How New Yankees Voice Dave Sims Makes His Way Through the Long MLB Season

DAVE SIMS IS a baseball lifer. Growing up in Philadelphia, as a fan of the game, he always remembered hearing the voice of Mel Allen on Yankees broadcasts. He played during his time at Philadelphia’s Chestnut Hill Academy, becoming the team’s co-captain, and then went on to play catcher for his collegiate team at Bethany College in West Virginia. Sims eventually made his way into journalism, beginning his career in 1975 as a sports reporter for the New York Daily News, covering a wide range of sports for a wide range of outlets in the decades since. Now, after 18 years as both a TV and radio play-by-play voice of the Seattle Mariners, Sims has a new job: providing the radio voice of the New York Yankees, taking over a role previously held by John Sterling for the last 36 seasons.

With 162 games in its regular season—plus, every team hopes, a run in the playoffs—the MLB campaign can be a long and grueling seven months. And that’s not only for the players, but the staff and media joining the team at home and on the road, as well. But for Sims, 72, this isn’t hard work. It’s what he’s here to do.

“I wasn’t made to be a chemist, or a mathematician or anything like that,” he tells Men’s Health on an early April morning. “I’ve been around sports all my life. This is what I know, this is what I love, and I like getting after it.”

A typical home game at Yankee Stadium makes for a packed day. Sims likes to get his exercise in early, because he does a lot of sitting down throughout the course of preparing for and calling a game—though he still moves around in the booth enough to close in on 8,000-10,000 steps most days. His routine consists of getting a sweat going on an exercise bike, working out with kettlebells and dumbbells afterwards, and, with the help of his wife, Abby, usually eggs and toast for breakfast.

Two other essentials to his routine? A ton of water, and daily walks through Central Park.

“Central Park is so New York,” he says, “On a beautiful day, everybody’s walking through, and happy, and it’s cool. You watch the trees and everything bloom… It’s a beautiful thing, man.”

A daily routine is one thing. Keeping the energy high in real-time is another. Sims is known for his in-game enthusiasm, which recently got a shout out on-air from none other than Howard Stern, something Sims calls “unbelievable.” While there are more advanced statistics than ever—legitimate ways for us to know more and more about the game and the players within it—the fun of baseball, really, is that it’s always unpredictable, and that’s what helps Sims remain so animated at any given moment.

“In baseball, you can’t project anything,” he says. “That’s the excitement you hear in my voice.” (And he keeps that voice fresh by drinking room temperature water only. Cold water has frozen his vocal chords in the past, he says, making for an uncomfortable situation while calling a game.

If any single game, inning, or moment is a sprint, then you have to consider the entire season to be a marathon. Everyone who likes baseball is excited in April. But what about in July or August, when the weather gets hot, the new season shine wears off, and the playoffs are still months away? How, in that case, does someone like Sims keep his enthusiasm up?

It becomes something of an exercise in endurance. And to be clear, the weather plays no part in it. “A lot of people always say, in terms of gloom and doom, that it’s going to be hot,” he says. “Well, no kidding—it’s baseball!”

Sims notes that in his time covering the Mariners, he’s seen teams that have lost between 90 and 100 games. On the contrary, he says, the winning seasons have a totally different (and almost always positive) energy.

The length of the season doesn’t get to him—because baseball helps, in a way, to keep everything in order. “If you do get tired, you have to pick yourself up mentally,” he continues. “I like what I do. I like the game, I like the people. I like being around. I like being scheduled every day. I can look at a calendar, I know where I’m going to be, and what I’m going to be doing.”

In just his first month and change since starting to work on Yankees broadcasts, Sims has already settled into a routine, working alongside longtime Yankees radio analyst Suzyn Waldman. He’s gotten feedback from players, coaches, and fellow media members who he’s crossed paths with in the past, and he’s already started to form relationships with vital members of the Yankees organization like manager Aaron Boone (the two instantly connected due to their shared Philadelphia background) and two-time MVP Aaron Judge. Meeting before games with players and coaches in the clubhouses gives him additional nuggets that he can drop in throughout a broadcast.

Sims has a lot of material, and has been doing this long enough that he knows exactly what he’s doing. But he’s also human, and like every human, can get into funks that he needs to snap out of.

Being locked-in mentally is one of the most vital parts of being a play-by-play guy, and potentially helping to immortalize moments in real-time. On the road, Sims clears his head by taking a walk, or going to a museum. Sometimes, meeting with a friend from any given city for lunch can have a similar positive effect. He does also talk for a living, after all, so sometimes if he’s starting to feel a lack of focus, a touch of fatigue, or a moment of self-doubt, he’s able to talk himself right out of it.

But his most reliable cure for those doldrums is thinking about his own place in history—and a certain family connection. And that helps him lock right back in.

“In the history of Major League Baseball broadcasting, I’m the fifth or sixth Black guy to have his own broadcast team,” Sims says. “So, I think about my father’s generation, and cats who grew up baseball fans who never even thought about doing something like this. I can hear my Old Man saying ‘Yeah, you’re tired. So what? Keep moving!’”