"Every Game Was Like an Event"--Howie Rose (SNY)
Lovely job, by the folks at SNY Thursday afternoon...
Gary Cohen had long harbored the desire to call a game from the very top
row, of Shea. While logistics precluded the exact fruition of that
dream, Cohen, Ron Darling and Keith Hernandez were ensconced at a table
set up in one of the very first rows of the stadium's upper echelons.
Cohen, of course, spent his youth in those seats. (How big a fan was he?
Cohen went even in the late '70s, when the team was more-or-less awful,
and he was already a young man. The stadium was so empty in those days,
that a gal from Flu****ng I once dated, years later, told me that she and
her friends, when feeling too lazy to go to Jones Beach, would hop the
subway a couple of stops to Shea, buy general admission, and lay out
somewhere in the stands. They were all more than pretty, but could count
on no one being there, to bother them....)
It may be unique that such a fan has gotten to become the lead TV
broadcaster for the team he's followed since childhood. None of which
would matter, really, if the Mets' telecasts didn't continue to be first
rate. (Having finally gotten the baseball package, there is now no doubt
in my mind that the SNY team is simply the best in today's baseball.)
Former radio guy Kevin Burkhardt, as the games' sort of "roving
re****ter," is also a nice part of these festivities.
(By the way, another reason to admire the work of Ron Darling? A few
weeks ago Darling mentioned that after every game, late at night, or
early the next morning, he makes A SECOND COPY of his scorecard. It
helps him relive the game, he explained, and further lock it in his
memory.)
The telecast was made further special when Met vets Ed Kranepool and Art
Shamsky, stopped by.
(And a lovely bit of humor, later, when Hernandez called over a hot dog
vendor, and then professed outrage at the price of a stadium weiner.)
It was also terrific, in the sixth inning, when WFAN's Howie Rose
reunited with Cohen. It was charming to hear the two together again, and
to hear Rose particpate in what by this point had become kind of a
celebration of memory. It would be churlish of me not to mention how
Rose's voice also continues to be as much a part of the franchise as
almost any other element of the team's history.
Is there another team in baseball that has first class, from TWO
DIFFERENT teams, on both sides of its broadcast front?
Rose, of course, was also in those seats, years ago, and knows, how
rarified, and delightful, that air can be.
Exactly what was it to be young, and at Shea?
As Howie mentioned:
"Every game was like an event."
Like Thursday's broadcast.
Jim Burns (James H. Burns)
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Neil Best has a terrific column on this, over at NEWSDAY:
SNY's Cohen gets to call Mets game from upper deck -- -- Newsday.com
http://www.newsday.com/s****ts/baseball/mets/ny-spmedia165688023may16,0,7548213.column
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