Keith Hernandez, Ron Darling, and Gary Cohen Credit: SNY
By Sam Neumann on
This article was published in conjunction with the 2026 Awful Announcing MLB Announcer Rankings. To see how 85,000 voters evaluated the 30 local MLB team announce teams, click here.

Being a New York Mets fan isn’t for the faint of heart.

Trust me, I would know.

I’m not the only Mets fan on staff at Awful Announcing, but I am the most vocal. And since I watch somewhere between 1-162, that would technically make me one of the most qualified to write about the SNY broadcast booth, but not exactly the most qualified to speak on them. I’ve met Gary Cohen at spring training; I’ve exchanged pleasantries with Keith Hernandez. But I don’t really know either of them, and I don’t know Ron Darling either. I can’t speak to anything except the parasocial relationship I’ve developed with Gary, Keith, and Ron since I was seven years old.

So, in theory, I could explain in great detail why they still resonate with the masses 21 years later, and I have before. But I’d only be scratching the surface of why AA’s readers consistently rank the Mets’ broadcast among the best in baseball year after year (they came in third in this year’s rankings).

Awful Announcing’s 2026 MLB local broadcaster rankings

In search of answers for why that’s the case — and not just delivered from the mouth of a diehard Mets fan — Awful Announcing spoke with SportsNet New York’s (SNY) senior coordinating producer, Gregg Picker, who has been with Gary, Keith, and Ron since the very beginning.

“Why did someone decide to put peanut butter and jelly together? I don’t know,” Picker tells me. “Why it is, is the guys are unbelievably respectful of one another and respectful of the viewers. Honestly, they work their asses off to provide an entertaining, an educational, an informative show every day.”

“Working with those guys is fun, it’s challenging, it’s exciting, it’s enlightening,” Picker continues. “It’s all good things. We feel so fortunate to have been put together with one another 21 years ago, and for it to still be going on. I think the interesting thing is we really try not to take anything for granted. We spend a lot less time relishing and kind of soaking in what we’ve accomplished and what we’ve done, and a lot more time thinking about what we’re going to do next.”

That, according to Picker, is one of the secrets to the success of “the best booth in baseball.”

Going into the 2026 season, which has been a disaster of epic proportions for the Metropolitans, Picker asked the trio to pretend they were in Year 1, trying to establish themselves. And speaking of Year 1, when asked if he could’ve ever imagined the booth that Curt Gowdy Jr. put together would be amongst the all-time greats, Picker didn’t really have an answer.

“What was really great was we were really given a lot of leeway to create whatever we were going to become as a team,” he says, “and I think that is a big part of it. We had very few restrictions put on us. And one of our goals has always been to provide a little something for everyone. We recognize that not everything that we do, whether it’s hardcore baseball analysis, or it’s humor, or it’s interviews, or it’s fun stuff, we recognize that not everything we do is going to be popular with everyone. And we don’t really get too caught up in that. We really trust ourselves and our own judgment, and we know when we’ve done something good, and we can do something better.

“That’s really been important to us, too, that people don’t get sick of what we’re doing. And when we do fun stuff — (Monday) night was the perfect example — Steve Gelbs is a big part of our broadcast, too. He was a part of the grounds crew… So when we do fun stuff, we really try to make it less self-serving and drop in educational facts for the viewers. So while we’re doing fun stuff and people are laughing, we’re also trying to drop in stuff that informs the viewer and makes them more educated, whatever that subject matter is, by the time we’re done doing it.”

In Picker’s admission, that’s a roundabout way of answering the question that was posed. But did he envision it? Did he know? The 8-time Emmy Award winner says he never really thought about it that way, which is why he deviated from the initial question. It was just something that happened.

“One thing that has been very important to us is that we don’t fall into a pattern in the booth of just regurgitating the stories that are out there that everyone else is doing in the same way,” Picker added. “… We really, really try hard to find a different way of presenting it in a smart way that’s going to get the attention of viewers and leave them enraptured by how we present it.”

Picker and the trio have always treated the broadcast like a puzzle — a set of pieces that only work if you’re placing them at the right moment, building toward something that keeps moving rather than going slack. That matters more for a local booth than it does almost anywhere else in sports television, Picker said, because a broadcast that’s on the air 162 nights a year eventually becomes part of the fabric of people’s lives. So the strategy, refined over two decades, has been letting Cohen, Hernandez, and Darling share pieces of their actual lives on the air, not as filler between innings, but as the connective thread Picker believes keeps people watching a team that, this season, has given them plenty of reasons not to.

“The same things that people are watching go through on a day-to-day basis, our guys in the booth go through, and we try to create connectivity so that the viewers and fans can really relate and feel like they really know Gary, Keith, and Ron,” Picker said.

Viewers can watch enough nights to feel like they know Gary, Keith, and Ron. Fewer of them could tell you the first thing about Picker. So I asked him to describe what his role actually looks like during a broadcast, and how it works with the other producers, the directors, and the three men doing the talking.

