Legendary Mets Announcer Set To Retire After This Season
The New York Mets have had some legendary broadcasters over the years, and Howie Rose was one of the team's best.
New York Mets fans have endured an offseason of change, with former stars being shipped out and new ones being signed to go with other potential new ones coming up through the ranks. Fans have always been able to lean on a set of familiar voices to describe what’s happening and fill them in on the details, but now they’ll be going through some changes in that department, too, with the news that longtime radio play-by-play announcer Howie Rose will be retiring at the end of the season. This sort of change might seem trivial to outsiders who haven’t gone through the Mets experience, but it’s not.
It’s not just that the Mets put their fan base through at lot, either—the team has a reputation for having the best announcers in baseball, and that includes Rose. What made Rose’s voice and broadcasts different wasn’t just his set of pipes, either. He had a knack for punctuating the right moments of a given game, and as Andrew Marchand of The Athletic noted, Rose’s knowledge of Mets stats and factoids was encyclopedic, with no bit of trivia he seemingly didn’t know about.
But Rose didn’t use that all-encompassing knowledge to clog up the broadcast. Like all great announces, he had the ability to turn a game into a story, and he had a near-perfect ability to balance game descriptions with the need for some entertaining moments when the games failed on that front. Rose has struggled with medical issues recently, as the 72-year old announcer was diagnosed with bladder cancer back in 2023.
That led him to cut back on the number of road games he called, and Rose is currently scheduled to call 81 home games, including the Subway Series contests against the New York Yankees, but no other “road” games. While the Mets announcer was definitely a “homer” who rooted for the Mets, he also pulled no punches. If the Mets made a mistake or played lethargically or poorly, he would let fans know about it, often in descriptions that were brutally honest or hilariously funny—sometimes both.