Now (Now Now Now) . . . Pitching (Pitching Pitching Pitching) . . .

Pitchers and catchers having reported, this week calls for a cool Clyde Haberman piece on Bob Sheppard, whose “stately, august, classic, silken, dignified, elegant, mellifluous, sonorous, velvety and soothing” voice you should recognize as the PA announcer at Yankee Stadium:

The Voice. Even over the telephone, it is unmistakable.

No one who has ever set so much as a foot inside Yankee Stadium over the last half-century can fail to recognize Bob Sheppard’s voice. It is so infused with authority that Mr. Sheppard could read Eminem lyrics aloud and make them sound like Magna Carta.

Then again, what did you expect when you phoned him – Jackie Mason?

“I speak the same way at Yankee Stadium that I speak in the church,” he said from Jupiter, Fla., where he spends much of the winter. “I speak the same way in the classroom. I speak the same way to you over the phone. I’m kind of limited in what I can do. I’m not good at dialects.”

Here it is, the last week of February, and another baseball season is upon us. Teams have begun spring training with more than the usual antagonisms swirling around them.

Bad enough that players change teams more often than Sean Combs changes his name. Now fans have something far more unsettling to absorb. We’re talking about the disheartening allegations of steroid use that threaten to undermine home run records and other statistics in this most numbers-centric of all major sports.

Through the turmoil, New York baseball fans have at least one touchstone: Bob Sheppard. He is a constant – like the subway, only more dependable.

He has been the public-address announcer at Yankee Stadium since April 17, 1951, when Harry Truman was in the White House and the war du jour was in Korea. The first batter whose name he called out was DiMaggio. That would be Dom DiMaggio of the visiting Boston Red Sox, not his more famous Yankee brother, Joe.

Mr. Sheppard has endured through 11 presidents and 8 New York mayors, not to mention the countless vagaries of the team’s longtime owner, George Steinbrenner, who he says has never criticized him but also “has not been generous” with compliments.

Naturally, you want to know how old Mr. Sheppard is, but he refuses to say. Here’s a clue. One of his boyhood heroes was the great first baseman George Sisler, who hit .407 in 1920 and .420 in 1922.

Why be so sensitive about age? he is asked. Anyone can do the math.

“Well, don’t,” he replies. “Just don’t.”

O.K., no math.

What you really need to know is that the Voice is remarkably undented by time. Sportswriters have stretched themselves sore reaching for adjectives to describe it. Stately, august, classic, silken, dignified, elegant, mellifluous, sonorous, velvety and soothing form but a partial list. All those words still apply, especially in this age of screaming sports announcers who make the old Crazy Eddie pitchman sound sedate.

But why don’t we talk, Mr. Sheppard suggested, about something other than baseball or football, which he also announces for the absurdly named New York Giants of New Jersey. Aside from learning some new names, like Randy Johnson and Carl Pavano, preparing for his 55th season with the Yankees does not exactly involve heavy lifting.

He preferred to reflect on the way New Yorkers mistreat the English language, not a surprising concern for someone who taught speech for decades at St. John’s University and John Adams High School in Queens, his native borough.

TOO many of us, it seems, talk too fast. We hit our G’s way too hard in words like “singer,” even those of us who are not from Lawn Guyland. Public speakers are no thrill, either. For Mr. Sheppard, a Roman Catholic, no one approaches the late Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen. “He spoke the truth,” Mr. Sheppard said. “He spoke it fervently. He spoke it eloquently.”

Do any politicians make the grade?

Franklin D. Roosevelt did – “smooth and eloquent,” Mr. Sheppard said. But “there are not so many people anymore,” he said. “I can’t think of any recent politician, except that young fellow who spoke at the Democratic convention.” He was referring to Barack Obama, the new United States senator from Illinois. “He struck me as someone who is going to be heard from again and again and again.”

And so will Mr. Sheppard, if all goes well.

He is often called on to read Scripture in church. Routinely, he says, people approach him later to ask if he is the guy who announces at Yankee Stadium. “It happens over and over and over again,” he said with a laugh. “Not by sight. I mean, nobody knows what I look like. It’s kind of an anonymous thing.”

Wouldn’t he like to be recognized on sight?

Not really, the Voice said. “Humility is a great grace.”

Wanted: Volunteers to Dress as Vagrants (No Law & Order Experience Necessary)

The City’s Department of Homeless Services is offering $100 to volunteers to serve as quality control decoys for their annual homeless count:

As part of a new quality-control measure from the Department of Homeless Services, some 150 “fake” homeless – graduate students clad in old clothes and blankets – will be sent out to see if the volunteers spot them.

If the volunteers approach the decoys, the fakes, who are making $100 each, will ‘fess up and hand over a sticker to make sure they are not mistakenly counted.

The idea is to test the effectiveness of the count, which has been criticized by some homeless advocates because it partly relies on estimates.

“What happens to this cadre of 150 could be a fairly faithful replica” of the count’s accuracy, said Dr. Kim Hopper, a research scientist at the Nathan Kline Institute, who is leading the decoy effort.

Some 1,500 volunteers have already signed up and will gather at 10:30 p.m. Monday for a quick training session, then hit the streets at midnight for a few hours.

Not clear if they are offering a bonus for multiple visits.

Inner Public Works Geek, Activate!

The Bronx-Whitestone Bridge is being put on a diet:

The Bronx-Whitestone Bridge has a weight problem.

Over the decades, the 65-year-old suspension bridge has been bulked up to make it more stable. But now engineers have decided that it has grown too beefy.

