Ever since the New York Mets dropped 12 straight games in mid-April and drove a stake through their own season before the outfield grass had even thawed out, people have been coming up to Howie Rose to offer their condolences. Bummer of a way to go out! LOLMets, huh?
It is true that Rose, who is 72, decided to come back for this one final season in part because he believed — ha! — that the Mets front office had built a roster capable of making his lifelong recurring dream come true: calling the final play of a Mets World Series title. Laugh if you must but, yes, he thought there was a chance. He’s a Mets fan. Mets fans always think there’s a chance. And for what it’s worth, the pundits agreed. It is now charming to recall that, before the season, the Mets — yes, these Mets — were considered, at worst, a playoff lock.
Instead, they were dead by May. And that meant Rose’s last game, after 21 years as the radio voice of the Mets, would be on a meaningless Sunday in the season’s final weeks. The offense’s two cornerstones, outfielder Juan Soto (2026 salary: $51 million) and shortstop Francisco Lindor (2026 salary: $34 million) barely played in April because of injuries, leaving the bewildered new arrival Bo Bichette (2026 salary: $42 million) to keep a clubhouse full of strangers afloat. A season’s worth of only-the-Mets moments got pancaked into a matter of weeks, and throughout it all, the former Met Pete Alonso, a fan favorite and the franchise’s all-time home run leader, whom the front office all but dumped last winter, was anchoring the lineup for his new team, the Baltimore Orioles. Mets fans at Citi Field were protest-chanting Alonso’s name by the summer (and would even give him a curtain call — virtually unheard-of for a visiting player — after he hit a ninth-inning, game-tying home run during his first series back at Citi Field). Ownership finally mercy-fired the manager in June, put most of the team on the trading block in July, then shipped out 30 percent of the opening day roster in August.
Condolences? For the Mets? Talk about missing the point.
Howie Rose is a man who lived in the Bronx as a youngster (before settling in Bayside, Queens, at age 8) and was raised a Yankees fan by his Bronx-born father. But on the very day the Mets bungled into existence in 1962, Howie swore fealty to the blue and orange — an act of punk impudence that can be described only as very Metsy — and he didn’t do it because he wanted to win. Young Howie, a gawky, angular, somewhat giftless kid with a face for radio, probably never looked in the mirror and saw a champion looking back at him. Did he choose the Mets, or did the Mets choose him? Either way, the Mets repaid him right away with the worst team in baseball’s modern era, the amazingly awful 1962 Mets — 40 wins, 120 losses — a bit of genetic code re-imprinted over six more slapstick seasons until 1969, when a miracle World Series title gave Mets fans the silly idea that miracles were just as fundamental to our DNA as slapstick.
By then, Rose had abandoned his dreams of being the guy who hits a World Series-winning home run for the Mets, because he was already determined to be the voice who called it. And ever since the spring of 2006, when he slid over one chair and inherited the lead job, he has watched 21 chances come and go. He knows a dead-end season when he sees one, because he’s seen all of them.
“He’s the voice of the people,” says Marysol Castro, the public address voice of Citi Field on weekends, who has worked five booths down the hallway from Rose since 2018.
So please, spare your sympathy for poor Howie Rose. He’s fine. Or rather, he’s not fine — he’s old, he’s tired, and ever since a brutal cystoprostatectomy surgery in 2021 that cost him a chunk of the season, along with his prostate and his bladder, his stomach has been a boiler that, suffice to say, does not abide the food in the Citi Field media lounge. And of late the tiny radio booth is always so jammed with people parading through — sponsors, farewell-sayers, magazine writers — that it’s impossible to get any pregame prep work done. And then there’s his commute from Long Island, which should take 30 minutes but ask him how long it took today. … That’s the stuff that bothers him. That’s why he’s putting this career in the books.
The Mets’ losing — that just rolls off him at this point. It’s the ritual throat-clearing for the truly Metsy part of the season, which commences only once their playoff hopes have been all but mathematically dashed. And ever since they officially surrendered at the trade deadline in early August, the Mets have been — of course, far too late, at the moment when it matters least — scorching hot. Twenty-two wins in 35 games at one point. Just in time to crank the delusion machine back up for 2027.
