The beauty of sports is its unpredictability. If you’re a die-hard fan, you know the feeling. Gut-wrenching losses or improbable wins, a 162-game baseball season has its proverbial ups and downs. But for Mets fans, there’s one thing they can expect when they watch their team play, and that’s the man who is always there with every pitch.
A pleasant good evening, everybody, and welcome to this week’s Pipe Dream Job column.
You may have heard that line before, as it comes from one of the best play-by-play announcers in all of baseball, current SNY and long-time Mets radio broadcaster, Gary Cohen.
Entering his 19th year broadcasting the Mets, Cohen is truly living his “dream job.” Growing up a Mets fan in Queens, Cohen envisioned a career in broadcasting, but only because his first choice didn’t come to fruition.
“My aspiration as a kid was to be the shortstop for the Mets or power forward for the Knicks,” joked Cohen, who lacked the natural ability to pursue either sport. “It was a matter of the merger of sports and radio, both of which always fascinated me, and it came to be my niche.”
Cohen, a political science major at Columbia University, spent more time at the radio station than he did at the library. But for the sports enthusiast, it was that dedication to an extracurricular activity that ultimately prepared him for his future job.
“As far as doing play-by-play is concerned, there’s only one real way [to learn], and that’s by actually doing it so you can critique your own tapes,” said Cohen, who broadcast college games and did a sports magazine show. “The preparation for doing that job is not learned in the classroom, it’s learned from growing up reading about sports and watching games.”
Cohen got his first big break doing radio play-by-play for Virginia’s Division I basketball team after working for a radio station in New Hampshire and a larger station in South Carolina. The following year in 1986, Cohen nabbed a broadcasting job with the Durham minor league baseball team. If not for that job, Cohen may have found himself calling three-point shots off the front rim rather than 300-foot shots off the foul pole.
“I felt I was better at basketball and it was more of an action sport,” said Cohen, who was a little apprehensive about doing baseball. “It’s such a game of conversation and storytelling because there’s so little action during a course of a game.”
But for Cohen, who chose the radio job for the Mets rather than offers from two other teams in 1988, it is that exact challenge of calling baseball games that makes viewers feel more connected.
“I think the fact that you’re on the air every day, seven days a week, three to four hours a day, allows you to develop a stronger connection with fans than you do with any other sport,” he said.
A sport like baseball, which can have at least a minute of down time in between pitches, requires a lot of pertinent topics to keep a listener, or viewer, captivated. Cohen must have a keen sense of what is going on with the Mets team and organization, what is happening around baseball, and really, what is going on in the world. He believes every pitch, including the home run calls or ball fours, and every game including the one-run and blowouts, is telling of what makes a great broadcaster.
“It’s as much how an announcer calls the least important pitch of the game as he does the most important pitch,” said Cohen, who is mostly known for his “It’s Outta Here!” home run call. “That’s more important than the big call, the signature call, the thing that gets replayed on the highlight show.”
But in the past two years, Cohen has had his share of highlight coverage, thanks to a new job opportunity. Cohen, who had done radio broadcasting all of his life, was presented an interesting offer to leave his beloved radio booth and switch to television. When the SNY Network began in 2006, executives approached Cohen with the thought of teaming alongside former baseball players Ron Darling and Keith Hernandez for television broadcasts.
“It was the right time, right people, right place,” said Cohen, who had ample opportunities to jump to television in the past but chose not to. “[It was] a chance to start with a new network and still be a part of the Mets.”
Cohen did see a shift in the way he covered games. Undoubtedly, every pitch call and exact location does not need to be as descriptive on television, but now teamed with former Mets Darling and Hernandez, he is not necessarily the go-to guy for insight and analysis. Day in and day out, Cohen doesn’t write an outline of topics to talk about. He sees the direction each conversation takes during each game with Darling and Hernandez.
“What I do every day is make sure I’m fully prepared for whatever might come up,” Cohen said. “Each day is different, and every day you never know what is going to show up in the course of a broadcast.”
Now that it’s the offseason, Cohen is making the adjustment from broadcasting almost every day for seven straight months to almost no work at all.
“Take the kids to school, go out and run four to five miles and figure out what to do for the rest of the day,” said Cohen of his typical day at home. But February is a new start for Cohen and the Mets who, like many fans, were shocked at the way the team finished the 2007 season.
“It’s a mystery as to what went wrong and how they could possibly not be in the postseason,” Cohen said. “They really need to examine what they’re doing in terms of developing young pitching.”
Regardless of who the Mets sign this offseason, the excitement of starting a new year and every game during a lengthy season is what makes Cohen enjoy going to the ballpark every day.
“To me that moment of anticipation right before the first pitch every night is a rush,” said Cohen. “It’s when that moment stops being a rush is when I’ll probably quit.”
Mets fans hope that isn’t anytime soon.
Published Nov. 6, 2007 in Binghamton University's "Pipe Dream" Newspaper.
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