The production team and the announce team, he said, function like a team in the truest sense. The broadcast has never been about any one person, and hasn’t been since the group was established 21 years ago. As a producer, his job isn’t to be the star of anything. It’s to look after everyone else, to make sure the group understands the objective on a given night and over the course of a season, and to trust the people around him to execute it. During a broadcast, Picker is constantly in the booth’s ear, prompting topics, flagging what’s coming next, and handling every replay himself. His go-to comparison is that the producer is the coach and the director is the quarterback — working in tandem, but with the producer ultimately responsible for the whole show. Above everything else, he said, his job is making sure Cohen, Hernandez, and Darling feel comfortable and secure enough that they’re never left exposed on air, and that no two nights ever call for exactly the same approach.

Hernandez, in particular, tests that last part.

“There are times where I get pretty emphatic and tell Keith to stop talking, and there are other times where I encourage him to go to places maybe some other people wouldn’t go,” Picker said. “Years ago I worked for John McEnroe and produced the U.S. Open, and Keith and John are very similar — they were both so masterful at the sport they played, and they bring an honesty, a humor, and a charisma along with it that you really try not to stifle. You try to harness it and make sure whatever they’re doing is appropriate for the time they’re doing it.

“Humor has been a big part of our show. We take what we do seriously, but we try not to take ourselves too seriously. If you had to pick the top five things you can attribute our success to, being able to laugh with one another, at one another, at others, would be one of them. We don’t discriminate, so we may not be the best show for you if you have thin skin. But we try to remember that we’re covering baseball. It’s a sport. There are a lot of serious issues in the world, and at the end of the day we’re trying to entertain people and give them some escape from what everybody deals with every day. We rely a lot on humor.”

They rely on a lot of hard work, too. Take Ron Darling predicting that Brett Baty — who went from looking like an everyday regular in 2025 to a Quadruple-A player in 2026 — would get a big hit against Atlanta Braves starter Bryce Elder, for example. Darling thought it was a great matchup for the 26-year-old Baty, who would later mash a Grand Slam on the first pitch he saw that evening. But in order to make that prognostication, Darling had to prepare and really sit and think about what Baty’s strengths are, what Elder’s strengths are, and figure out why this was a good matchup for a player slashing .213/.286/.329 with a .615 OPS.

“So there’s really nothing that we won’t try as long as it’s an educated attempt to provide quality and entertaining TV,” Picker says. “We’re not afraid to try things, and I think a lot of that credit goes to people who started SNY and Curt Gowdy when he put the booth together 21 years ago. We have never been stifled from trying to do whatever we think is right during the course of a broadcast. Sometimes you have to walk a fine line, and there’s some delicate stuff… It’s just worked.”

And we hate to be cliché, but it works because Gary, Keith, and Ron work exceptionally well together. You can always ask more sophisticated questions and search for a better answer, but there’s not a scientific formula to unearth here. Network executives wish there was, because every higher-up who loves a three-man booth is foaming at the mouth to recreate their own GKR in the aggregate, but it just doesn’t work like that.

“The three of them just mesh incredibly well,” Picker says. “They’re all extremely different from a personality standpoint. I truly love them all, and I’ve loved working with them. It’s a real treat. I’ve spent a third of my life doing this job and working with these guys, and I honestly couldn’t have asked for a better trio to work with if I was gonna do a particular job for as long as I’ve done it. They’re incredibly smart, all of them. They’re incredibly respectful of one another, so even when they disagree on stuff, they listen to one another, and they’re respectful of each other’s opinions, and they just have a chemistry together that is really almost impossible to explain in words; it just works, and it just happens.”

It’s also impossible to explain in words why the Mets’ season has gone so poorly in 2026. After a slow-motion collapse that left New York missing the playoffs by one game the season prior, the team was stripped down to the studs, hoping that an overhaul of homegrown players could reenergize a franchise that was a year removed from being just two wins away from a World Series appearance.

Whatever grand plan David Stearns had to turn the Mets into a World Series contender in ’26 spectacularly blew up in his face, and it’s left an ambivalent fanbase that’s out for blood. They want someone to blame, and they sure as hell aren’t going to take it out on the beloved broadcasters who are part of the fabric of their everyday life, but they don’t always want to hear from them, either.

“Unfortunately, we’ve had our share of seasons where the team hasn’t been as successful as they would have liked to have been,” Picker said. We would prefer that the team be winning. It’s much easier to hold people’s attention. And in a season like we’re experiencing now, we have to be extremely creative, and that’s why, you know, in the offseason, I put together a document that’s like honestly 60 or 70 pages long, and it’s full of ideas, and we cherry-pick those ideas whenever I think it’s appropriate or what I think we need to do at a given time.

“I’ll be completely honest with you, one of the greatest compliments that we get as a production team and a broadcast team, and you would be surprised probably how often we hear this, is that when fans and viewers tell us that the only reason they’re still watching is because of the broadcast and the guys in the booth. And that gives us a tremendous sense of pride because we know that people who are still watching are really hardcore Mets fans, and we owe it to them to deliver three hours every night of our very best.”

About Sam Neumann

Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.

View all posts by Sam Neumann