Sunday School: (Never to be) Forgotten Faces of Flushing #89 : Howie Rose The Voice That Became Family
For the past 88 weeks, our “ Forgotten Faces” series has taken a look back at Mets who, despite leaving their fingerprints on the franchise, may have slowly faded into the background of Mets history. Today, however, we have a slight wrinkle in the series. We are honoring a man who will never, ever fit that category. His name is permanently etched into the history of the New York Mets, not with a bat or a glove, but with a microphone, a remarkable memory, a passion for the game and a voice that has become as familiar to generations of Mets fans as the crack of the bat itself. Howie Rose isn't someone we have to remind Mets fans about. He is someone they will forever remember.
There are certain voices that don't just call baseball games.
They become part of your life.
For Mets fans of my generation, there was Lindsay Nelson. There was Bob Murphy. There was Ralph Kiner. Their voices came through the television and radio and somehow became as familiar as the voices around the dinner table.
For the generation that followed, there was Howie Rose.
And later this afternoon, Sunday, September 20, when the Mets take the field at Citi Field against the Philadelphia Phillies, Howie will call his final game as a member of the Mets broadcast team. The Mets will honor him with a retirement ceremony before the game, marking the end of a broadcasting career that has been intertwined with New York sports for more than five decades and with Mets baseball in one form or another since 1987.
That sentence is difficult to type.
Not because Howie Rose is disappearing from our lives. He isn't. He will continue to serve as master of ceremonies for special Mets events at Citi Field. But for those of us who have spent decades listening to him describe the Mets, there is something about knowing that there will be a final “Put it in the books” that makes this feel very different.
Because Howie wasn't simply the guy calling the game.
He was the guy who was there.
And for me, Howie has been there in more ways than I can possibly count.
I first got to know Howie through my work in sports media, and over the years he became a guest on my radio show numerous times. We shared plenty of conversations about the Mets, Rangers, Islanders, broadcasting, New York sports and the wonderfully strange world that exists when your job is to talk about the things you spent your childhood loving.
But my connection to Howie goes even deeper.
Howie Rose is a chapter in the book I wrote with fellow Kiner's Korner staff writer A.J. Carter, Glove Story: Fathers, Sons and the American Pastime. He also wrote the foreword to another book I co-authored with my fellow Kiner's Korner writer Howie Karpin, You Never Forget Your First: A Collection of New York Mets Firsts.
So when I say Howie Rose is part of my history, I don't mean that in the generic “I've interviewed him” sense.
He's literally "Put it in the Books"
And perhaps that is fitting, because Howie has spent his career putting New York sports history into words.
Howie grew up in Bayside, Queens, a Mets fan who attended Shea Stadium as a kid. He broke into broadcasting in 1975 as one of the original voices of SportsPhone, eventually becoming one of the original talk hosts when WHN became WFAN in 1987. He worked Rangers games, called the Islanders, worked Mets television, and eventually became the full-time radio voice of the Mets. He has been part of Mets broadcasts in various capacities for nearly four decades.
And that résumé doesn't even tell the story.
Because Howie's career wasn't simply about longevity. It was about being present for moments.
Lots and lots of moments.
Some of them belonged to the Mets.
Some belonged to the Rangers.
And some belonged to all of us.
I have been lucky enough to cover both teams, so Howie's voice has followed me through more than just baseball season. I heard him call hockey. I heard him call baseball. I sat across from him at ballparks and rinks. And like so many New York sports fans, I have accumulated memories in which the event itself and Howie's description of it are permanently attached.
That's what great broadcasters do.
They don't just tell you what happened.
They become part of what happened.
Howie understood that early.
In my interview with him about his book Put It in the Book, he talked about the moment that changed his life. It wasn't at Shea Stadium. It was in the fall of 1966, when an eight-year-old kid's radio dial landed on a Rangers game being called by Marv Albert.
“Hearing him do a game with the passion, the energy, the description, and the emotion that he brought to that broadcast hooked me,” Howie told me. “It was, for me, a seminal moment at a very early age.”
The irony is that more than half a century later, Howie would become that guy for somebody else's eight-year-old.
