Howie Rose has been a voice synonymous with New York Mets baseball for nearly a quarter-century, and for the first time in his career last season, he had to cut his season short to undergo a medical procedure. A fan of the team from their inception in 1962, Rose watched Tom Seaver and the 1969 “Miracle Mets” win a World Series championship, lived through the 1977 “Midnight Massacre” trade and watched the franchise rebuild and win another championship in 1986.
The Mets’ yearly campaigns, aside from the shortened 2020 season, have always begun at spring training, first in Tampa, Fla., and, since 1988, in Port St. Lucie, Fla. For Rose, being back at spring training among the players, coaches and management evinced feelings of nostalgia with the prescience that baseball would indeed be played in 2022, and he would once again be in the booth bringing fans the action.
“It was a very, very joyful experience for me just to get back behind the mic with a baseball field in front of me and the game going on,” said Rose. “You don’t get the same flow of adrenaline in a spring training game as you do for a regular season game, but I will say I had that adrenaline flowing a little bit more strongly.”
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Howie Rose became infatuated by the possibility of becoming a broadcaster from the time he was 7 years old listening to Mel Allen call New York Yankee games. As a native New Yorker, he grew up following professional sports in the area and took note of the styles of various announcers, something that eventually helped him craft his own distinct sound. At the age of 13, Rose created and served as president of “The Marv Albert Fan Club,” dedicated to play-by-play announcer Marv Albert, a person who became a mentor to Rose and helped him as he made his way into the industry.
During his time as an undergraduate student at Queens College, Howie Rose was a credentialed media member for the NHL’s New York Islanders in their inaugural season. It was an experience that set him on a path to becoming a professional, positioning him for his first job working at Sports Phone as its weekend night announcer. By dialing 976-1313, sports fans had the ability to hear the latest game scores and news about their favorite teams. Shortly after in 1977, Rose worked at WHN, a country music station in New York City, as a morning sports anchor, and eventually served as its sports director before leaving in 1983. He continued working in radio when he became an update anchor for WCBS, and, on the side, served as a freelance broadcaster for the NBC Radio Network.
July 1, 1987 is one of the days that transformed sports media. It marked the official launch of WFAN, the first radio station dedicated to the sports talk format. Rose’s former station, WHN, officially flipped formats and became the first-ever 24/7 sports talk radio station, and he became one of its inaugural hosts.
Rose was behind the microphone as WFAN’s first-ever nighttime host on weekdays, while also hosting the Mets Extra show and working alongside his childhood idol Marv Albert as a backup radio play-by-play announcer for the NHL’s New York Rangers. Through countless hours of listening to Albert and other broadcasters combined with his vast experience up to that point in time, Rose had evolved as an announcer – all while remaining in his hometown.
“There comes a time for every young broadcaster when… you just begin to realize that you’ve got complete command of what you’re supposed to do between the language and your ability to condense what you’re seeing on the field; or on the ice; or on the court, to a point that makes it understandable to the listener,” said Rose. “When you get to that point, you’re, for lack of a better word, polished, but I don’t know if that’s a philosophical thing. It evolves over a period of time.”
Like Howie Rose, Albert grew up in New York City and was a fan of the local teams. Rose gravitated towards him was because of his ability to show fandom on the broadcast without it becoming subjective. It is a lesson he took with him throughout his career and one he continues to carry with him today.
“He seemed to be an unabashed rooter for those teams – the Knicks and Rangers – and then as his career grew, he, I think, tried to stress the importance, and properly so, of objectivity and being able to tell the story as it unfolded in front of you,” said Rose. “That doesn’t mean that you can’t have that emotional bond with whichever team you happen to be broadcasting – if it’s real.”
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May 27, 1994. Eastern Conference Finals Game 7. The New York Rangers hosted the New Jersey Devils at Madison Square Garden with a trip to the Stanley Cup Finals on the line, and held a one goal advantage into the game’s final minute. Vying for their first Stanley Cup Finals appearance since 1979, Rangers fans were on their feet in hopeful anticipation. As the clock ticked down below 20 seconds, the Devils pulled their goaltender and managed to sneak a shot past Rangers goaltender Mike Richter to tie the game at one, and keep their championship aspirations alive.
After a scoreless first overtime that kept the game tied, Rangers forward Stéphane Matteau intercepted the puck in the second frame for a scoring opportunity against the hall-of-fame goaltender Martin Brodeur. In what was shaping up to be an all-time dramatic conclusion, Rose told the listening audience of the thrilling finish in one of the most iconic calls in NHL history.
“Matteau behind the net, swings it in front, he scores! Matteau! Matteau! Matteau! Stéphane Matteau! And the Rangers have one more hill to climb, baby, but it’s Mount Vancouver! The Rangers are headed to the Finals!,” exclaimed Rose in a jubilant moment for Blueshirts fans within a city of 16 million.
In that moment, Rose’s passion for both the Rangers and New York sports as a whole shined through. All of his years of practicing with a tape recorder in the blue seats as a fan watching the Rangers had led to that quintessential moment he could, for so many years, only refer to as a verisimilitude. Yet he always remained ready for the opportunity to arrive, and when it did, he delivered a call that represented what had happened appropriately. Twenty-eight years later, the magnitude of that once-in-a-lifetime moment is still evident to Rose each time he steps behind a microphone.
“It’s what we work for – it’s what we live for,” said Rose when asked about the significance of calling memorable moments. “It was stuff that I dreamed about as a fan…. Just thinking about it still gives me goosebumps.”
