so far.”
Berbari is part of a long line of prominent Fordham sportscasters. He first caught the Fordham bug on a field trip there during a sportscasting camp run by Patrick Reichart at Chaminade High School after Berbari’s freshman year at Harborfields.
But now he must make his own way.
“These are the people I looked up to when I really developed that spark and thirst for broadcasting,” he said. “So I think there's always naturally that question of, wow, this is amazing. This is incredible. Like, do I belong here?
“But I think the best I can do is just try to do it the way I've done it and be myself, because the game is the game and if I try to overcomplicate it, it probably wouldn't serve me well at all.”
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.
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