Like other moderately pathetic things, the New York Mets are defined by what they are not. They gestated in the wound the Dodgers and Giants left behind, and were eclipsed from birth by the glory of their crosstown rivals, the Yankees. Tethered to more middling fortunes, Mets fans pride themselves on finding humor, meaning and even beauty in failure. As was instilled in me by my father, who had it beaten into him by the Dodgers: Winning is uninteresting, as compared with the more edifying stuff that comes with losing. When the Mets underachieve, my world is properly ordered. More disorienting is the new reality: Steve Cohen, a billionaire owner with the capital and drive to make the team a perennial contender. Is this real? Can I be a party to this? When vertigo sets in, I find ground in the company of my old pal Howie Rose.
Howie Rose — of Brooklyn, the Bronx and, as of 1962 (the year the Mets were born), Queens, that underappreciated mecca of immigrant New York. Howie, as we fans call him, has been a fixture of New York sports broadcasting for half a century, and the voice of the Mets since 1995. In tone and spirit, he personifies the unbleached outer-borough Yiddishkeit of a public school kid who came out to the ballpark, fell in love with the game and never left. All things end, but for as long as the Mets can drag the summer out, Howie is guide, companion and fellow sufferer.
Howie is a “pro’s pro,” a play-by-play guy who always hits his marks and an observer whose rooting interest in the Mets never trumps his solemn duty to be the listeners’ eyes and ears. When you need him most is when Howie is at his best: say, in a tense ninth inning. In such moments, Howie’s technique is empirical and precise, a verbal cinematography of acute agitation. Meter quickening along with the tension, Howie walks you on the tightrope between heartache and deliverance: the Mets’ pitcher “sweeps a little dirt away from the left of the pitching rubber, steps behind the rubber, tugs once at the bill of his cap, takes a deep breath and steps to the third-base side of the rubber,” before the windup and the payoff pitch.
That’s how Howie called the end of Johan Santana’s 2012 no-hitter, the franchise’s first. Nobody had been more tormented than Howie by the Mets’ never having celebrated this statistical anomaly. I can’t be the only one whose principal joy that evening was of Howie’s finally getting his chance to call one.
Howie’s pictorial style is designed for radio, and radio is key to Mets fans’ tenderness toward Howie. “Radio is the most intimate medium out there,” Howie recently said. “It’s you and me. I’m talking to you.” Such intimacy invites time-travel and transference. One moment, Howie is my father circa 1982, making me believe that a struggling hitter is due for one. The next, Howie is my present-day reflection, a grown man whose day will be ruined if Díaz blows this save.
For the fan base, the most excruciating losses are made monuments in time: Mike Scioscia going deep off Dwight Gooden in ’88; Carlos Beltrán striking out in ’06, his bat still resting on his shoulder. Occasionally good things happen, too. Last season was a progression of sublime wonders. The most miraculous of all games took place the evening of Oct. 3, when, down two runs in an elimination Wild Card game against the Milwaukee Brewers, the slumping homegrown slugger Pete Alonso delivered a ninth-inning, three-run home run to turn the series. In his call, Howie rode the rhetorical surplus of the inning’s rising action into the denouement of Alonso’s homer. “Swing and a fly ball to right field,” he began. “Pretty well hit. Frelick back. At the wall. He jumps. It’s gone! He did it! He did it!” As Alonso circled the bases, the call became a logorrheic flow carried forward by elation and minimally contained by craft: the reassertion of situation and score, the roster of teammates waiting at the plate, the irresistible invocation of fairy tales. Fifty years into a storied career, the call is the call of an amateur. Mets fans’ eyes and ears? Certainly so. But more than that, Howie is our heart.
Would that we could all be the Dodger icon Vin Scully, that wizard of linguistic economy who served up word and silence in perfectly tailored proportion. But when your moment arrives, you don’t get to choose. You have no choice but to be what you are. Howie’s call was raw, Mets-y and unmistakably his. The call will bind him forever to Alonso, and cemented his bond to all of us who stupidly give ourselves over to this franchise. And having listened to it over 100 times now, I am confident in saying that as cathartic testimony to answered prayer, the call is a masterpiece.
But last season is now in the books. Henry David Thoreau could well have been describing baseball’s Opening Day when he wrote, “In a pleasant spring morning, all men’s sins are forgiven.” Pitchers’ losses are reset to zero, and with one good swing — or a lucky bounce — you could be batting a thousand. Is it tempting fate to think this may be our year? Might my finance-drenched optimism be but a prelude to a newly ignoble species of disappointment? Perhaps. But on Opening Day, how else is there to feel but hopeful? Come top of the first, Howie’s timbre will be especially buoyant, his enthusiasm that of a child returning to the bleachers after a long winter, summer stretching out as far as the eye can see.
Joshua Dubler is the son of Walter Dubler (1934-2024). He lives in Rochester, N.Y.
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