When a baseball fan hears the crack of the bat, they are instantly mesmerized, glimpsing at the pathway of the baseball as it sails high in the air. For the last 34 years, the jubilation of that moment is encompassed by Gary Cohen, who exclaims “It’s outta here!” to fans of the New York Mets.
Cohen grew up in Kew Gardens, NY, located close by to Shea Stadium. He instantly became “Metsmerized” with the orange and blue, attending a countless number of games in the upper deck each year.
When he was young, he hoped that he would one day be the team’s starting shortstop, akin to Bud Harrelson. If not baseball, he aspired to be the starting power forward for his favorite basketball team, the New York Knicks; however, neither of those opportunities panned out because of his physical stature and lack of athletic ability.
From the time he was 6 years old, Cohen was listening to Mets games on the radio broadcast by play-by-play announcer Bob Murphy. Murphy worked alongside Lindsey Nelson, a play-by-play announcer as well, along with former major league outfielder Ralph Kiner. Additionally, Cohen would listen to Marv Albert broadcast Knicks basketball on the radio and also tried to pick up signals to hear announcers in other markets. That task was made easier once he received a desk radio capable of receiving AM signals as a gift for his ninth birthday.
“I never really thought about it as a career path,” Cohen said. “I never thought it was really a viable option but when I got to college, the opportunity presented itself and I took my stab at it and enjoyed it and pursued it.”
Cohen returned to “The Big Apple” after originally attending the University of Pennsylvania, and attended Columbia University as a political science major. Yet Cohen spent most of his time at WKCR-FM, the campus radio station, where he broadcast several sporting events including basketball, football and soccer. Cohen had the chance to cover sports, receive criticism and improve over time, finding his rhythm and proclivities that resonated on the air.
“College radio afforded me a chance to learn how to start working at this craft in a low-pressure environment and not subject anybody to my learning process since there were very few people listening,” Cohen said. “I think it was a great training ground in terms of just figuring out how to do what we do.”
Cohen called games from the moment he attended Columbia University, but briefly stepped away during his junior year to work at Sportsphone – a telephone service that updated fans about the latest scores and news in sports. As an on-air anchor, Cohen’s role was to try to read 30 or more scores within one minute’s time, a task that improved his on-air delivery and efficiency with words.
Once Cohen graduated from college, he started his career working in Lebanon, N.H. at a news radio station. Soon thereafter, he was able to find freelance play-by-play jobs, including with the Spartanburg Spinners of the South Atlantic League in 1983 and with the Old Dominion Monarchs men’s basketball team.
“I just wanted to get into the radio business and wasn’t really sure of my path,” Cohen said. “….I didn’t get my first real minor league job until five years out of college – and by that time I had a lot of radio training but I had not done a lot of baseball play-by-play.”
In 1986, Cohen was selected to be the full-time play-by-play announcer for the Durham Bulls in the Carolina League. Broadcasting solo rather than with a color commentator for 140 regular season games on the radio, Cohen knew that he would have to keep the audience both informed and entertained. The next year, Cohen continued broadcasting games solo in the International League for the Pawtucket Red Sox – his final tune-up before his call to the majors.
“Working solo is an interesting concept because you’re having a conversation with the listener but you don’t have any reaction,” Cohen said. “I think that the reaction you get from a partner to the things that you’re saying whether it’s adding information or having conversation or laughing at each other’s jokes; I think that adds a little bit to the broadcast.”
During the 1988 season, Cohen was notified that the Mets needed a fill-in broadcaster to call a Mets game on the radio alongside his childhood idol Bob Murphy. Although the assignment was not an audition, a broadcasting job opened up on the radio at the end of the season for which Cohen applied. He also explored other major league radio broadcasting jobs, and following several interviews, was offered roles to broadcast the Montreal Expos and the San Diego Padres. The Padres were looking for a quick commitment on Cohen’s end. However, he was reluctant to accept the job since he was still optimistic that he would receive a call back from the Mets.
At the time, Cohen was also broadcasting college basketball for Providence College and college football for Brown University but genuinely looked to transition to work within Major League Baseball. Out of desperation, Cohen made a call to the Mets on an arena payphone before a basketball game to try to receive an answer regarding the job. From the moment he was told ‘Yes,’ the decision had been made. He would be working with Bob Murphy broadcasting games on WFAN, the flagship radio station of the Mets, in the number one media market in the world.
