We’re going to go ahead and say it’s safe to claim that the New York Mets will not win a World Series in Howie Rose’s final season in the booth. That’s at least what Carlos Mendoza – who has since been relieved of his duties — promised to the departing radio voice of the Metropolitans.
The 72-year-old Howie Rose wanted nothing more than to bookend his last Opening Day at Citi Field with a ceremony on the steps of City Hall. But after a 9-19 start, sandwiched in between a 12-game losing streak, we wrote that Rose deserved better. The Mets have since gone 44-49 during that stretch, hardly a team that looks primed to honor Rose in October, let alone the rest of the way.
But the organization will attempt to honor Rose in another way, as SportsNet New York (SNY) announced this week plans to premiere a new documentary, Howie Rose: Put It In The Books, on Tuesday, Aug. 18.
The 60-minute feature will include reflections from Mike Piazza and Pete Alonso on the calls that accompanied two of the most memorable home runs in New York Mets history, Alonso’s own game-winning blast in the 2024 Wild Card series, chief among them. The Mets would later play the audio over the team’s plane speakers on the flight home from Milwaukee, giving Rose a standing ovation before he walked back to celebrate with Alonso.
Howie Rose made plenty of calls worthy of their own hour-long special over his career, and Marv Albert, Mike Francesa, Gary Cohen, and Ian Eagle each seem to speak to that in the film, describing not just Rose’s technical skill on the air but his standing in New York sports more broadly.
As he enters the twilight of a storied broadcasting career, Rose is still very much a treasure, as evidenced by a recent profile in New York Magazine’s Intelligencer. But he also doesn’t want to overstay his welcome in the booth. Diagnosed with bladder cancer in 2021, Rose trimmed his workload to roughly 100 games in recent seasons before deciding to cut travel out completely this year. He announced ahead of the 2026 season that he’d call 84 games total, all of them either home broadcasts from Citi Field or the three Subway Series road games at Yankee Stadium in September, the only trips he agreed to still make.
In recent years he’s addressed his future by noting plans to return the following season, then reserving the right to reassess everything once he settles back into his home in Florida for the offseason. He eventually came to the conclusion that this season would be his last. Of course, there’s always the John Sterling precedent to come out of retirement for the playoffs, but no Mets fan is holding their collective breath for a similar encore in 2027, not with the way 2026 has played out, and especially with the uncertainty over whether there’ll even be a season to speak of.
Whether Howie Rose’s future holds anything like that is a question for another Florida offseason. For now, SNY will do its best to honor the career that was before Rose officially puts it in the books.
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.