The Howie Rose Mets retirement has been on the cards since shortly before the 2026 baseball season, when Rose announced he was stepping away after 22 years as the club’s radio play-by-play voice. According to Metsmerized Online, Rose has been calling Mets games in that role since 1995, making this his 40th season with the organisation in total. His final broadcast is set for September 20th.
The announcement landed against a bruising backdrop. The highest-paid team in baseball history had sunk to last place, and much of the team’s beloved core had vanished over the winter. Then came the elimination from playoff contention at the hands of Pete Alonso’s Orioles, in what Rose’s interviewer at GQ described as one of the most gruesome weeks of Mets baseball in recent memory. For a fanbase that has leaned on Rose’s Queens-accented commentary as a kind of emotional ballast through decades of disappointment, the timing stings.
Yet Rose himself remains, characteristically, in the business of making the Mets feel worth it. Speaking from the Bob Murphy Broadcast Booth at Citi Field ahead of the first game of the final series of the season, he explained his philosophy with a bluntness that any winter hillwalker pushing through horizontal sleet would recognise: endurance is not suffering, it is the whole point.
“You have a choice in this town,” Rose said. “To root for the Mets, to root for the Yankees. And because you have that choice here in New York, if you choose to stay a Mets fan through down years, when the Yankees are playing in October every year, well, that’s loyalty. And that loyalty is tested by the refusal to jump ship.”
Four Decades of Following a Fanbase Through the Weather
Rose made that choice at age seven, a full year before the Mets even existed. His father had tried to steer him towards the Yankees, but when he heard a new team was coming to Flushing, Queens, close to the Bayside neighbourhood his family was moving to, he was convinced they’d been created for him. The franchise, knowing its expansion squad would lose for years, marketed itself to young baby-boomers as a colourful alternative to Yankee severity. “Blue and orange are kind of my colours anyway,” Rose remembers. “I don’t know why.”
The broadcaster who shaped Rose’s own approach was Bob Murphy, the original Mets voice, whose ability to find the promise of tomorrow in a dismal evening of baseball kept the fanbase intact through the lean early years. Rose traces his ambition directly to a game on August 4th, 1966, when the surging Giants took a 5-0 lead into the seventh inning against the second-to-last-place Mets, only for Ron Swoboda to hit a walk-off homer and give New York the win. Riding the Q27 bus home, Rose thought not about hitting the winning run but about how Bob Murphy must have called it. The broadcaster’s voice, he came to understand, is the shape through which a fanbase sees its team.
The rest followed from there. He organised a fan club for Marv Albert at age 14, received critiques and eventually a lifelong friendship in return, and was hired as a reporter at WHN ten years later. His famous “MATTEAU! MATTEAU! MATTEAU!” call during the Rangers’ 1994 Eastern Conference victory turned him into a name. The Mets put him on TV shortly after. In 2004, he stepped into Bob Murphy’s seat for the radio broadcasts, completing a plan that had been forming since that summer bus ride three decades earlier.
Howie Rose Mets Retirement and the Question of Who Follows
Rose’s preferred successor is Keith Raad, who has worked alongside Rose as the full-time play-by-play radio broadcaster for the Mets on Audacy Mets Radio 880 AM. Raad’s path to the seat has been methodical: before joining the Mets broadcast team, he spent ten years in Minor League Baseball, including five seasons with the Brooklyn Cyclones, the Mets’ High-A affiliate. That kind of grounding in the minor-league grind, calling games in half-empty parks through long road trips, tends to produce broadcasters who understand the rhythms of a sport built on failure.
Rose has hinted at openness to filling in for Raad if invited, and has promised to return as emcee for major ceremonies at Citi Field. The prospect of an October invitation is not lost on him. “I’d be honoured to come back,” he said, “but I’m not going to push anybody aside so I can muscle my way into the big moment.”
On the wall of the Bob Murphy Broadcast Booth, the words “HE DID IT!” are pinned in thumbtacks, a reference to Rose’s call of Alonso’s three-run homer to clinch the Wild Card series in 2024. It is, for now, the closest the Howie Rose Mets partnership came to the world championship he has long acknowledged as his biggest regret. “Unfortunately, I’ll not have gotten a chance to call a world championship for the Mets,” he said. “I don’t have many, but that will be my biggest regret.”
Rose’s final broadcast arrives on September 20th. Whatever the Mets do with the rest of their season, the booth’s door, as he put it, will remain open for one more miracle.
