New York Yankees radio broadcaster John Sterling had to be rescued from his car Wednesday night in New York by the team’s Spanish-language announcer as significant flash flooding occurred throughout the city.
Though the Yankees were playing in Anaheim Wednesday, the team’s radio announcers are still not traveling with the team due to COVID-19 and instead call road games off a monitor from Yankee Stadium. Driving home, Sterling wound up stuck in his car in Edgewater, N.J. amid rising floodwaters and had to be rescued.
Yankees Spanish-language radio announcer Rickie Ricardo told WFAN’s “Moose and Maggie Show” that he was also trying to get home when he got a call from Sterling’s on-air partner Suzyn Waldman detailing Sterling’s plight.
“Suzyn asked me ‘where are you?’ I said, ‘I’m working my way across upper Manhattan to get to the [George Washington] Bridge to get to New Jersey,'” Ricardo said, via Peter Botte of the New York Post. “She says ‘John is stuck on River Road in Edgewater.’
“Now, I know for years, I’ve seen how bad it gets flooded on River Road in Edgewater, and with the kind of rain we had, I can only imagine. So I said, ‘Suzyn, I’m on my way. I more or less know where he lives. I’ll figure out where he’s at and see what I can do.'”
Ricardo eventually found Sterling in his car with water covering the wheels and spilling into the cabin.
“John gets out, we wade our way through the water,” Ricardo said. “I get him into my Jeep. We finally get John settled. He’s a little shell-shocked and I don’t blame him. And then the adventure is to get the extra half-mile from where he was stranded to his apartment. No more than a half a mile. It took us about an hour.”
Both Ricardo and Sterling did get home safely amid the rising waters.
The flooding caused chaos all throughout the New York area Wednesday. That was clear just from looking at Yankee Stadium, and things were even worse at the home of the team’s Double-A affiliate in New Jersey.
