Your intrepid Yankee Reporter caught up with former Yankee broadcaster Charley Steiner as he was getting ready for Spring Training. In this exclusive interview, Charley shares his thoughts about his new job and team, ruminates about his time with the Yankees and the pressure that the team is under constantly, and comments about his working relationship with John Sterling.

PHIL ALLARD: Congrats on your new job, Charley. What excites you most about covering the Dodgers now?

CHARLEY STEINER: I get to work with Vin Scully. I’m not going to be in the same both with him because I’m going to be on the radio and he’s going to be on television. And he is not with the team when they travel. But he is the Johnny Carson of our business. It doesn’t get a whole lot better than that. Plus, I grew up as a Dodger fan in Brooklyn. They moved to L.A when I was 8 years old. So Scully is the guy I listened to.

Then moving out here to Southern California where it’s 75 and sunny; that ain’t bad. Plus when you consider the opportunity that the Dodgers are giving me. It’s an absolute no-brainer.

PHIL ALLARD: It’s a homecoming for you.

CHARLEY STEINER: That’s what if feels like. They had a full-blown press conference for me, which seemed overblown a bit but very nice. It took me about 47 years and 3000 miles to “get home,” but I am excited as I have been at any time.

PHIL ALLARD: What do you do to prepare to cover a new team?

CHARLEY STEINER: I don’t know that I do anything terribly different. You know, not unlike what I did with ESPN. You meet people, you spend time with them. I am going down to Spring Training on Feb. 25, but a lot of the guys I know very well. I know Derek Lowe very well; I was just talking to him on the phone the other day. The last two years we spent 26 games a season together.

PHIL ALLARD: Lowe is a great pick-up for the Dodgers.

CHARLEY STEINER: It’s a great pick-up. So you throw Lowe into the mix and I have known Jim Tracy forever. I’ve known Glenn Hoffman forever. That is one of the advantages I have had working at ESPN. People knew who I was. And over the years I knew who they were. So, it’s not that difficult. People make it out to be more difficult that it is.

PHIL ALLARD: Also, when you are doing something that you love, work is never difficult.

CHARLEY STEINER: Ya, this ain’t heavy lifting. It’s just like going to a new school. Everyone still speaks the same language, ya know.


PHIL ALLARD: You will be working with Rick Monday mostly, right?

CHARLEY STEINER: I will be working with Monday for 110 games on the radio; I’ll be doing the play-by-play and he will be the analyst. Everything is precisely defined in our roles. Then for the 48 games I will be doing on TV, I will be working with Steve Lyons. So I’ll be doing both radio and TV and the Dodger Pre-game on TV with player interviews. Plus there is talk of a satellite show too. So they are throwing me in the deep end of the pool and saying “He better swim.” But I am ready to go.

PHIL ALLARD: What do you think of the Dodger pitching staff this year?

CHARLEY STEINER: I like this pitching staff a lot. I think they are very solid. Hopefully Brad Penny can be healthy. Weaver has been much better out here.

PHIL ALLARD: Weaver tied for the league lead in quality starts and 220 innings these days makes him a workhorse.

CHARLEY STEINER: New York is not the easiest place on earth to produce, and besides that he is home now.

PHIL ALLARD: That’s right; Southern California is home for Weaver.

CHARLEY STEINER: He grew up not far from here at all. Then you throw into the mix Derek Lowe, a great pick-up. Ground ball pitcher in a park that is hard to hit homers in.

PHIL ALLARD: Lowe killed the Yanks and the Cards; to me he was the Sox' most influential pitcher in the post-season.

CHARLEY STEINER: And with Perez there are four very solid starters there. The 5th spot is open; Ishii will compete for that.

PHIL ALLARD: Ishii had a lot issues last year with the walks.

CHARLEY STEINER: He is a lefty and you hope that he is more consistent than he’s been. But he is in a battle to be the 5th starter. And for set-up there's Yhency Brazoban .

PHIL ALLARD: Former Yankee farmhand

CHARLEY STEINER: Right, and Gagne speaks for himself. They are very solid. Plus, Wilson Alvarez is good there in the middle. They are as solid as anyone in the NL west. They are not the Yankees but this is a wide open division and the Dodgers have as good a chance as anybody else. The Giants are a good rotisserie team on paper but they are old. Everyone is 35 or older. Can they last a full season? Bonds will miss most of Spring Training, and the Padres have a good team, so it’s a very interesting division. The Dodgers certainly are there and if things break right, there is no reason they can’t win the division again.

PHIL ALLARD: To change gears here for the Yankee fan base, what was your favorite memory of your time with the Yanks?

CHARLEY STEINER: Two words: Aaron Boone.

PHIL ALLARD: I wouldn’t doubt it. I am a “Turn the sound off the TV and listen to the radio” guy, so I heard most of the games you and Sterling called. That was your call on Boone in 2003. Beautiful. Can you walk us through the raw emotions of that night?

CHARLEY STEINER: The Yankees and the Red Sox speaks for itself. The last two years they played 52 times. The Sox won 27 and the Yanks won 25—two evenly matched teams. Here you have this incredible series. The Yanks come from behind with Pedro on the hill and there you have it. One pitch separated those two teams, that’s it. Then you throw into the mix 2004…

PHIL ALLARD: The apocalypse on 161st Street.

CHARLEY STEINER: …Easy there…and the Red Sox were equally terrific.

PHIL ALLARD: Could you feel the series slipping away from the Yankees in 2004?

