Howie Rose will take the microphone for one final Mets broadcast on Sunday, closing a four-decade run in New York sports and ending a relationship with the club that began when he was a Queens kid in the Shea Stadium upper deck.
| Year | Rose and the Mets |
|---|---|
| 1954 | Rose was born in Queens. |
| 1962 | He became a Mets fan in the franchise’s inaugural season. |
| 1969 | At age 15, he watched the championship club from Section 1, Row 1 behind home plate at Shea Stadium. |
| 1995 | Rose began the uninterrupted stretch that made him a Mets radio voice. |
| 2024 | He delivered the call on Pete Alonso’s decisive Game 3 Wild Card Series homer against Milwaukee. |
| 2026 | His final Mets call is scheduled for Sunday. |
The Mets will honor Rose this weekend, with another person taking over the on-field emcee duties that Rose has so often handled for the franchise’s biggest occasions. The club inducted him into its Hall of Fame three years ago, but Saturday’s ceremony will put the broadcaster himself at center stage.
A voice tied to the biggest moments
Rose arrived at this goodbye with a résumé that reaches beyond baseball. Many New Yorkers first knew him for the frantic “Matteau! Matteau! Matteau!” call when the Rangers won Game 7 of the 1994 Eastern Conference Finals. A generation of Mets fans has its own Rose refrain from October 2024, when Alonso’s late three-run homer sent the Mets past the Brewers in the Wild Card Series.
His call captured the moment: “It’s out of here. He did it. Pete Alonso has hit the biggest home run of his career.”
Alonso said Rose has become inseparable from the club in the minds of Mets fans.
“For so long, he has been the Mets’ voice to people,” Alonso said. “He means an awful lot to so many fans. It is great that he can finish this on his own terms and receive the appreciation he deserves.”
Alonso called himself fortunate to have played a small role in Rose’s long New York sports story, adding that the broadcaster “has done so much in the sports world.”
From Shea’s upper deck to the radio booth
Rose’s attachment to the Mets was not manufactured in a studio. He was eight when the club began play, and the 1969 championship turned a young fan’s interest into a lasting bond. He still returns in conversation to that summer and to his Shea Stadium seat behind home plate.
“Fifteen is the ideal age for a team you love to win a title,” Rose said. “You could handle school, and life was playing ball and watching baseball.”
Six years after that championship season, Rose entered broadcasting as one of the original voices on Sports Phone, the telephone score-and-information service for New York fans. He later became sports director at WHN radio, spent much of the next period in hockey, then returned to the Mets orbit in the late 1980s as host of the club’s “Mets Extra” pregame and postgame programming.
Since 1995, Rose has held a place in the Mets broadcast family alongside Bob Murphy and Lindsey Nelson. Across the franchise’s 65 seasons, one of those three voices has been present on radio for virtually every night of Mets baseball.
The memories behind every inning
Rose’s value has always been more than the clean call of a ball leaving the yard. He can watch a game in 2026 and pull a fitting memory from the 1960s, ’70s or ’80s, connecting current players and situations to old broadcasters, writers, front-office employees and forgotten members of the roster. His booth language can occasionally bend toward Yiddish, another part of a voice that belongs specifically to New York.
“I have not watched or heard every game, of course,” Rose said, “but I have known about every game the Mets have played. There are not many people who can say that now.”
The next Mets broadcaster will inherit a cherished chair, but not Rose’s particular route to it: the Queens childhood, the Shea memories, the hockey years and the direct link to Murphy and Nelson. Sunday will put his final call in the books. The absence that follows will be felt well beyond the radio booth.
