Gary Cohen on why local broadcasts offer something national broadcasts can’t replicate

There’s a reason fans get so angry when a national broadcast takes over their team’s games, and Gary Cohen can tell you exactly why.

The Mets’ play-by-play voice on SNY since 2006 sat down with Stephen Strom, pregame host of Marlins On Deck on 104.3 WQAM, to explain why the local broadcaster offers something no national crew can replicate — not because national broadcasters aren’t good at their jobs — but because of what daily immersion in a team actually produces.

“I’ve seen it with guys who do like a 50-game schedule for a team,” he said. “It is very hard to parachute in and know all the intricacies of what’s going on with any team. As much as I keep up with every team in baseball and have some sense of what’s going on, unless you’ve been there every day, you can’t possibly know all the things that go into making a season with a team. And when a national broadcast comes in, they do the best they can, and they’re all very talented people, but they’re not as inculcated in the fabric of what is going on with that team in that year, and I don’t think you can replicate that. And I think that’s why people react to national broadcasts the way they do.”

TV Voice of the Mets Gary Cohen joined me about broadcast and baseball 🎙️ pic.twitter.com/Qh3TSlfU2B

— Stephen Strom (@SStrom_) May 30, 2026

It’s a point that has grown more consequential as MLB has steadily shifted more games to national platforms and streamers through deals with NBC, Apple TV, and Netflix. As we wrote here in September 2024, Mets fans experienced that firsthand when national rights holders took over the SNY booth during a critical late-season stretch, not because the national broadcasts on Apple, Fox, and ESPN were bad, but because it wasn’t the guys who had spent all summer in the clubhouse.

“In all the years that I’ve been doing this sport, I’ve never had a fan come up to me and say, ‘I wish you would do more statistics,'” Cohen added. “Do you know what they always say? They say, ‘What is David Wright really like? What’s Juan Soto really like?’ That’s what people really care about. They want to hear about the humanity of the people playing the games more than anything else.”

And from Gary Cohen, Keith Hernandez, and Ron Darling, that’s exactly what Mets fans have gotten for the better part of two decades.