Nearly half of the 31 seasons Gary Cohen has spent calling Mets games have been on the television side now, which hasn’t changed how Cohen sees his identity. He remains, in his view, a radio person who is doing TV.
Cohen, who called his 2,000th game for SNY on Tuesday night, talked to The Athletic about the differences in formats, the Mets media landscape and whether he would have needed to work so hard to ditch his New York accent were he a rising broadcaster today.
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Since we’re celebrating the past 2,000 games, let’s look to the future. Is it your hope to always call Mets games, so long as you’re working?
You know, it’s funny, when I first took the Mets job in 1989 I was, I don’t know, about maybe a month into it. And somebody — and I forgot who it was — came up to me and said, “Well, now you got this job, what are you going to do next?” It was such a foreign thought in my mind, because this is what I always aspired to! This is what I had wanted to do since I was a kid. And now I was back in New York, doing the Mets games for the team that I grew up rooting for.
This was the dream come true. And someone was asking me what I thought I was going to do next. Which I always thought — I remembered that ever since. I guess you’re still asking me that same question, and honestly, I’m extraordinarily happy doing what I’m doing. I really haven’t given much thought to anything else.
Put it this way: upon reaching the dream, was there ever an aspiration to something else? Monday Night Football?
I’ve done other sports, but baseball was always the base of what I done. I love college basketball — love it, love it, love it — and I do Seton Hall games on the radio, which probably 10 people listen to. Just because I love doing the games and I love my association with the people there. And I get to do the tournament for Westwood One, which is also an extraordinary amount of fun, and I’ve done hockey here and there. But baseball and the Mets, really for 31 years now, have been the base of what I’ve done, and what I’ve aspired to, and I can’t really imagine that changing.
I romanticize your radio days because that’s when I first startedlistening to baseball. I remember,years ago, somewhere,reading about youdiscussing the differences in formats. Now that you’ve done TV so long, how do you look at them?
Well, even 14 years later, I’m still a radio guy doing TV. I mean, there’s no question about that. The radio is what I grew up with, it’s what I aspire to do, it’s who I am, and I probably do TV more like radio than most TV guys do. And I have to be constantly conscious of not talking too much and not over-describing and doing the thing that you naturally do on radio. Other than that, it’s just dressing better and playing with others. In radio you’re the whole show, and in television you’re a piece of a very large team and dependent on others and have to work well with others in order to be successful.
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Do the formats connect differently?
I think it is different. I think that because people can see the game on television, the announcers are often background noise. Whereas on radio, if you’re interested in the game, you have to listen to the answers because otherwise there is no game. So I think it definitely connects with people differently, and I think you have to approach it differently. When I was on radio, I was much more of a nuts-and-bolts, make-sure-that-everybody-could-see-everything-in-their-mind announcer. Whereas on television, there’s a lot more digression, a lot more comedy. Things other than the event happening right in front of people which they can see.
How much room isthere for innovation in both formats? Or is the broadcast an areawhere, because of baseball’s tie to the past, it’s better off unchanged? There was a little discussion in Boston recently about the hypothetical validity of a talk-show format.
I think radio is very different from TV in that regard. Again, on radio, unless you are adequately describing the game in front of you, you are doing a disservice to the people who are listening, because they can’t see. The idea of doing a talk show format on radio for a baseball game does not make any sense. It may make sense to other people. Television’s completely different and we have an incredibly innovative producer in Gregg Picker who has tried to expand the types of things that we do. Whether it’s going for information, or education, or levity. Bill Webb was our director when we started, and he passed away a couple years ago. But he also taught our current director, Dan Barr, and they both have been innovative in the kinds of camera angles that they use and they will experiment, I think, with all of those things to help break up what can sometimes be the monotony of a long baseball season. But at the end of the day, you’re still showing the game, and reacting to the game. And the rest of it, from an announcer standpoint, certainly, all depends on the personalities in the booth.
You got rid of your New York accent. Do you think if you were coming up today, you would have had to? There seems to be greater tolerance for a lack of traditional polish.
That’s a really good question. I think that has changed. Well, I think play by play, still because you are in peoples’ ears for so many hours over the course of a season, I think, if you listen around baseball, most of the voices you hear are people who have polished sounds. But I remember the first time I heard Chris Russo on the radio, and realized that it was possible for somebody who sounded completely different to succeed in this business. I think the standards have changed to a certain extent in other realms of radio and TV, but probably not so much in play by play.
I saw you recently discussed your speech impediment that you worked to get rid of in college. What exactly was it?
I had a lazy L. I talked about my first effort, a Penn-Lafayette freshman football game, so here I was doing a game involving the Lafayette Leopards, and on my tape it sounds … very much like Tom Brokaw. I had to work really hard to get that out of my speech, particularly when I transferred and I was doing games with the Columbia Lions. There was some imperative there to work hard to eliminate that.
I know SNY and the Mets allow you room for candor, that comes through. I also know there can be blowback behind the scenes in coverage of a team anywhere. Have you had any?
I would say that over the 31 years that I’ve been doing the Mets, I have been incredibly well insulated from all of that. And that’s a credit to the folks that I worked for at WFAN, and it’s a credit to the folks that I work for at SNY: that when and if there has been blowback, very little of it has come back to me. We are given a mandate to be honest and to be forthright, and obviously, there are lines that you can’t cross in terms of the language and the substance of what you say. Nobody’s ever said where those lines are, but I think we all have a pretty good idea of how to be honest and express our opinions and make sure people know how we feel without crossing that line.
