PORT ST. LUCIE — As the longtime radio voice of the Mets, Howie Rose has provided generations of fans with a lifetime of memorable calls. It’s almost as if he was able to pay forward something his father wasn’t able to experience, as Alzheimer’s Disease robbed him of his memory.
Rose announced the 2026 season would be his last in the Mets booth on Thursday. It will conclude a broadcasting career that has spanned more than 50 years and seen him call games for the Mets, Rangers and Islanders. A lifelong Mets fan from Queens, Rose credits his late father Bob for his baseball fandom and his eventual entry into baseball play-by-play. Unable to share his career with his father after his passing while Rose was still a senior at Cardozo High School, the illustrious broadcaster has decided to retire at 73 years old to be able to enjoy moments with his family while he still feels good enough to create new memories.
“My wife, Barbara, and daughters, Alyssa and Chelsea, have sacrificed so much for so long. I’m 72 now, so effectively, I’ll be retiring at 73 and to me, that’s, that’s just enough,” Rose said. “If I’ve lost a tick or two off my fastball, I’ve learned to sort of compensate for that. But I don’t want to hang around too long to where things become noticeable, but they’re not what they were.”
Rose, a member of the Mets Hall of Fame, grew up attending games at the old Yankee Stadium with his father, and later made his home in the upper deck of Shea Stadium. He started his career in the late 1970s with Sports Phone, before moving over to WCBS radio and WFAN. In 1987, moved from the upper deck to the broadcast booth.
Rose idolized the original Mets broadcast trio of Bob Murphy, Ralph Kiner and Lindsey Nelson, eventually taking Murphy’s spot alongside Gary Cohen in the TV booth. Though he doesn’t quite feel that he belongs in the same category as those three or even mentioned with broadcasters like Vin Scully, baseball fans in Queens and beyond might disagree.
A framed photo of them still hangs in the radio booth, giving Rose motivation during games when things start to wane.
“It’s there for a reason,” Rose said. “Not only because of what they meant to me, but it’s so humbling for me to be part of that history and lineage. When we get a game that’s dragging on, or it’s one-sided, or it’s like, ‘Enough already, I’m coming back tomorrow. It’s midnight, I’ve had enough, I’m ready to go home,’ you don’t want to impart that on the air. I look at that picture, and that is a reset…
“That kind of recalibrates me and just reminds me — even with that little glance — what I’m blessed to do and who I’ve been blessed to follow. Those three in that picture mean everything to me.”
You don’t need a screen with Rose. He paints a picture so vivid that fans feel as though they’re also sitting in the upper deck on a summer day. It’s evocative of another time, and it reminds us why calling play-by-play on the radio is so difficult, and why listening to the greats feels so special.
There was “Matteau, Matteau, Matteau” as the voice of the New York Rangers. A simple, yet iconic call that came when former Blueshirts winger Stéphane Matteau scored the game-winner in double overtime of Game 7 in the 1994 Eastern Conference Final against the New Jersey Devils. Matteau’s goal sent them to the Stanley Cup Final, where the Rangers eventually defeated the Vancouver Canucks, the last Cup won by the team in Midtown.
More recently, there was Rose’s iconic call of Pete Alonso’s home run in Milwaukee during the 2024 NL Wild Card series. His favorite call from that playoff run, however, was actually his call of Francisco Lindor’s grand slam in the NLDS a few weeks later.
“I’ll probably be ridiculed for saying this, and I apologize for sounding brash, but I really felt as though I had a bit of I had my own little Vince Scully moment after the Lindor grand slam,” he said. “He crossed home plate, and I said, and if you remember, in that game, the Mets had been leaving runners on for 5-6 innings, whatever it was, and it was getting a little scary that they weren’t able to cash in on any of those opportunities. But Lindor hits the home run, and I punctuated it by saying, ‘They were famished for the big hit all night, and Francisco Lindor just provided a feast.’
“I thought, ‘Wow, you pulled that out of a hat someplace!’”
In recent years, Rose has taken a step back. He and his wife, Barbara, now reside in Florida full-time after selling their house in New York. The Mets will still have him serve as the master of ceremonies for various events moving forward, but day-to-day, he’s ready to put his broadcasting career in the books.
“Vin Scully left the Dodgers and life went on out there,” Rose said. “I would never be so bold as to put myself in that pantheon, so if I just look at it through this narrow prism of Mets broadcasters, what they meant to me growing up, and extrapolate from that what that might mean to a current generation of Mets fans, that is extremely humbling.”