Suzyn Waldman

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Suzyn "Georgie Girl" Waldman is an American sports broadcaster. Starting with the 2005 season, she has been the color commentator for New York Yankees baseball, working with John Sterling on radio broadcasts for WCBS-AM in New York City.

She is the second woman in Major League Baseball history to serve as a full-time color commentator on a regular basis (Betty Caywood of the Kansas City Athletics served as a color commentator for a year in the 1960s). In the mid-1990s, she was a play-by-play announcer for the Yankees' local TV broadcasts, which made her the first (and to date only) woman to serve that role for a Major League Baseball team.

She is an award-winning veteran of more than 20 years of sports reporting, as a former broadcaster for the YES Network and New York sports radio station WFAN. Her voice -- on a live sports update -- was the first heard on WFAN when it premiered at 1050 AM on July 1, 1987. At WFAN, she covered both the Yankees and the New York Knicks basketball teams and co-hosted the daily mid-day sports talk show.

In 1996, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. While her chemotherapy regimen limited (and eventually ended) her day-to-day role of broadcasting Yankees games on TV, she continued in her role at WFAN throughout her illness (now long in remission), and her return to daily broadcasting of Yankees baseball on radio is a testament to her determination and love of her craft.

In 1999, Waldman played a key intermediary role in negotiating an end to the 14-year Yogi Berra-George Steinbrenner feud, thereby allowing Berra to rejoin the Yankees "family".

Ironically, though she has been very devoted to a career that heavily revolves around the New York sports scene and the New York Yankees in particular, she was born and raised in Massachusetts and was originally a fan of the rival Boston Red Sox. She has said, though, that she ceased to be a Red Sox fan at least 20 years ago. She has been quoted as saying, "I climbed on the bandwagon and I'm not leaving anytime soon!"

Prior to her broadcasting career, Waldman worked for many years as an actress and singer in Broadway musical theatre. Her most notable role was as Dulcinea in Man of La Mancha. Her rendition of "There Used To Be a Ballpark" appeared on the 1995 WMHT-TV documentary Local Heroes: Baseball on Capital Region Diamonds. Also, she has performed the National Anthem at many Yankee home games.

[edit] External links

• New York Yankees biography
• poorly-written Suzyn Waldman petition