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Broadcaster in a league of her own in Yankees radio booth

Suzyn Waldman hung tough for nearly 20 years in male-dominated baseball to become the first woman to work as a full-time MLB analyst.

Maybe it was the nuns keeping their scorecards at Fenway Park. Maybe it was the cancer. Maybe it was all those Man of La Mancha performances on stages across the country that convinced Suzyn Waldman to dream an impossible dream.

To talk baseball.

Fastballs and sliders, leadoffs and cutoffs. She knew about all that stuff. She had been a fan since she was 3. She had passion, knowledge and something to say, not to mention the chutzpah to perform for large, live audiences.

In baseball parlance, she was a natural.

In baseball ranks, she was taboo.

"It's all about breaking a paradigm," she said.

Not the type to take no for an answer, Waldman persevered for nearly 20 years in her male-dominated field of dreams to become the first woman to work as a full-time announcer in major-league baseball. Her 19th season in the Yankees clubhouse is her first as analyst for the team's radio broadcasts on WCBS.

That's right, analyst.

"There's always going to be a lot of bad reaction whenever any female breaks another barrier, and this is the one I've been trying to break for a very long time," said Waldman, 58. "This is my last one. My friend Lesley Visser and I talk about breaking holes in the wall, and this is my last hole in the wall."

When Yankees fans tune in to follow their beloved Bronx Bombers - something area fans can do on Tampa's WBZZ-AM 1010 - they get balls and strikes from veteran play-by-play man John Sterling, his rich bass practically pouring out of their stereo speakers. When he welcomes his companera to the broadcast - his trademark compadre no longer applied - they hear insight, anecdotes and observations, but in a slightly higher vocal range.

They hear Waldman, talking baseball.

Her voice, strong enough to reach a theater's balcony patrons without a microphone, is that of a belter. Fairly low in the register for a woman, it delivers New York brass through a distinct Boston accent that makes some Yankees fans twitch. How could someone from Bah-ston who carries a picture of Ted Williams in her wallet be a Yankees broadcaster?

But she knows her stuff.

She knows that when Mike Mussina's fastball isn't working, there's not much difference between it and his other pitches. She knows when Alex Rodriguez gets away with a base-running blunder. And she knows how foolish Derek Jeter feels to strike out swinging wildly at a knuckleball.

She knows, because she asks.

"She doesn't write down a bunch of stats and bore you to death," said Sterling, a 23-year veteran of MLB broadcasts. "She does a great job in the clubhouse and players tell her things they don't tell other people."

She knows Mussina is a creature of habit, uncomfortable with any interruption of his pregame routine. She knows manager Joe Torre is the type to stand on the top step of the Fenway dugout while the Red Sox receive their World Series rings.

And he did.

Waldman knows the Yankees.

"I want someone at least once a broadcast to say, "I didn't know that,' " she said.

Women have made tremendous strides in the sports world the past 20 years, but when Waldman entered the business in 1987, at age 40, female broadcasters were rare. And largely unpopular. One player spit tobacco juice in her face, but the strongest resistance Waldman encountered came from so-called colleagues.

She was the first Yankees beat reporter for WFAN, the nation's first all-sports radio network in 1987. No one in the press box spoke to her. Station workers doctored her tapes to make her sound "like a moron." When she got her own afternoon talk show, employees walked out of the room while she was on the air.

"It was ugly," she said.

Some wiseguy at WFAN stuck her with updates on the overnight shift - that would fix her - but it backfired when Waldman was a hit with the quirky collection of students, night-shift workers and truck drivers prowling the dial for company in the predawn hours. She not only gave them sports scores, she sang them songs.

Still working nights, Waldman took all the daytime assignments no one else wanted: the Knicks, Devils and Yankees, New York's other baseball team after the Mets won the 1986 World Series. When all three started winning, only Waldman knew the teams.

Suddenly, she was indispensable.

"I felt I had something to say," Waldman said. "I do agree that as a female you can't come to baseball late; it's not a game you can learn. It's got to be something inside you. I go back to when I could reach out and touch Ted Williams."

Waldman was 3 when her grandfather introduced her to the Green Monster. They went every day. When the Red Sox were out of town, Waldman sneaked a transistor radio under her pillow. She didn't know the broadcasters weren't talking to her, or that generations later, baseball fans would not want her talking to them.

The women in Waldman's neighborhood knew sports. Her mother knew. Her aunts knew. The nuns who went to Fenway with Richard Cardinal Cushing knew. They knew the Red Sox, the Celtics, and when the Patriots came to New England in 1960, the women knew them, too. Why wouldn't they?

