Howie Rose worked his last Mets broadcast on Sunday, after about thirty-one years in the booth, and thirty-one is not the number.
The number is this: the Mets have existed for sixty-five seasons, and the radio job has been held by Lindsey Nelson, then Bob Murphy, then Howie Rose. Three men. Unbroken. If you are a Mets fan of any age at all, the sound of summer in your kitchen has been one of three voices your entire life, and on Sunday the third one put the headset down.
He also, before any of that, called hockey, and produced the single most famous three words in New York sports radio — “Matteau! Matteau! Matteau!” — in 1994, in a game seven, at a volume that is still funny to think about. And in 2024 he got to make the other one, on Pete Alonso’s wild card home run in Milwaukee, at an age when most people have stopped being able to do that with their voice.
Here is the thing about radio that television people never understand. Television tells you what happened. Radio decides what it felt like, in real time, with no take-backs, and if the man in the booth gets it wrong the moment is gone. Rose almost never got it wrong. He had the rarest quality a broadcaster can have, which is that he sounded like a person who would be watching anyway.
We do not do sincere very often around here. This one gets it.
Sixty-five seasons. Three voices. Thank you, sir. The bar will have one for you.