“I had grown up in New York and grown up as a Mets fan,” Cohen said. “Once I got that job offer even though San Diego was very tempting because it’s San Diego, it was a no-brainer that I was going to take the Mets gig.”
He entered the role well-informed about the history of the franchise and in-tune with the fanbase, premises many broadcasters do not initially have in the major leagues. It gave Cohen the ability to be relatable and authentic towards the audience, expressing his views and opinions on the organization backed with encyclopedic knowledge and cogent, logical reasoning.
For the next 15 years, Murphy and Cohen worked together on the radio to bring Mets fans the game action through the team’s highs and lows, including during a World Series appearance in 2000. Being on the radio for his childhood team was a dream come true for Cohen – and he has not looked back since those first moments interacting with Murphy in the radio booth.
“I was in, I think, my second month working Mets radio in 1989 and I forgot who it was but somebody came up to me and said: ‘So you got this gig – what are you going to do next?,’” Cohen recalled. “My reaction then is the same as my reaction now: ‘Next? Why would I want to do anything next?’ Getting the gig was probably the most memorable moment of my life.”
Murphy was the play-by-play voice of the Mets from the team’s inception in 1962, and as time went on, he had to reduce his workload in order to maintain his health. In July 2003, Murphy, in his 42nd year with the organization, announced that he would be retiring from calling games on the radio at season’s end. He was subsequently diagnosed with lung cancer and fought the disease until he passed away in August 2004 at the age of 79.
“Working with ‘Murph’ was almost like a surreal experience for me,” Cohen said. “….To be sitting next to him every night and sharing a booth with him and interacting with him; I had to pinch myself virtually every day….. It wasn’t something that I ever thought about as a kid as even a possibility and yet here I was. It was almost like an out-of-body experience at times.”
At the start of the 2004 season, Cohen was joined in the radio booth by Howie Rose, who had been covering the Mets on television since 1996. Rose, like Cohen, had grown up a fan of the Mets since 1962 and first became infatuated in broadcasting when he listened to Yankees play-by-play announcer Mel Allen at the age of 7. Now working together, Cohen saw himself in Rose and was quickly able to foster an effective on-air chemistry conducive to sustained success. In short, they were able to pick up where Murphy and Cohen had left off, captivating fans of the Amazins’ for the next two seasons.
“I think of Howie as my brother from another mother,” Cohen said. “We share a lot of sensibilities; we shared a lot of experiences. It was so much fun to be able to bounce things off Howie over the course of nine innings every day. We had an enormous amount of fun.”
In March of 2006, SNY was created, which gave the Mets more control over their local media rights. Due to the move, the team reshuffled their announcers and added Gary Cohen to the television broadcasts – a move to a rather unfamiliar medium for someone who had been working in radio from the first day he called a baseball game. Joining him as color commentators were former teammates and 1986 World Series champions Keith Hernandez and Ron Darling, athletes Cohen followed as a young adult.
“Television couldn’t be more different in that you have 50 people, each of whom has a responsibility to bring a part of the broadcast to life,” Cohen said. “I think that was my biggest transition – understanding that I was not in control anymore. I was just a small spoke in the wheel as opposed to being the wheel. I think as I came to understand that more over my first couple of years doing television, I think it made me a lot more relaxed in terms of just settling into my role, doing my part and letting everybody else do their part.”
Over the years, the SNY broadcast booth has given viewers driving advice, discussed their favorite ice cream flavors, and traded baseball cards live on the air. They have also welcomed guests to the booth, including sitcom star Jerry Seinfeld and the winner of a yearly kidcaster contest where a young, aspiring broadcaster gets to call half an inning of a Mets home game. Through it all, they remain focused on the game and infuse their personalities throughout the action – almost like an alternate national broadcast centered around a local baseball game.
“As far as the playfulness, I think a lot of that stems from the mix of personalities – especially Keith,” Cohen said. “He just has a great sense of what works in terms of the absurd and the funny and the reminiscence and we’re all willing to go down that path and take it wherever it leads us. Virtually 0% of it is pre-planned; it’s just stuff that flows out of whatever goes through our brains at that moment.”