CHARLEY STEINER: Oh, Absolutely. It was palpable. When the Sox were down 3-0, to a man they said: “If we win tonight, I like our chances.” If you spent as much time with the Red Sox as I have, you know when they mean it. Now there are a lot of good guys on the Yankees and I like them very much. But what happened was after the Sox won the 4th game, then Doug Mientkiewicz and Kevin Millar, said “We are on our way.” Then, BANG, you could feel it.

PHIL ALLARD: You were quoted earlier this winter (and I am paraphrasing here) that you felt that the Yankees didn’t show joy when they won as much as relief. Can you embellish on that a bit?

CHARLEY STEINER: There should be emotion of joy and euphoria, and “God, isn’t that great.” Unfortunately, with the Yanks, the prevailing attitude after a victory is one of relief, and then “God, we have to go out and do it again.’ That is the pressure that is put on them by the Steinbrenner way of doing business and you know, it’s been enormously successful for him and the Yankees. But it’s also very pressure-intensive. The Yanks were far tighter leading 3 games to 1 then the Red Sox were trailing 3 games to 1. Again, the Yanks have had an enormous amount of success doing business in that fashion for a very long time. So, to second guess them would be hypocritical.

PHIL ALLARD: After game 3, Sheff, Mat, and A-Rod hit, I believe, somewhere in the .100s. All those chances they had, if anyone came through they would have won the ALCS.

CHARLEY STEINER: But again, you look back on it, if they closed the Sox out in the 9th inning of game 4, we wouldn’t be talking this way. If Mo doesn’t walk Millar…

PHIL ALLARD: I hate that word "IF".

CHARLEY STEINER: But the point is that the Yanks were tight. The Sox were loose. And if the Red Sox lost all you would have heard is that they are disorganized, undisciplined, all of that nonsense. 2nd guessing is the easiest thing in the world.

PHIL ALLARD: You got a lot of it in that series.

CHARLEY STEINER: What do you expect? It’s the Yanks and the Red Sox. It’s historic every time they take the field. And now Randy Johnson pitches opening day. You just add another chapter.

PHIL ALLARD: That’s going to be fun. Will you watch that game?

CHARLEY STEINER: I expect so, but I will tell you this: Wherever I am it will be a whole lot warmer than there.

PHIL ALLARD: Do you guys open at home?

CHARLEY STEINER: We open in San Francisco

PHIL ALLARD: Ok, In general, how do you stay emotionally unattached and objective when you are covering the same team every day?

CHARLEY STEINER: What happens when you are broadcasting for a team, my philosophy is it’s in the fans interest for them to win, so consequently you are excited when they do win. If they don’t, it is your responsibility as a broadcaster to explain why they didn’t; so it’s not that difficult. You have to draw a fine line. I was always amused to read in the paper that I was a homer. I always thought that was interesting. I mean, here is a team, the Yankees, that I broadcast for 3 years. And they win 101 games a year. Where I come from that’s pretty good. I get blasted for being a homer and they win more than they lose. What am I supposed to say? That they suck? I mean my God, you read some of these guys in the paper...

PHIL ALLARD: Like Mushnick

CHARLEY STEINER: You read these guys and they’re all over me.

PHIL ALLARD: And they’re all over your buddy Sterling.

CHARLEY STEINER: Well there is a big difference. If I work at ESPN it’s a national audience. When you do that you are pretty much impassive to who wins and who loses. When you are broadcasting for a team you’re appealing to your fan base. Your fan base is primarily Yankee fans if you are doing a Yankee broadcast, Dodger fans if you are doing a Dodger broadcast. But never do I say “we”. It's always ‘they” and you’re working to an audience and you have to know who your audience is. That doesn’t mean that you are dishonest. But is it better if the home team wins rather than loses? Sure.

PHIL ALLARD: Bottom line is it’s more fun covering a good Yankee or Dodger team than a Tampa Bay.

CHARLEY STEINER: God yes. You know for years the great Ernie Harwell was broadcasting the Tigers and they had some bad teams and I said “How do you do it?”

PHIL ALLARD: So with John Sterling, what was the day-to-day like, and how did you get along?

CHARLEY STEINER: People make a much bigger deal out of it than it was. It was what it was. It was fine. The job got me back to New York and working with John was okay. The difficulty was that John was doing six innings of play-by-play and I was doing three. What that meant was that I was an analyst for 2/3 of the game, 2/3 of a season, and I am not an analyst. That’s why the Dodger opportunity is so good for me. I'm back doing, hopefully, what I do best and that’s call the game. I'll be working with an analyst, in this case Monday on radio and Lyons on TV. So the Yankees and John got me to the Dodgers and Vin. So what’s wrong with that picture?

PHIL ALLARD: It always sounded to me like you and John were having fun.

CHARLEY STEINER: Absolutely, we were two professional broadcasters who came from different places and we got together for 162 games and whatever we had in the postseason. Like musicians, once we arrived on stage each night we played our instruments and when the night was over we went our separate ways and then came back the next night. All that other nonsense that people would write about was just that—non-sense.

PHIL ALLARD: Any advice for Suzyn Waldman? How do you think she’ll do filling your shoes?

CHARLEY STEINER: I hope it all works out for her. She’s a very nice lady.

PHIL ALLARD: Charley, do you have anything else you’d like to say to the New York audience?

CHARLEY STEINER: At the end of the day, thanks for your support. It was an honor to broadcast the Yankees and I got to see firsthand some remarkable history and hopefully I was able to tell the story as accurately as I could. I was born and raised in New York, but I was also born and raised a Dodger fan. So while I am happy to be in LA, I leave New York with mixed emotions. But then again, it is 75 and sunny here in February.

PHIL ALLARD: Well on that note Charley, I know you have to go. Let me thank you for your time today and I wish you well.