Which is why Mets fans, the ones still paying attention anyway, have been having a blast of late. Once again they’re witnessing Yankees fans, their crosstown big brothers, go red with rage — at their imperfect team, at their imperfect manager, at their very nature — even as they prepare for the playoffs. Again. While here Mets fans are, hovering around a dozen games below .500 but losing their dang minds with joy every time the rookie outfielder Carson Benge cuts down a runner at home, or the rookie ace Nolan McLean turns a hitter’s knees into jelly. It’s pure stupid uncut hope for next year, and for 21 seasons, Rose has been their most dependable supplier.
But look, if you really want to dial up the woe-is-Mets pathos, it’s easy to arrange the facts of Howie Rose’s life and career to fit that narrative. Here it goes.
Teenage Rose had to wait a mere seven years for a world championship, yes, but he didn’t get to watch the triumphant final out, because it happened at 3:17 p.m. on a Thursday afternoon, so he was in Mr. Freda’s English class at Benjamin N. Cardozo High School. (Mr. Freda did let them listen to the radio call, but as soon as left fielder Cleon Jones squeezed the clinching out, he switched it off and made the class return to Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” … until they got to the line about how “the game is done, I’ve won, I’ve won,” at which point he flung the book over his shoulder and switched the radio back on. Mr. Freda: What a legend.)
He got his first full-time job in New York sports media in 1977, at WHN radio, just in time to cover his baseball hero, Tom Seaver, being shipped out of town to the Cincinnati Reds as part of series of trades that came to be known as the Midnight Massacre.
He got his first Mets job, hosting the pre- and postgame radio shows, in 1987 — the year after the Mets won the World Series again in 1986.
Rose’s first season as the team’s lead radio voice was 2006, and the mere mention of that year gives Mets fans flashbacks to an infamous snuff film: the future Hall of Famer Carlos Beltran turning to stone with the bases loaded as Strike 3 sailed past him to end Game 7 of the National League Championship Series. The next season, the Mets blew a seven-game division lead in just 17 days — a catastrophe that Mets fans, with their uniquely dauntless logic, have managed to contort into yet more proof that a valiant comeback is always possible. (If you can blow a lead that big, then you can overcome one too, right?) Rose did get to call a World Series once, in 2015, which means he got to call each of Mets closer Jeurys Familia’s record-setting three blown saves in a five-game rout by the Kansas City Royals.
Don’t misunderstand, it’s not like Rose endured all this with a cheerful shrug. Does he curse himself that he missed 1986 by one year? Sure. Did he envy the way Mike (Francesa) and the Mad Dog (Chris Russo), his friends and sometime rivals in New York sports radio, got rich and ruled the city while he called Islanders games at the Nassau “Mausoleum” out in Uniondale? Sometimes! But the notion of expecting those things to go your way, feeling somehow cosmically cheated if they don’t — sorry, that’s Yankees-fan mentality.
Rose is an original Mets fan, arguably the original Mets fan, and what Mets fans know is that there will always be someone who got more than you, who did it a little bit better than you, who will get a longer paragraph in sports history than you. The thing is, you and that person actually have that in common. What Mets fans know is that you either redefine winning or you’ll lose at everything.
So maybe that explains how Rose sees it: He has worked in sports for more than 50 years, and he was only unemployed for two weeks, and he never had to move away from his hometown. And for half those years, he had one of the only jobs he ever really wanted.
On the Mets team plane, an invisible line of demarcation separates the front, where the support staff and broadcast crews sit, from the back, where the players sit. And while Rose has taken hundreds of team flights by now, he wouldn’t dare cross it. “We don’t go back there,” he told me. Only once has he ventured beyond that line, and only because he was summoned.
Oct. 3, 2024: The plane was idling on the tarmac in Milwaukee following the Mets’ most dramatic postseason win of Rose’s tenure, highlighted by Alonso’s three-run, ninth-inning blast to snatch a playoff series from the Brewers. The celebration was already in full swing when a Mets press officer queued up Rose’s home-run call on his phone and held it up to the P.A. system, filling the plane with the sound of his voice. None of the players had heard his call yet, pitcher Sean Manaea told me, and after a brief moment, “everybody started to realize what was going on. And then everyone got hyped.”
Three and one to Alonso. Williams sets. Here’s the pitch. … Swing and a fly ball to right field. … Pretty well hit, Frelick back at the wall — he jumps — it’s gone! He did it! He did it! … Pete Alonso keeps this fairy-tale season going with the fairy-tale swing of his career!