And somebody else's eight-year-old.
And somebody else's.
That's the beautiful circle of sports broadcasting.
Howie didn't simply admire Marv Albert. He eventually became his protégé and friend. In fact, Howie told me that he actually started a Marv Albert fan club in the summer of 1967.
Marv later wrote the foreword to Put It in the Book and summed up the impact Howie had made on him with a line that Howie still clearly cherished: “If I was back in my high school days, I would have started a Howie Rose fan club.”
The kid who started the Marv Albert fan club eventually became the Howie Rose millions of us listened to.
Not a bad career arc.
And while Marv helped shape the broadcaster, the Mets helped shape the fan.
Howie told me that when the Mets arrived in 1962, he was eight years old and essentially believed the franchise had been created specifically for him.
“I was narcissistic enough to think, having become a big baseball fan in 1961, that when the Mets were formed for the next year, that they were created just for me,” he said. “It's like, okay, now you're a baseball fan, here's your own team to root for.”
That Mets team lost its first game.
Howie was disappointed.
And, as he put it, “From that moment on, they became part of my DNA.”
Imagine that.
A kid growing up in Queens, falling in love with the Mets, going to Shea Stadium, listening to Lindsey Nelson, Bob Murphy and Ralph Kiner, and eventually growing up to work alongside two of them.
Howie once told me that was the part of his career that “absolutely knocks me over.”
And it should.
Because there are very few people who get to live out a childhood dream quite that completely.
Howie was especially influenced by Gil Hodges, whom he adopted as a hero almost immediately. When he later walked through the Gil Hodges entrance at Citi Field, he told me there was something “a little chilling” about seeing Hodges' image there.
That connection to Mets history has always been one of the defining characteristics of Howie's work.
He wasn't just calling the current Mets.
He understood where they came from.
He understood that every game was another page in a book that had started in 1962.
And perhaps that is why his most famous calls resonate beyond the words themselves.
“Put it in the books.”
The phrase became synonymous with Howie and with Mets victories. The Mets themselves now describe it as his signature call.
But before “Put it in the books” became attached to Mets victories, Howie gave New York hockey fans another phrase they will never forget.
“Matteau! Matteau! Matteau!”
If you were a Rangers fan in 1994, you didn't simply hear Stephane Matteau score.
You heard Howie Rose lose himself in the moment.
I was there for some of the great New York sports moments of my lifetime, and I have always said the Matteau goal is right there among the most incredible.
When I asked Howie about the call, he admitted something that made it even better.
He wasn't particularly thrilled with it at first.
“I had never, ever heard myself so out of control on a call,” he told me.
After the game, he worried about how it sounded. Then he started hearing people talk about the call. Then Russ Salzberg was talking about it the next morning.
And slowly, Howie realized that perhaps being out of control was exactly what the moment required.
Nearly three decades later, it remains one of the most recognizable calls in New York sports history.
That's the thing about Howie Rose.
He never tried to make the moment about Howie Rose.
He let the moment make Howie Rose.
That was true again on June 1, 2012, when Johan Santana threw the first no-hitter in Mets history.
Howie had spent decades refusing to participate in the superstition surrounding no-hitters. But that night, for reasons he couldn't quite explain, he decided not to say the words.
Instead, he found other ways to let everyone know what was happening.
“The Mets have all the hits and all the runs,” he said at one point.
Everybody knew.
When the final out was recorded, Howie was almost amused by what had happened.
“Here I am, the anti-superstition type through all of the years I was broadcasting, and now I've actually subscribed to the superstition, and the guy pitches a no-hitter.”
And then there was the 2015 National League Championship Series.
The Mets had just swept the Cubs, and Jeurys Familia struck out Dexter Fowler to send New York to the World Series.
“THE METS WIN THE PENNANT!”
And then came the words.
“Put it in the books!”
MLB later asked Howie to name his favorite Mets call, and that was the one he selected. He explained that growing up a Mets fan and pretending to call games on the schoolyard made it almost surreal to realize that he was now saying those words into a live microphone as the Mets broadcaster.
Of course, if we are talking about Howie's calls, we have to talk about Mike Piazza and September 11.