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Let’s say the team is playing consistently bad baseball. Do you ever have to restrain yourself?
I don’t think it really works that way. You know it’s like when, years ago people used to say, “Well, how do you, as a fan” — and I grew up as a fan of the Mets — “How do you not just scream and yell?” And I said, “Well, I channel that fandom through my calls.” That’s what I do, that’s the nature of my job. And I think the same thing is true with what you’re talking about. You know how to channel the things that you need to say through whatever filter is necessary to make sure that you’re not indulging in character assassination, and you’re not being shrill in a situation that calls for intelligent conversation.
I think that’s what it really ends up coming down to. We’re trying to entertain and educate and enlighten people, and I think you can do that with a certain amount of well informed verbiage. Spewing in a way doesn’t really serve anybody’s purposes.
This question comes courtesy of The Athletic beat writer extraordinaire Tim Britton. We hear a lot about the three-man booth, but what’s the dynamic if it’s just you and Ron Darling, or just you and Keith Hernandez?
It’s completely different. When Ron and Keith are there together, they are playing off each other as much as it’s me interacting with them. It’s one of the unique qualities of our booth. Normally, when you have a three-man booth, the play-by-play person is addressing the color person and the color person is not necessarily interacting with the other person, and our broadcast is completely different. It’s three co-equal members and the conversations can go in any particular direction. When it’s just one or the other of them, it’s a little different dynamic, and it’s different with Ron than it is with Keith. Because they’re different. I can’t explain to you exactly how it’s different, but every — again, any booth is dependent on the personalities within.
We all bring different things to the table, and the interaction is what it happens to be that night.
Todd Zeile is your first new partner in some time, right?
Yeah, I mean other than a couple of games here and there. I think Ed Coleman filled in a couple games when Keith was sick, I’m trying to remember—there were a bunch of folks in spring training. Cliff Floyd did some games, Todd did some games. There might have been some others too. I’m not recalling off the top of my head. As far as more than a game or two in the regular season, yeah, he was the first other than Ron or Keith that I can recall anyway.
Do you have to break him in like a new mitt?
I’ve worked with a lot of people in my life. Going back to when I started out doing play-by-play. I think that whomever you work with, you try and be welcoming to that person and bring out whatever they’re bringing to the table, you know? Todd had a really underrated career, played a lot of different places, so he knows a lot of different people. He also had a fascinating life off the field. So he’s got a lot of reference points, including the years that he spent with the Mets. I think that you have to approach people where they live. And I think over the course of the few weeks that Todd filled in, I think he and I got better and better at bringing out what he could do best. I thought by the end of the 20-something games he did, I thought it was really working well.
I know I’m channeling what I see on Twitter here, but it feels like the New York backpages and the type of stories that I grew up with in New York, consistently critical and hard-hitting, draw pushback more than they used to. Anything, it seems, draws pushback. How do you see the evolution of the coverage of the team and the reactions?
Well, I think as a society, individuals have a lot more outlet for anger than they’ve ever had before. Especially in the anonymous settings of social media, they’re not shy about expressing it. But you know, that’s a trend that accelerated during the advent of sports talk radio as well. I think it would be extraordinarily difficult to be a beat writer these days, because of the demands to be immediate and yet, at the same time, provide depth, and dealing with the pushback from fans who have expectations in the moment.
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I think very little of that affects us in the job that we do. Because we have our little bubble. We just do the game. We show up every day. We’re in the clubhouse. But for the most part, our job is to chronicle the game over the three hours and very little outside that bubble ends up having an impact on us. And I feel fortunate in that, that people can scream and yell on the sidelines if they want, but we can also ignore it —which is good probably.
I’ve been in New York a week, and it seems Mets ownership is as hot a topic as ever. What’s your take on the state of the Mets?
The Mets are always a fascinating study. It’s, what are we now, in Year No. 58? And it’s been a history of a lot of failure, punctuated by extraordinary achievement. And it seems as though there’s more drama surrounding this franchise than most. But otherwise, it’s just a baseball team trying to win. And you know, if you look at the history of the, I don’t know, Texas Rangers, it’s not all that different, right? It’s just that it’s in New York. There are certain flashpoints. And sometimes things get accelerated because of where we are and who they are. It’s never dull.
Isthere such a thing as a perfect call?
I don’t know, it’s all so ephemeral, right? Because it’s all in the moment. You’re combining your vision of what’s happening with your language skills, with your timing, with trying to process what you’re seeing and expressing yourself in the moment, and there’s no backspace. I try never to look back. I think it’s kind of like a player, in that, if you’re stewing about what just happened, then it’s going to affect what’s about to happen. There’s always another pitch, there’s always another play, there’s always another game. And I try not to ever dwell. But there’s probably no such thing as a perfect call.
Were you ever a dweller?
No — well, I mean, when I first started out, when I was in the minor leagues trying to learn how to do this, I used to listen back to every game, every day, and nitpick what I was doing, which is how I got better. I think it’s the only way to get better is to be your own worst critic. But I haven’t done that in many, many years.
(Top photo: Alex Trautwig / MLB Photos via Getty Images)