“We put this bridge on a diet,” said Michael C. Ascher, the president of M.T.A. Bridges and Tunnels, an arm of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. “Here’s a bridge that’s 65 years old. It got a little heavy around the midsection. Just like with the human anatomy, as you get on in years, lean is better. In this case, instead of putting an extra strain on your heart and other organs, it’s putting a strain on the supporting structure, the skeleton, of the bridge.”

When the work is completed a year from now, the steel and concrete bridge will have shed 6,000 tons, or one-quarter of its total suspended weight. Engineers say the decreased weight will reduce the strain on the bridge’s steel cables, make it more durable and lengthen its life by decades, if not centuries.

If you missed some of the bridge’s backstory, it’s interesting:

Last year, workers completed the removal of steel trusses that were installed on each side of the bridge in 1946, after the notorious collapse of a bridge in Washington State. In June, they will begin replacing the bridge’s concrete deck with a lightweight steel version that is being built in Brazil.

The project to decrease the bridge’s load, which follows years of wind and stress tests on laboratory models, is possible because of advances in aerodynamic design.

The Bronx-Whitestone Bridge has long been known for its slim and graceful profile. It was built in less than two years to serve visitors to the New York World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park and it opened to traffic on April 29, 1939 – the day before the start of the fair.

Stretching 2,300 feet between its two towers, the span was the fourth longest in the world. At the ribbon-cutting, Robert Moses, the highways and parks czar who oversaw the bridge’s construction, called it “architecturally the finest bridge of them all.”

But a year later, a catastrophe on the West Coast shook that image.

On Nov. 7, 1940, the deck of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge twisted itself apart and plunged into the water below during a fierce windstorm. No one was killed, but the collapse, captured on film, instantly became one of the most infamous engineering failures in history.

The prevailing theories in bridge design at the time paid little heed to aerodynamics, according to Henry Petroski, a professor of civil engineering and of history at Duke University who has written extensively on bridge design.

“The idea that a bridge roadway or a deck could undulate, could be moved vertically by the wind – that was just not thought to be something to worry about,” he said. “The idea was to make the deck, the roadway of the bridge, as slender as possible. The aesthetic model was driving this, and it was generally thought that these bridges were so big, massive and heavy, built of steel and concrete, that the wind was just not going to move them. And that was wrong.”

Even before the Bronx-Whitestone opened, engineers noticed that its deck would occasionally sway in the wind and shift back and forth, lengthwise, between the two steel towers.

The Bronx-Whitestone was neither as long nor as narrow as the Tacoma Narrows, but the same engineer, Leon S. Moisseiff, had worked on both bridges. The chief engineer of the New York bridge, Othmar H. Ammann, was on a commission that investigated the failure of the Washington bridge.

Mr. Ammann insisted that the Bronx-Whitestone was stable, but its pendulum-like movement alarmed drivers and pedestrians and Mr. Moses ordered it stiffened.

“He felt that the risk of losing motorists and therefore revenue far outweighed what the engineers said and that this perception of instability was unacceptable,” said Darl Rastorfer, the author of “Six Bridges: The Legacy of Othmar H. Ammann” (Yale University Press, 2000).

In 1940, diagonal stiffening cables were installed on the bridge. In 1946, two steel trusses were erected on the sides of the bridge to stiffen it more. The trusses resulted in the elimination of the pedestrian walkways and the widening of the bridge from four to six lanes of traffic.

Bridge enthusiasts lamented that the installation of the trusses marred the bridge’s aesthetic qualities. “It ruined the view of the skyline of Manhattan,” Professor Petroski said

See also: nycroads.com’s Bronx-Whitestone Bridge Historic Overview

Location Scout: Bronx-Whitestone Bridge.

Inner Libertarian, Activate!

Inner libertarian: activate. Form of: a snarky blog post about a proposed City Council bill to force movie theaters to be truthful about when the main feature will begin:

It’s the latest horror at the movies: endless ads for everything from ladies’ underwear to perfume to soda.

But a new City Council bill aims to set moviegoers free with a different kind of advertising – movie listings that reflect when movies actually begin, not the ads and previews before.

“We can’t outlaw advertising,” said City Councilwoman Gale Brewer (D-Manhattan), author of the bill. “But at least we can tell the industry that they have to be honest about when their movies start, not their ads.”

. . .

If passed, Brewer’s bill would require theaters to advertise the “actual start time” of any movie, not when ads and previews begin. Any theater that doesn’t comply could face fines of $500 to $1,000 for each infraction.

Not surprisingly, the city’s larger theater chains are giving two thumbs down to the idea, saying moviegoers know to expect “pre-feature content” at any movie.

Shouldn’t the City Council be more worried about the important issues — resolutions opposing war in Iraq, for example?

Council Member Brewer explains herself:

“In the scheme of things, it isn’t life or death,” said Brewer. “But people shouldn’t feel used after going to the movies.”

If the benchmark for passing legislation protecting consumers is “feeling used,” then I can think of many more useful bills — a warning label indicating when Andy Dick will appear, for example. The possibilities are endless.

Inner Adam Gopnik, Activate!

AAA notes the city’s worst highways: The “very worst” is the ramp from the northbound Major Deegan Expressway to the George Washington Bridge (the Daily News explains: “At the end of a steep spiral ramp where two lanes merge, trucks must cross two busy lanes in a quarter mile to reach the bridge.”); the Gowanus Expressway from the Belt Parkway to the Prospect Expressway; the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway from Hamilton Ave. to Tillary St.; and the Goethals Bridge, connecting Staten Island and New Jersey.

Sure, these highways were built for, like, Model Ts driving 35 miles an hour. So go slower! Against my better judgement, I’m exercising my Inner Adam Gopnik to say, “Deal with it.”