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.”