We have to talk about David Wright.
We have to talk about the Mets' improbable postseason moments.
And more recently, Pete Alonso's home run in Milwaukee in 2024, another call that immediately became part of Mets postseason lore.
“Pete Alonso with the most memorable home run of his career!”
Howie wasn't simply describing the ball leaving the park.
He was describing what the moment meant.
That's been his gift.
The Mets recognized that gift officially in 2023, when Howie was inducted into the Mets Hall of Fame alongside Howard Johnson, Al Leiter and Gary Cohen. He is also a member of the National Jewish Sports Hall of Fame, the New York State Baseball Hall of Fame and the New York State Hockey Hall of Fame.
But awards aren't really what define Howie.
People do.
Players.
Managers.
Broadcasters.
Fans.
And, occasionally, backup catchers who misunderstand a Three Stooges reference.
One of my favorite stories from Put It in the Book involves Todd Pratt.
At a Mets Welcome Home Dinner, Howie and Tom Seaver were introducing players. Howie talked about the importance of depth and joked that even the Three Stooges had Shemp.
Then he introduced Pratt, who was Mike Piazza's backup.
Apparently Pratt did not find the joke nearly as funny as Howie did.
A few minutes later, Pratt walked over to him and said, “We're through, dude.”
Howie had to explain that being compared to Shemp was actually a compliment.
And it eventually worked.
In fact, Howie said Pratt became so apologetic afterward that “he couldn't have been nicer. He practically sent me candy and flowers every day.”
That's Howie.
Funny without trying too hard.
Self-deprecating.
Observant.
And always with a story.
It is also why Put It in the Book was such a great read. The book wasn't an attempt to throw anybody under the bus. Howie told me that was intentional.
“It was going to be a lot of nice stories, and nobody's getting thrown under the bus,” he said. “There wasn't and is not any salacious material to be included in the book.”
He wanted to tell the story of a kid who grew up in the upper deck and somehow wound up in the broadcast booth.
And that may be the best description of Howie Rose there is.
He was one of us.
He was the kid in the upper deck.
He was the kid listening to games.
He was the kid who idolized Marv Albert.
He was the kid who believed the Mets had been created just for him.
He was the kid who fell in love with Gil Hodges and the Miracle Mets.
And then, somehow, he became the voice that other kids grew up listening to.
That is why this particular Never to Be Forgotten Faces is different.
Because most of the people we've written about in this series are people whose careers we look back upon.
With Howie, we have been looking forward while listening backward.
He was the constant.
I told him during our interview that my generation grew up with Murphy, Kiner and Nelson, voices that followed us from childhood through school, marriage, children and life.
And I told him that for another generation, he had become that same thread.
His reaction said everything.
“It just about knocks me over,” he said.
Then he explained why.
“To have had the opportunity to actually grow up watching Lindsay, Bob, and Ralph, and then to have worked with Bob and Ralph as partners, that's the thing that absolutely knocks me over.”
And then he said something that may be the most important thing in this entire story.
“When somebody says, as you just did, and I'm so flattered to hear it, that I represent to this generation what Murph did for theirs, it's probably the nicest thing in this business and the most humbling thing that anybody could say to me.”
That is what a broadcaster hopes for.
Not just to be heard.
To be remembered.
For those of us who grew up listening to Howie, there will never be another “Put it in the books” that doesn't make us hear the countless ones that came before it.
There will never be another “Matteau! Matteau! Matteau!” that doesn't transport a Rangers fan back to Madison Square Garden.
And there will never be another broadcaster quite like the kid from Bayside who somehow got to live the dream he first discovered when he stumbled onto Marv Albert on the radio in 1966.
Howie Rose once told me that his career had been “the epitome of ‘Living the Dream.’”
But for those of us who have listened to him for decades, Howie Rose wasn't just living his dream.
He became part of ours.
And that is why Howie Rose will never be a forgotten face.
He is a voice.
He is a memory.
He is part of the family.
And for generations of Mets and New York sports fans, he always will be.
Put it in the books, Howie.
And thank you.
Here is the full interview from March 2013:
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