baseball" by the Association for the Help of Retarded Children 2007 honored by Oklahoma City University with the Abe Lemons/Paul Hansen Award for Sports Excellence. The Abe Lemons/Paul Hansen Award recognizes an individual who significantly contributes to the growth of sports in the state. 2007 featured as one of "100 Leaders for the Next 100 Years" by Oklahoma Sports Heritage Museum. Post-playing career Murcer was also involved in the team as management and part-time coach as well. He was an assistant Yankee general manager in 1985, and individually worked with Rickey Henderson's rehab efforts when Henderson was brought to the Yankees. In 1987, George Steinbrenner hired Murcer to coach left-handed hitters. In 1989, he became partial owner of the Class AAA baseball team in Oklahoma, the Oklahoma City 89ers. He was also a regular at the annual Yankees Old Timer's Game, playing his last game in 2007. Broadcasting After his retirement, Murcer turned to a career in broadcasting. He was a sportscaster for the Yankees—on broadcast TV, radio, and the YES Network—for most of the two decades. He and colleague Frank Messer were behind the WPIX microphones as the infamous pine tar incident unfolded at Yankee Stadium on July 24, 1983. Murcer also worked games for NBC, teaming with Ted Robinson. Murcer continued to call games on WPIX until 1998, when the station lost the rights to broadcast the Yankees (they would pick up the broadcast rights to the Mets instead). He then moved to WNYW, where he and Tim McCarver (later Suzyn Waldman) shared play-by-play roles. He would remain there until 2001 (calling, among other games, David Cone's 1999 perfect game), and then moved to the YES Network to call the games there and on its broadcast partners (originally WCBS, now WWOR-TV), with a reduced workload. Murcer won three Emmy Awards for live sports coverage as the voice of the Yankees. In November 2007, Murcer was nominated for the Ford C. Frick Award, presented annually to a broadcaster for "major contributions to baseball" by the Baseball Hall of Fame. The 2008 award, as announced three months later, went to longtime Seattle broadcaster Dave Niehaus. Anti-tobacco activism Murcer was a tobacco user for most of his life. In the late 1990s, he conceded what he thought was the error of his ways. After having a family member that suffered from cancer, Murcer became an anti-tobacco activist, according to the AP.