While announcing a home run by Harrison Bader, New York Yankees radio announcer John Sterling dropped a line from “I’m Just Wild About Harry”, a song written in 1921 for the Broadway play Shuffle Along. Chris Mack, Colin Dunlap, and Dorin Dickerson of The Fan Morning Show couldn’t decide whether Sterling’s call was good or bad.
“If you were — right now — in say Lanny Frattare’s sports announcing class down at Waynesburg (University), and you put a demo tape together and you went and were trying to be schooled in radio or whatever, and you turned it in, and it included ‘Oh, I’m just wild about Harry’ and you worked that into one of your calls, would the professor say ‘There’s no way you can go forward with that’? Or would they say ‘I like that you’re selling this!’? Is that good or bad?”, Colin Dunlap asked.
“I think it’s good,” Dorin Dickerson replied. “I think it shows the wittiness to be able to just think of something that just flows. That flowed really well.”
“Has anyone in their life ever called Harrison Bader ‘Harry’, though?”, Chris Mack wondered. “Here’s the one thing about Sterling, though. He is always committed. 110% committed to the call.”
“It’s timely. It was written in 1921, I see here. So he’s working in pop culture. For him,” Dunlap added.
“I don’t want to be this guy, but the video I’m watching has a man dancing in blackface,” producer Adam Crowley added.
“Dorin, thoughts?”, Dunlap joked to Dickerson, an African-American. “Are you serious? And he’s referencing that? He went to that concert. He was there. He waited outside for tickets.”
“I think it was great,” Dickerson concluded.