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Rose departed WFAN shortly thereafter as both a host and announcer, joining SportsChannel to replace Jiggs McDonald as the television play-by-play voice of the NHL’s New York Islanders. While he grew up a Rangers fan by virtue of their being in existence while he was young, Rose lived close to Nassau Coliseum and watched the team win four straight Stanley Cup championships from 1980 to 1984. Up until that point though, Rose’s career had been largely concentrated in radio, and while he wound up calling hockey games on television for 20 years, radio always was and remains as his preferred medium of choice.
“There’s much more description on radio,” explained Rose, “and the thrill of taking a blank canvas and painting something verbally to create an image that’s sharp enough and clear enough for a listener to interpret so that he or she can see what’s going on even though they’re not actually watching it – That’s the greatest challenge in broadcasting to me. Because of that, I’ve got a huge preference, artistically, for radio.”
Calling Islanders games was not Rose’s only gig in 1995 though, as he also began broadcasting games for the Mets on the radio and, one year later, in the television booth along with Ralph Kiner on MSG Network. For fans of National League baseball in New York, Rose has served as the soundtrack of summer from that time on, and in just his second season in the medium, was nominated for a New York Emmy Award. Calling games on the radio, Rose affirms, prepared him extremely well in transitioning to television, but he did have an eye-opening moment on day one of his new job.
“I thought to myself at the end of the [first] game, ‘Man, that was easy,’” recollected Rose. “You’ve got so many different variables on television that conspire to make your job easier. You’ve got a producer who tells you what… to say in the open; you’ve got a director who’s showing you the pictures that you have to respond to, and you’ve got the game that you describe only in snippets as opposed to vividly [like] the way you have to on radio…. I think I could roll out of bed and stumble into a television booth and do a game and not embarrass myself. I couldn’t imagine myself doing that on radio.”
Indeed, Rose did return to radio – and WFAN for that matter – when legendary Mets broadcaster Bob Murphy retired in 2003. He worked with Gary Cohen for three years before Cohen joined the newly-launched SNY as the team’s television play-by-play announcer, along with analysts and 1986 World Series champions Keith Hernadez and Ron Darling. Since then, Rose has been the primary voice of the Mets Radio Network, and has continued to work in that role with various different partners over the years.
While some radio announcers have called games solo, such as former Dodgers broadcaster Vin Scully, Rose prefers having a partner to accompany him throughout the broadcast. For the last three seasons, that partner has been Wayne Randazzo, a radio broadcaster from Chicago, Ill. who had been hosting the Mets pregame and postgame shows on WCBS NewsRadio 880, the flagship radio home of New York Mets baseball.
“You need someone to bounce things off with, and you need someone to provide a counterpoint to whatever it is that I might be saying or we might be opining about,” said Rose. “I’m also at a point in my career where I absolutely love mentoring younger broadcasters, and… I just love watching younger broadcasters evolve into real good, solid major leaguers.”
Rose acknowledges that he has been fortunate to work in his hometown for the entirety of his broadcasting career, working games for the teams with which he grew up. While his situation is not completely unique, he knows it is extremely rare, a primary reason as to why he tells prospective broadcasters pursuing a job an incommodious truth of the industry.
“As you go to college and start to think about doing this beyond school as a full-fledged professional, you need to be willing to relocate; you need to be willing to be lonely even as you perhaps marry and raise a family,” said Rose. “You have to be prepared to deal with the sometimes very deep depression of being away from them for days or weeks at a time. That’s not easy, and you have to know that that’s all part of the equation, and you have to, if not necessarily embrace it, accept it and be willing to deal with it.”
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As Howie Rose continues to recover from his medical procedure, he is making lifestyle changes to ensure he can remain behind the microphone for many seasons to come as the Mets pursue their first World Series championship since 1986. Rose will still be calling 130 of the team’s 162 games; however, he will not be traveling with the team past the Mississippi River on trips to the West Coast to cities including San Francisco, Los Angeles and Denver among others. Jake Eisenberg, the lead play-by-play broadcaster for the Omaha Storm Chasers, has been hired by the Mets and WCBS to fill in for Rose during the games he misses, serving as the booth’s third voice.
“The baseball schedule is unforgiving and as you get older – it’s like a player – if you want to stay sharp, you need a blow here and there,” stated Rose. I don’t know if I would have done it right now, but certainly in a year or two.”
Rose has called a no-hitter, various cycles and a pennant-clinching game. He has watched the careers of all-time great players unfold, including Mike Piazza, David Wright and Jacob deGrom. He has and continues to serve as the Mets Opening Day master of ceremonies, possesses a near-encyclopedic knowledge about the franchise and is a fixture around the ballpark. But the one thing he has yet to do is call a World Series championship, and it is something he and every other Mets fan has and continues to patiently wait for. That is why, if the Mets qualify for postseason play, but happen to be in one of the locations Rose is refraining from traveling to during the regular season, all bets will be off.
“Once they get to the postseason, assuming they do, I don’t care where they’re playing,” exclaimed Rose. “I don’t care if they’re playing on Guam; I’m making that trip.”
Come this Friday, April 15, Howie Rose will be calling a game from the Bob Murphy Radio Booth at Citi Field for the first time since August 31 of last year, and you can unequivocally “put it in the books” that he is ready to be back in the fold.
“We’ve got the Tom Seaver statue unveiling and the Jackie Robinson [Day] ceremonies, and obviously our pregame introductions and all that,” said Rose. “To be back in that saddle is going to be very, very exciting for me.”
