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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Yes, tonight begins this year's Subway Series between the Yankees and the Mets. It's a fun ritual in New York every year that pits the Bronx against Queens, navy blue and white against a brighter blue and orange. The different legacies and cultures of the two teams and their fan bases, which we'll talk about a little bit. We are thrilled to have with us for a few minutes, the television voice of the New York Mets on their channel, SNY, Gary Cohen, not so much to preview the games per se, but to talk about life in New York as seen through the Subway Series and from the broadcast booth.

It's also SNY's 20th season as the Mets' TV channel. Gary Cohen, along with his partners Ron Darling and Keith Hernandez, have done the games all this time. SNY reached out to us to suggest having Gary on before the Subway Series in part to celebrate their two decades. I said, "Have Gary Cohen on the show? Let me think about it." Yes. Are you kidding? What a treat. Gary, it's great to have you with us. Welcome to WNYC.

Gary Cohen: Thank you, Brian. It's an honor to be on with you.

Brian Lehrer: I'll just say right up front that I watch frequently. I've watched baseball for many years. In my opinion, you with Keith and Ron are the GOAT. You're the greatest of all time as a team doing baseball games, in my opinion, because you're not just calling the action. You're having a fun and smart conversation the whole time. You actually touch on a wide variety of non-sports things around the edges as you go.

It's always such a pleasure. Just to give the listeners one example. Wednesday night, you were talking about the old Tracey Ullman Show during a break in the action. I've seen you do a beautiful eulogy for the late New Yorker magazine writer Roger Angell. Before we even talk about the Subway Series, can you say something about the vibe you're going for in the booth? Is it something you can put into words?

Gary Cohen: You're very kind, Brian. I think that we all bring different sensibilities to the booth. Having Ronnie, who's a brilliant person in every respect in addition to having been a wonderful Major League Baseball pitcher, and Keith, who is an autodidact with so many different interests outside of the game and having been as brilliant a player as he was, I think we all have different sensibilities that we bring to bear.

I think we all respect one another enough to let each go off on their own tangents and maybe have something to contribute to each one. Ultimately, it's all about the game. I think that for whatever weird paths we might go down in the course of a broadcast, it always comes back to the baseball game. We try to respect the people who are watching enough to not make it all about us. It's really about the game. I think we're very fortunate in that it's worked as well as it has for 20 years.

Brian Lehrer: All right, Subway Series. Is it fun to call those games or does all the hype make it something you more have to survive and you're happy when it's over?

Gary Cohen: Yes, I think that when it first started in 1997, when interleague play began, it was holy war. It was an unbelievably different experience from what baseball is from day to day because, in 1997, two New York teams had not faced each other in meaningful games in over 40 years. Those games took on outsized importance. I think that Met fans and Yankee fans, they're very tribal. They care very much about how they're perceived and how they're perceived in relation to the other.

I think that in many respects, this year is unique in that both teams are very successful. It's only the third time in all these years they've been playing each other that they've both come into a Subway Series in first place. The fact that the Mets poached the Yankees superstar Juan Soto and signed him to an unprecedented contract, I think that has created more hype for this game. Again, we only deal within the parameters of what happens across nine innings. I think the hype is something very separate from the broadcast that we're going to put on.

Brian Lehrer: When the game is going on. You just referred to the fans of each team being concerned about their image. Can you feel the difference between a Yankee Stadium crowd and a Citi Field crowd other than who they're rooting for?

Gary Cohen: Oh gosh, yes. There's a great sense of earned entitlement in being a Yankee fan. They've won World Series than any other franchise. They're used to being the top dog. I think a Mets crowd is more eclectic. I think that the vibe is much more of a fun one rather than an entitled one. I think that it's fascinating to me the way people attach themselves to different franchises for whatever reason.

Across the last 30-odd years, with the Mets not having won a World Series, it's been natural to expect the vast majority of fans growing up in that era to attach themselves to the Yankees, and they have. I think that it's turning to a certain extent because the Mets have a different leadership team. I think there's a greater expectation now of them being more successful for the long term.

I think the vibe in the stadium is still what it was. I think that the Yankees are expected to win and the Mets are hopeful of winning. I think that that is how the fans perceive themselves. It'll be interesting if the Mets taste some success over the next couple of years, whether that changes much as the Red Sox fans have changed with their success over the last two decades. For now, the vibe is certainly very different.

Brian Lehrer: About you, and my guest is Gary Cohen, Mets play-by-play announcer on SNY for 20 years now, I see you went to Columbia for college. You were a political science major there. You obviously think about the world. We could tell that from the broadcast. Did you ever think of going into politics for a living after being a poli-sci major, or was it always that you were a kid from Queens and wanted to grow up and broadcast Mets games?

Gary Cohen: I think that once I found that there was such a thing as college radio, I think that everything else took a back seat. Quite honestly, being a political science major was more a means to an end because I felt as though maybe that was an easier road to hoe than being, say, an economics major or a biochemistry major. [chuckles] There are a few times early in my minor league days when I thought, "Well, maybe this isn't going to happen and maybe I should go to law school." Fortunately, I was able to serve a relatively brief apprenticeship before I landed where I think I was always supposed to be.

Brian Lehrer: I see you've called other sports as well. You did the Rangers, New York hockey team at one time, and Olympic hockey, also Brown University football. I think you still do Seton Hall basketball. Do you?

Gary Cohen: I do, for the last 22 years, yes.

Brian Lehrer: Another sports journalist I know has said to me that baseball, in his experience, is the hardest because there's so much time between plays that have any action to call. It's harder to keep filling those spaces with something interesting than it is to keep calling the action in basketball, say, where the action almost never stops. I'm curious your experience in that regard if there's a hardest sport to do play-by-play for.

