I had sat at the hipster bar near Detroit for seven innings, and the Mets had only two hits. The season was over unless we could come up with a couple of runs in the final two frames against the Brewers. I couldn’t take it. I settled my tab and took the streets of Hamtramck, Michigan.
I needed the fresh air. I needed to move my legs. But mostly, I needed Howie’s voice in my ears.
Howie Rose was the New York Mets radio announcer for decades, and he was the best in the business. I listened and walked that October night in 2024, using the MLB app on my iPhone, as the Mets went down weakly in the eighth. By the time the Mets came up in the ninth, I was holding vigil on a bench in “Pope Park,” a tiny park in this formerly Polish-Catholic enclave, honoring Pope St. John Paul II.
After the commercials, the broadcast played a few seconds of nervous-but-almost-jubilant fan noise from Milwaukee. Then came Howie’s voice, “Well, we go to the top of the ninth inning. Do the Mets have another comeback in them?”
Howie is, was, and always will be a Mets fan. But unlike the average radio or television announcer, Howie was no homer. Where lesser announcers would groan or downplay excellence by the other team, Howie gave opposing players credit, often loudly and emphatically.
Sportscaster Howie Rose speaks to the media prior to the game between the Philadelphia Phillies and New York Mets at Citi Field on September 20, 2026 in New York City. (Photo by Evan Bernstein/Getty Images)
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Sportscaster Howie Rose speaks to the media prior to the game between the Philadelphia Phillies and New York Mets at Citi Field on September 20, 2026 in New York City. (Photo by Evan Bernstein/Getty Images)
In this inning, possibly the final frame of a miracle season, Howie provided the hope: “Do the Mets have another comeback in them?” But he also dealt straight. “There is no margin of error now,” because the Mets were facing “Devin Williams, the brilliant closer for the Brewers.… Last night, Williams picked up the save, needing 10 pitches to get the top of the Mets order.”
I had listened to Howie throughout my adult life, but I only became a real fan in 2015. That’s when I first got the MLB app, which allowed me to listen to Mets broadcasts. It’s also when my wife asked me to build a dining room table and accompanying benches for our large and growing family.
Throughout August and September, and then the amazing but ultimately failed October playoff run in 2015, I listened to almost every night game as I sawed, sanded, and drilled. Howie’s broadcast kept my mind occupied, made the hours pass more enjoyably, and allowed me to be a baseball fan again without taking time away from family. Here I was doing my impression of St. Joseph — working with wood in service of my family — while catching my team’s playoff run. Every win, he would sign off with the words, “Put it in the books!”
If the Mets were off or rained out, I would tune into the broadcast of our division rivals or root against the Yankees. Hearing these other announcers, I began to realize how great Howie was.
I noticed one game where Howie used the same phrase in three straight innings — “flyball to rightfield” — and his intonation told me each time just what was happening.
If Howie said “flyball to rightfield,” very matter-of-factly, but hanging, almost like a question, you knew it was foul. You were waiting for him to conclude “out of play.”
But Howie might also say “flyball to rightfield,” with a rising, but calm tone. The listener could see the routine flyball in his mind’s eye.
And sometimes “flyball to rightfield” was said with a dire excitement. You knew before even the folks watching on TV that this one had a chance to go out.
The Cardinals’, the Giants’, and certainly the Yankees’ announcers had no such ability to paint with their words.
I had become a connoisseur of radio announcing, a distant cousin of my own occupation as a writer. And it was clear to me that there were some greats — such as the Nationals’ Charlie Slowes — but there were two kings: Vin Scully and Howie Rose.
Over the years, Howie became a regular voice in our home and in our car. My son and I listened to him call a Mets’ combined no-hitter in 2022. We hugged in the kitchen as Howie exclaimed, “Put it in the books.”
Later that season, in one of Jacob deGrom’s first games back, I loaded my children into the car to drive home while the Mets led the Dodgers 2-1 after the seventh inning. The Mets’ bullpen, so dreadful in recent years, had to shut town Joey Gallo (38 homers the prior year), Cody Bellinger (former rookie of the year), Mookie Betts (former MVP), Trea Turner (the prior year’s batting champion), Freddie Freeman (the batting leader at that moment), and Will Smith (who always killed the Mets).
Howie’s voice held us transfixed in the dark of the Honda Odyssey on the Beltway, as Adam Ottavino dealt a 1-2-3 eighth. And then throughout the ninth, Howie painted the picture of Edwin Diaz’s slider at its nastiest. For my children and me, that was the sports highlight of 2022. We all remember it crystal clear, and most of us never saw a minute of it.
You can understand, then, why I felt weirdly at ease in Pope Park when the Mets somehow needed two or more runs against Devin Williams. With a man on base and one out and Brandon Nimmo batting, Howie said, with a knowing tension, “Pete Alonso is on deck.”
If you followed the Mets, you knew the drama. Alonso had set the record for rookie home runs. He was the Mets’ best slugger. But he had never delivered the big hit, and here he was at the end of a mediocre season, and his contract was expiring. It was hard not to fear he would end the season.
Nimmo singled to right fielder Sal Frelick. The go-ahead run was coming up.
Howie concisely set the stage: “And NOW, if you’re a script-writer and you think back to Pete Alonso’s career with the Mets, and the chance that this could be his final at bat as a Met…”
Howie laid out the details: bad season, 0-for-3, contract on the line.
Alonso took four pitches, three of them balls.
Howie painted the scene: Lindor and Nimmo leading off the bases, the Brewers’ outfielders playing very deep, the Milwaukee crowd standing, holding their breath, and Williams uncomfortable on the mound. I could see it all from my seat in Pope Park.
“Three-and-one to Alonso, Williams sets. Here’s the pitch.” Crack.
“Swing and a flyball to rightfield” — tension in Howie’s voice. “Pretty well hit” — excitement. And then, in Howie’s next words, I heard near ecstasy I had never heard before: “Frelick back, at the wall, he jumps—”
If you are a Mets fan, you’ve been here a hundred times. Glory was in reach, but you end up on the wrong side of someone else’s highlight reel. It would have been the least surprising thing in the world if Frelick had made the catch of the season and robbed Alonso of a home run.
But I knew he wouldn’t. I knew it because of Howie’s intonation. “He jumps” somehow conveyed a jump of desperation, adding color to what would come next.
“IT’S GONE! HE DID IT! HE DID IT!”
It was the perfect call. Packed into those words was an entire career. We had questioned Alonso for years. Can he come through when it counts? Can he prove his worth to this team? There were a hundred questions, and Howie answered them: He did it.
“Pete Alonso keeps this fairy-tale season going with the fairy-tale swing of his career!”
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Of course, this is the Mets. We didn’t make the World Series that year. We let Alonso go the next year. And now Howie’s gone. He retired at the end of this past, deeply disappointing season.
There should have been — in 2015, in 2022, or in 2024 — a World Series, Game 7, “Put it in the books!” Howie deserved it. But Howie chose to be a Mets fan. Mets fans don’t get happy endings. We knew it was a sad road when we chose it. But it is a road that was beautiful, thanks to Howie’s words.
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[ H/T Washington Examiner ]