While Gary, Keith and Ron all have ties to the Mets over their careers in baseball, they call the broadcast “down the middle,” meaning they do not demonstrate biases towards either team. Instead, they are looking to provide fans with the necessary information and unfiltered opinion, being more objective than subjective. That approach has struck a chord with the cohort of sports fans in the New York metropolitan area, craving fair and balanced coverage of their favorite teams and the dissemination of the unequivocal truth.
“I know it’s not the same in other markets but it definitely is very important here to not just sell your team but to sell the sport and to me that’s of great importance,” Cohen said. “We’ve seen the regionalization of baseball and I feel as though fewer and fewer baseball teams are fans of baseball as opposed to fans of particular teams. We try [to] work against that; we try [to] make sure that people understand the game in its totality, not just in terms of who’s winning in that particular moment.”
Prior to the 2007 season, Kevin Burkhardt interviewed for the field reporter job with SNY but did not think he had a legitimate shot of being hired. Three years earlier, he had been working as a sales associate at Pine Belt Chevrolet after he was unable to break through the radio industry. A few years later, WCBS-AM gave him the opportunity to work part-time doing sports updates and he eventually joined its sister station, WFAN, as its New York Jets beat reporter. Once he landed the job at SNY, he worked to improve his craft and bring unique storylines to the SNY broadcasts to further enhance the broadcast coverage.
Burkhardt left SNY after the 2014 season to work in a full-time job with Fox Sports and is now the lead play-by-play announcer for its National Football League coverage. He has been working with color commentator Greg Olsen throughout the 2022 NFL season and will call his first Super Bowl from State Farm Stadium in Phoenix, Ariz. this upcoming February.
“Kevin was the greatest sideline reporter I’ve ever seen in the history of any sport,” Cohen said. “He just had a great personality; great air presence; [he] worked his butt off to get every story out of the clubhouse and became an integral part of our broadcast.”
Cohen has followed the Mets from the time he was young, causing some to erroneously think that his preparation for games is facile. In reality, Cohen shows up to the ballpark several hours before the game to read over media notes, statistics and compile relevant information for that night’s broadcast. Before the games, he makes it a point to visit the home clubhouse to make himself available to talk and sometimes interact with the players. Usually about one hour before the broadcast goes over the air, the commentators meet with their producer Gregg Picker in the press dining room to discuss broadcast elements and potential talking points, even though much of the end product is derived organically.
“To me, what’s great about this job is not the punctuation marks; it’s not the home run calls; it’s not the World Series games. It’s the day-to-day; it’s the 500-600 hours a year that you’re on the air and how you wear with your audience,” Cohen said. “People are listening to you and watching you, many of them every day, for hours each day over the course of six [or] seven months. As much as people focus on home run calls and strikeout calls and big moments, to me it’s the accumulation of all the small moments; all the little smiles along the way that make this job.”
During the offseason, Cohen continues to work as a play-by-play announcer, transitioning back to radio as the voice of Seton Hall Pirates men’s basketball games on AM 970 The Answer. Cohen had previously called St. John’s Red Storm men’s basketball games on WFAN, along with other college games early in his career. While he is still doing the same job, the role starkly contrasts his job with SNY in many ways – but it is something he looks forward to every year.
“College basketball on the radio is everything that baseball on TV isn’t,” Cohen said. “You sit six inches away from the action as opposed to hundreds of feet away. It’s a great change of pace; I love everything about it. I do it because it’s fun; that’s why I do the games.”
The Ford C. Frick Award is given annually to a major league broadcaster by the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum for “major contributions to baseball.” The 10 finalists to receive the award were recently announced, and it includes Boston Red Sox broadcaster Joe Castiglione; Cleveland Guardians broadcaster Tom Hamilton; and Cohen among other broadcasters both past and present. In the words of Murphy, it is a “happy recap” of the culmination of all the hard work and determination that it took him to reach this stage of his career, living a childhood dream.
“It’s incredibly humbling and gratifying,” Cohen said. “Just the group that I’m nominated with makes me gasp because a lot of those people are my friends and people that I admire. I don’t think that they could go wrong in picking any of them to be the Ford Frick winner. I’m just incredibly honored to be part of that group.”
Derek Futterman is a former associate editor and sports media reporter for Barrett Media. He previously interned for Paramount within Showtime Networks, wrote for the Long Island Herald and served as lead sports producer at NY2C. Find him on X @derekfutterman.