Gary Cohen: Well, I would say that basketball and baseball could not be more different. Basketball on the radio and baseball on TV, which is my current gig, are even more different. I will say that the hardest sport to call from a play-by-play perspective is hockey because you're generally pretty distant. The game moves so quickly and players are dressed identically and hard to identify. The point that your friend makes is well-taken because baseball is a three-hour game with eight minutes of action. What you're doing for most of the time is not talking about what is directly happening in the game.

You are creating moments and creating anticipation of moments that sometimes come to fruition and sometimes don't. It's a game that requires a lot of preparation. You have to have material that you bring to the table. You have to be ready for anything to happen. You have to know what's going on globally in the sport, which changes day by day because it is the only everyday sport. In that respect, it is definitely a challenge. Not from a play-by-play perspective, but just from everything else that goes into the broadcast.

Brian Lehrer: SNY is now in its 20th year. Congratulations. It's not its 100th year like another broadcast station I know, but 20 is something. Has doing the games changed much in the two decades, either because technology has changed or the game itself has changed? Is it a different job than in 2006 in any way?

Gary Cohen: Well, it's changed in several respects. One is the amount of information that's available on a day-to-day basis. When I started on the radio in 1989, the best information source was picking up the USA Today, which had blurbs on each team in a short paragraph. A lot of your research was done via the phone. Now, with everything statistically and feature story-wise available on the internet, there's obviously so much more out there every day. Literally, I could spend 24 hours a day, seven days a week during the baseball season trying to absorb all that, so there's that.

The other thing that's happened is the last three years, the pitch clock, which was introduced to baseball in 2023, has changed the experience of broadcasting for good and for bad. For good because it's taken a half an hour of dead time away. It was honestly very mentally draining to try to fill that empty space every day. The other piece is that for the transitory things that we try to talk about on the air to fill space, sometimes we have to edit ourselves a little bit more because there is not as much time to fill. It cuts both ways.

Brian Lehrer: What you can't see is that even though you're not here in person, Mets fans from our staff are gathering in the control room as if you were because you're on the air. They're raising their arms and cheering right now. Jason, Irene, you could listen on any radio. It would be the same experience.

Gary, I'm going to say by way of parental pride to our listeners and full disclosure that my son, Simon Lehrer, has been a producer at SNY for several years. I only bring it up because I know he worked with you on the 20th anniversary series that you're running during Mets games this season with you remembering specific games from the last 20 years with video of your scorecard, because you have kept every scorecard for every Mets game you've ever done, I am told. Is that right?

Gary Cohen: Not only do I have all the scorecards from the last 37 years of broadcasting Mets games, but going back to when I was a kid and I used to score games as a fan, I've got all my scorecards, including the one I treasure the most from 1974, in which the Mets and the Cardinals played 25 innings at Shea Stadium. I sat and watched the entire game on television and scored it. Keith Hernandez, my current partner, appeared as a pinch hitter in the ninth inning of that game.

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Gary Cohen: I've got a big attic.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, but I did the math. I didn't go back to your childhood. Including your radio years starting in 1989, during Mets games on the radio before you did them on television, that would be 162 games times 36 years. That's like 5,800 scorecards. Do they have their own room in your house?

Gary Cohen: Well, each year has its own plastic bin. They lived in my attic for many years until I was asked to pull them down to do this feature that you mentioned with Simon. We pulled out a game from each year to wax nostalgic about.

Brian Lehrer: Was that hard? Do you want to mention one or two that were obvious to you if we're going to look back at the 20 years, "Oh, we have to look at this moment on the scorecard because of that play or that game"?

Gary Cohen: Well, since we're talking about the Subway Series, I think David Wright's game-winning hit against Mariano Rivera, which was, I believe, in our first year broadcasting on SNY, that definitely stands out. The first-ever game at Citi Field in 2009, I think that's the only Met loss that we included in the series. Then last year, the last day of the season, which was actually the day after the end of the season, when Francisco Lindor hit the home run against the Braves that put the Mets in the postseason. Those are a few that definitely come to mind.

Brian Lehrer: Unforgettable. That weird circumstances, doubleheader. Last question. There's one disappointment, I think, for Mets fans watching on TV in the years when the Mets do make the playoffs. The networks have the rights to all those postseason games. I think the fans don't get to see their beloved home team announcers. You and Keith and Ron. This is true for every team and their home announcers. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the networks take over all the postseason games. What do you do during those games after having come all the way to October with those Mets teams in their very best years? I know you care. Do you sit at home and reflexively call the action to your wife or what's that like?

Gary Cohen: Well, it is the greatest downside of having moved from radio to television because when I was on radio, I got to do those postseason games, including when the Mets and Yankees played in the World Series in 2000. I knew when I took the job on TV that that was going to be the biggest downside. I think all of the regional sports network play-by-play and color announcers feel exactly the same way. They love to be there. It feels like you're taking a transatlantic voyage on an ocean liner, and then you get dumped overboard about a mile from shore.

Since I've been on SNY, SNY provides shoulder programming for those postseason games. We'll do pre and post-game coverage. Last year, throughout the Mets' postseason run, I was sitting in the SNY studios down at 4 World Trade Center and watching the games on television with everybody else and trying to provide a little bit of insight in the pre and post-game shows. It's definitely a weird feeling. It's very strange to be following a team all year and then not be a major part of it when the most important games arrive. It's definitely a kick in the gut.

Brian Lehrer: Well, Gary Cohen, congratulations on 20 years on TV doing Mets games. We really appreciate that you came on with us today. It was so much fun. Enjoy the Subway Series.

Gary Cohen: Thank you, Brian, and thank you for all you do. I'm a huge fan of your show, and I have been for many, many years. It really is an honor to be on with you. Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you. That means so much.

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