What it was like to really hear the voice of that club.
What it was like to really hear the voice of that club.
T he late 20th and early 21st century are seeing the triumph of the image again. That’s why even podcasts are being converted to video these days. People want to see the face on the screen — even the tiny one on their cellphones. I think I know why. The sound sucks.
I wish my children had more occasion to hear the previous era, when a single voice could carry a medium all by itself — the analog era. I can’t believe how old I sound when I say things like, “Back when I was a kid, people actually enjoyed phone calls.” There was a time before internet communications chopped us into bits and packets — subject to jitter and a long latency of 100 to 300 milliseconds, leading to miscommunication. Back then we had telephone wires, and real microphones and receivers. The mic voltage translated into line voltage and became the speaker’s motion on the other end. Traditional phones fed your ear a controlled sidetone to allow you to hear yourself speaking. The effect was to make a telephone conversation feel as if the two rooms the participants conducted it from had been physically joined up. By comparison, a cellphone call still feels like shouting into unreverberant blackness, then waiting for a response through it.
My nostalgia for analog is now in overdrive, with the retirement of Howie Rose, the Mets’ main radio play-by-play announcer since 1995. In his final weekend, Rose was moved to tears several times as the fans paid him tribute, as other broadcast personalities did the same, or when he tried to express to his listeners that he wanted to be remembered as one of them, a Mets fan since boyhood who simply had the aspiration and the opportunity to become the voice of the club he so loved.
And what a voice! Rose had all the borough-specific sounds of his era of Queens, N.Y., the long “aw” you hear in coffee and talk. Nasal, true outer-borough New York. Wry and a little mischievous. But neighborly, and warm. And like the real professionals in that world, he was comfortable falling silent and letting through the sound of the organ, the vendors, and the pop of the pitch hitting a leather glove. Sometimes when you tune in to talk radio from New York, the static hits your ear like a brick thrown on concrete. When you were tuning in for Howie Rose, it was like an acorn thrown against the outside of your bedroom window, the ceremony of a friend calling you out.
Twenty years ago, I took a job that moved me away from home and down to the suburbs of Washington, D.C. Not so long after I moved for work, I got engaged to a young woman from my hometown. The car trips I took back home became a near-weekly grind. Five and a half hours in ideal conditions, but conditions are never ideal on a Friday with Beltway traffic. In a very strange way, my fiancée and I had re-created the conditions my grandparents had lived under early in their marriage. My grandmother was home in New Jersey, and my grandfather, working for the federal government, spent Monday through Friday in a tiny Arlington apartment. And as with my grandparents, the accumulating stress and strain of this long weekly commute would forever shape our attitudes toward commuting. And as with my grandparents, who grew up fans of the New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers, respectively, the Mets would bind us together.
My whole drive was aimed at getting back to the one I loved as soon as possible. But along the way I did anything I could to get to the Delaware Memorial Bridge around 7 p.m., in time for a home game start. Once you crossed that bridge and took to the New Jersey Turnpike, the long reach of WFAN 660 AM radio could bounce off the ionosphere and reach my beat-up Kia Sportage. Week after week I would get to it just after the broadcast had started and just before the leadoff hitter, José Reyes, got to first base. A walk, a bunt single, a bloop-whatever. Reyes would get there, and the fun would begin: a stolen base, maybe a groundout or two — Mets ahead by one. I would stop for gas on the turnpike and use the ridiculous numeric keys to tap out a short message to her — my location, the score, and my hopeful estimate of when I was getting back to her.
Howie Rose was there for me on those many drives home. His voice turned a poorly maintained Kia bouncing down the turnpike near Carney’s Point into a seat high above home plate in Flushing. From that moment each night, I tried to imagine the life I’d build for myself. And it’s been a better, wilder, harder one than I ever could have guessed. We’re not obsessives who watch every game. But this is something that connects our family across households. Thinking back, I’m surprised how often Howie’s voice was there. On drives home from church, or after a date-night meal. Or two years ago, when my sons were at just the right age to fall in love with baseball, the Mets put on an astonishing late-season run to squeeze into the playoffs on the day after the season ended. Then in the decisive game of the Division Series, we listened to Howie call Pete Alonso’s go-ahead home run in the ninth. “It’s gone! He did it! He did it!” Howie shouted. My older son ripped off his shirt and began waving it like a flag in our living room. That’s it, I thought, he was stung, just as I was early in life. Pure joy and a sense of possibility, and coloring it was that man with the Queens accent, the Rose that you remembered for the way it sounds.