But Waldman was years away from a career in sports.

"I was always going to be on Broadway," she said. "I was (taking) dancing lessons and singing lessons."

Waldman, whose cell phone rings to Tchaikovsky's Russian Dance from the Nutcracker, spent 15 years in the theater, performing on Broadway and in touring productions. Her signature role was Don Quixote's Dulcinea in Man of La Mancha, but one night while on stage opposite Richard Kiley, Waldman realized it didn't get any better for her. It was the late 1970s, and the classic musicals she loved were disappearing.

"I was either going to be queen of the revivals for the rest of my life," Waldman said, "or I had to find something else to do."

Someone suggested baseball.

Waldman didn't see why not.

Though stubborn at first, eventually the diverse New York sports market - the same one in which Jackie Robinson broke MLB's color barrier in 1947 - got used to hearing Waldman. And once people started listening, it was apparent she knew baseball, bucking the theory that only former players were qualified to analyze the game.

"There are 500,000 gynecologists in this country, obstetricians who are men. They don't have babies, but they know how to deliver one," Waldman said. "I never understood it; I thought it was silly. Mel Allen never played the game. We're not putting in a new kidney, we're watching baseball. My goodness!"

In 1989, she won the prestigious International Radio Award for her live coverage from Candlestick Park during the earthquake that shook San Francisco during the 1989 World Series. Somehow, her phone line remained open, so she just kept talking. She hasn't stopped.

"It's tough to get a job in New York as it is, but she's very good at what she does and she's well-respected by everybody in here," said first baseman Tino Martinez, in his second stint with the Yankees after one season with the Devil Rays. "Guys treat her like part of the family. She puts me on the spot, asked me some tough questions at times, but she's always very fair."

By 1996, Yankees owner George Steinbrenner asked Waldman to analyze Yankees television games on the YES Network, the first woman in MLB to hold such a post. Her career was taking off. Then came the diagnosis that she had breast cancer.

"They wanted me to go away," she said.

Maybe it was the combination of the words breast and cancer that made people uncomfortable, but Waldman knew if she went away, someone else would have her job when she came back. She promised Steinbrenner she wouldn't be bald in the booth or throw up on the air.

She stopped seeing her oncologist because he told her not to go to spring training. Her next doctor, a woman, understood. Waldman had a lumpectomy and surgery to remove lymph nodes. She had six cycles of chemotherapy, missing work only the day of and day after her treatment. She wore a wig. Radiation waited until after the season.

That season, the Yankees won the World Series. Riding in the tickertape parade, Waldman felt like a winner, too. She sued New York City's Mount Sinai Hospital and two doctors for failing to diagnose her in 1994, when she had a precautionary biopsy because breast cancer runs in the family. In 1999, she received a $2.4-million settlement.

She remains cancer-free.

Though she clearly did not need to work anymore, she didn't dare quit until she had knocked one more hole in the wall. Doing so, she said, would have been disrespectful to the women who kicked down the locker room door for other journalists.

"That there's a 6-year-old girl out there who thinks she can't do something is terrifying," Waldman said. "That's cutting off half the population. There should never be a 6-year-old girl who thinks she can't do something."

Now that Waldman is the first, there can be a second.

JANE CHASTAIN, who began her sportscasting career in the mid 1960s, was the first woman to work for a large network, CBS, in 1974. She was the first allowed on a major-league baseball playing field and the first admitted to the NASCAR pits and garage area.

LESLEY VISSER, left, was the first female NFL beat writer in 1976, covering the New England Patriots for the Boston Globe. She also was the first woman to handle a Super Bowl postgame show for CBS in 1992 and first to join Monday Night Football on ABC in 1998. Visser now is the lead NFL reporter on CBS.

MELISSA LUDTKE, a Sports Illustrated writer, was denied access to the New York Yankees locker room in 1977 while covering the World Series. She and SI sued the Yankees for equal access and won in a precedent-setting case for women.

MICHELLE HIMMELBERG , a reporter for the Fort Myers News-Press who was among the first women to cover an NFL team, sued the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in 1979 for equal locker room access and won.

CHRISTINE BRENNAN, now a columnist for USA Today, was the first woman to cover the Redskins in 1985 for the Washington Post.

GAYLE SIERENS, left, who works as a news anchor at WFLA-Ch. 8, was the first woman to do play by play for a nationally televised NFL game, Kansas City vs. Seattle on Dec. 27, 1987.

Sources: The Association for Women in Sports Media, the American Journalism Review and American Sportscasters Online.