John Sterling, whose mellifluous voice became the soundtrack of spring, summer and quite a few Octobers to generations of Yankees fans and who during one stretch broadcast 5,060 consecutive games, has died at 87.

Sterling, the Yankees radio play-by-play voice for 36 seasons, was behind the microphone for five world championship teams and seven American League pennant winners during a broadcasting career that began upstate at a tiny radio station in Wellsville during the early 1960s and spanned an incredible eight decades.

Sterling retired just after the 2024 season began, having called a total of 5,631 Yankees games, saying that he was tired of traveling.

Sterling was largely out of the public spotlight since leaving the booth. He revealed he suffered a heart attack in January. Sterling had open-heart surgery after suffering “so many heart attacks that it would’ve killed most people,” his former radio partner Michael Kay said Monday on his ESPN NY Radio show. And while Sterling got through the surgery well, he was bedridden for so long that he lost the ability to walk.

Sterling, an emotional Kay said, was “really pushing” his rehab because his oldest daughter, Abigail, is getting married this summer.

An eclectic and eccentric character well-versed in Frank Sinatra, classic films, Broadway show tunes and his favorite soap operas, Sterling was just as apt to break into a song from the second act of “Oklahoma” as he was to describe the intricacies of a well-executed 3-6-3 double play.

His over-the-top signature call following the final out of Yankees victories — “Ballgame over. Yankees win. Thuuuuuh Yankees win” — was a fan favorite, as were his hokey salutations celebrating Yankees home runs. It was a shtick — and Sterling gladly admitted as much — that began with the simple and benign “Bern, baby, Bern!” a play on Bernie Williams and the chorus of the 1976 hit song “Disco Inferno” by The Trammps. Over the years that led to “A Thrilla from Godzilla” (Hideki Matsui), “It’s an A-bomb from A-Rod” (Alex Rodriguez) and “Robby Cano, don’t you know,” all the way to “Giancarlo, non si può stoparlo” in tribute to slugger Giancarlo Stanton’s Italian heritage.

While Yankees fans loved that Sterling saw everything through pinstriped glasses, he did have his critics who decried his many affectations and the accuracy of some of his calls. His signature “It is high, it is far, it is gone,” stuck in a lot of listeners’ craws since Sterling would use it no matter the trajectory or distance of a home run.

And Sterling, who wore a jacket and tie to every game — and white pants after Memorial Day but never beyond Labor Day — couldn’t have cared less.

“If someone tells you you stink, what do they know. It’s just their opinion,” he once said. “There will always be people who don’t like what you do. It’s like any art form. That’s just the way it is.”

Longtime broadcast partner Suzyn Waldman said: “He is more comfortable in his own skin than anyone I have ever met in my whole life.”

After missing a pair of games during the 1989 season — his first with the Yankees — following the death of his sister Jane, Sterling did not miss a game for 30 years until a health issue forced him to skip a handful of contests in July 2019. Sterling also missed a handful of games during the truncated 2020 season with a blood infection that required a brief hospital stay.

John Sloss was born July 4, 1938, in New York City to Carl, an advertising executive, and Gladys Sloss and was raised on the Upper East Side. He would eventually adopt the surname Sterling because he thought it sounded better than Sloss.

In an interview he said he knew he wanted to be a broadcaster since childhood.

“I must have been a little boy,” he said. “I heard an announcer say ‘Live from Hollywood, it’s ‘The Eddie Bracken Show’ with Eddie’s special guest …’ I didn’t want to be Eddie Bracken. I wanted to be the announcer. I don’t know why. It just appealed to me.”

Sterling, who never spoke much publicly about his childhood, said he tried to spend as little time as possible in his parents’ apartment — they would later divorce — and often made pilgrimages to Yankee Stadium, the Polo Grounds, Ebbets Field and Madison Square Garden with his friends all the while keeping track of the latest happenings on the New York stage and in Hollywood.

“I knew every actor, every singer, every impressionist, every comedian,” Sterling said. “I knew what singers worked for what record companies. … I knew what actors worked for what studio. They were like ballclubs to me.”

Blessed with a booming voice at a young age, Sterling said he left college early to take that entry-level job in Wellsville.

“When you work at one of those little stations you did everything,” he said. “I pulled a six-hour shift, afternoons, disc jockey work, you read the news. … Back then you had to work with platters and tapes and cartridges.

“It was good training because you find out what you’re good at. You have to find your own style. … That’s how I did it anyway. I had it in my mind what I wanted to do. I could always ad lib. I could go on the air my first day and do a show like I was doing it on WNEW because that’s what I listened to growing up.”

From Wellsville there were stops in Providence, where he was a rock ‘n’ roll disc jockey, and Baltimore, where he hosted a sports talk show and also broadcast the games of the Baltimore Bullets of the NBA for one season. While working there, Sterling was asked to come to New York and be one of several people filling in for a vacationing Bob Grant on his popular WMCA talk show.

“It was just after Attica,” Sterling said of the 1971 prison uprising in upstate New York, “and it was a general talk show. We did Attica for three hours. That was my first show on WMCA.

“When Bob returned he asked his girlfriend how the shows went. She said, ‘Oh, it was all right. But there was one guy who could really do it. He was actually a pro.’ Bob told me that story years later.”

While maintaining his duties in Baltimore, Sterling occasionally filled in doing sports on WMCA. In 1972 he was hired by the station to host a nightly sports talk show and later did Islanders play-by-play for three seasons after WMCA acquired the rights. He also broadcast Nets games for the station from 1975-81 as the team transitioned from the ABA to the NBA.

“It was a very exciting time in my life,” Sterling said. “I had made New York but you don’t know if you’re going to make it or not. … But it all worked out.”

He would eventually leave New York and spend nine years in Atlanta broadcasting the Braves and the Hawks before returning to his hometown to join the Yankees booth in 1989. Beginning in 2005, when he was joined by Waldman, Sterling did every inning of play-by-play except for those few games he missed.

Despite all those Yankees World Series victories, perfect games and no-hitters, Sterling had little trouble singling out the greatest game he ever called. And it had nothing to do with his beloved Bronx Bombers.

It was Game 7 of the 1988 Eastern Conference semifinals between the Hawks and the Boston Celtics. The Celtics won 118-116 after a duel between Larry Bird, who scored 34 points, and Dominique Wilkins, who scored 47.

“Dominique was magnifique,” as Sterling was wont to say.

“The best game I’ve ever broadcast in my life,” Sterling, who called the game from courtside at the old Boston Garden, told Newsday. “It was like I was in the game. It was fabulous. Utterly, utterly fabulous.”

Sterling is survived by his four children, Abigail and triplets Veronica, Bradford and Derek.