Howie Rose Will Always Believe |
The broadcaster Howie Rose is bracing for a meeting with Howie the dog. Rose walks briskly through a tunnel beneath Citi Field’s box seats, exchanging quick greetings with A. J. Ewing, a promising 21-year-old Mets outfielder who looks more like he’s 12, before climbing the home dugout steps and walking into the sun and onto the dirt beside first base.
It is three hours before the first pitch of the final July Mets game Rose will broadcast from the team’s radio booth. He got his start with the team doing pre- and postgame radio shows in 1987 — one year after, he ruefully points out, they last won the World Series — and he has been doing Mets TV or radio play-by-play since the mid-’90s. For 40 seasons, he’s had a front-row seat to confounding, sometimes epic disappointment. And in recent weeks, he has been receiving a wealth of accolades for that work. It’s part of the lead-up to Rose’s retirement on September 20, following the last out of the Mets’ final home game of the season. Tonight’s honor comes courtesy of the Mets and America’s VetDogs. Their newest service trainee, a four-month-old yellow lab, is named after him.
Howie — the human — is clearly moved by the gesture. He is also wary. “I am, of course, allergic to dogs,” Rose tells me under his breath, his delivery a perfect combination of humor, irony, and bitterness. When the namesakes pose for photos on the dugout bench, Rose takes his seat cautiously, muttering something about “enzymes in the saliva.” The scene is pure Mets: hope plus the promise of tears and the possibility of hives.
Rose was 8 years old when the Mets first took the field in 1962 and proceeded to incompetently yet endearingly lose a then-record 120 games. The boy was hooked, and that hook sunk in deeper seven years later when the Mets astonishingly became world champs. Rose spent countless adolescent days and nights in the upper deck of Shea Stadium, idolizing Tom Seaver and dreaming of becoming the next Marv Albert.
It happened, mostly. After college, Rose read scores and updates for Sports Phone, later landing a talk show on the revolutionary all-sports radio station WFAN before moving into play-by-play work on radio and TV. His first indelible moment came in 1994, when Stéphane Matteau scored a........