There’s a social media clip of this moment, and you can see Rose squirming in his seat, resisting the players’ entreaties to join the party, trying to persuade Alonso to come his way instead. “But when I saw that wasn’t happening,” Rose told me, “I said, ‘Oh [expletive], I gotta do it.’” Their embrace is sweet and suitably awkward. Two Mets icons, bound forever. The juggernaut Dodgers eliminated the Mets playoff two rounds later, but the Alonso homer has become the signature call of Rose’s Mets career.
“Nobody beats his inflection, and nobody beats his detail,” says Keith Raad, Rose’s broadcast partner of four years, who at 33 is less than half Rose’s age. “It was a perfect call.”
For what it’s worth, Rose does not consider it his best. That honor goes to his call of Francisco Lindor’s grand slam in the next round of the 2024 playoffs against the Philadelphia Phillies. “Because after the home run,” Rose says, “I punctuated the call by saying they were ‘famished for the big hit all night and Francisco Lindor just provided a feast.’ It came out of my mouth and I said, I like that. That’s a nice line. That’s a Vin line.” Vin as in the late great Vin Scully, a name he does not invoke lightly.
And it’s another call from another season entirely — from an otherwise ordinary game — that Rose rates as even more personally dear. Aug. 24, 2015: In his first at-bat after a long and arduous recovery from a chronic back condition that would soon end his career, David Wright — high on the list of Rose’s favorite living Mets — smashed a towering home run to left field. “Holy smokes!” Rose cried over the air. “The captain is back!” The homer, Rose says now, was one of “maybe five times in my career I actually was feeling the goose bumps as I was making the call.” Never mind that the Mets were on the road and trailing 3-0. Wright’s homer made it 3-1. Says Rose: “It wouldn’t have been the same for anybody other than David.”
“Howie — I mean, it sounded like he was going to come through the radio when he was making that call,” Wright says, calling from Southern California, where he has three little kids who’ve come to recognize Rose’s voice whenever they watch their dad’s highlights. Wright would hit only a handful more home runs, and like Rose now, he knew his time was almost up. His career ended the way most careers do: quietly, with a harmless pop out.
“I’ve been there as a player where it’s becoming surreal that things are about to end, that as an athlete, your mortality is only so many years,” Wright says. “And to hear the emotion that inevitably is going to be in his voice — it’s going to hit me hard. And I think it’ll hit a lot of Mets fans hard, because that’s your blankie, that’s your comfort zone: hearing Howie Rose paint the picture for us of a Mets game.”
A few years after Wright retired, he visited the booth before a game, and Rose shared a secret: The home-run call Wright and everyone else heard that day was not the actual original call — it was a hastily doctored version to bleep out an accidental, overexuberant F-bomb. But that was in the past, and now it was time for David to hear the truth.
“He fell for it hook line and sinker,” Rose says.
Rose’s longtime producer, Chris Majkowski, played the “original call,” to which he’d added a well-placed bleep that turned “Holy smokes!” into “Holy [bleep]!” When Wright heard it, he wheeled toward Rose, stunned. “No — you didn’t! You didn’t!”
He did not.
“I thought I had gotten the great Howie Rose to curse on the radio,” Wright says. “I come to find out they had all doctored this up just to see the look on my face.”
Wright grew up in just outside Norfolk, Va., home of the Mets’ top minor-league affiliate at the time. He was a Mets kid who became the captain of the Mets, sort of like how Rose was a Mets kid who became the voice of the Mets. Neither of them lived out their World Series dream, but for Rose at least, he’s got Alonso’s game-winner, and Lindor’s feast, and that look on Wright’s face. It’s enough.
Even now, even here at the very end, if you ask him about disappointment, about all those seasons when the Mets stiffed him with another September of meaningless, no-stakes baseball, or the precious few when they tantalized fans but came up just short, he might make a wisecrack first, but then he’ll wave you off and say, I can give you five reasons right now to be excited about the Mets next year.
The only difference is that next year, after more than two decades of next years, the radio voice of the New York Mets will be someone else.
Devin Gordon, who writes about the intersection of sports and culture, is the author of “So Many Ways to Lose: The Amazin’ True Story of the New York Mets — the Best Worst Team in Sports.”