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SNY's Cohen gets to call Mets game from upper deck

Neil Best

May 16, 2008

'It's a dump, but it's our dump," Gary Cohen said.

Yes, he has said it before, but on this day it meant more than usual.

It was two hours before yesterday's Nationals- Mets game, and SNY's play-by-play man was sitting a few rows from the top of Shea Stadium, surveying the vast red stretches of the upper deck.

Soon Cohen would be fulfilling a decade-long aspiration, calling a game from the cheap seats he used to occupy as a fan, just in time before they tear down the dump.

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It was a nod to his past, but more so to the others who grew up as fans far from the field, including the 18,000 or so children in the house yesterday for "Weather Education Day."

"Everybody comes to this job differently," Cohen said, listing the varied backgrounds of announcers who are former players, or who arrived from other cities as veteran broadcasters.

"But Howie [Rose] and I grew up as fans, in this ballpark, and somehow found our way back here to be play-by-play voices for the team," he said.

"Ultimately, all of us want to go back to our roots; to me, these are my roots. This is how I got where I am."

Cohen, 50, recalled the die-hards who night after night during the dark days of the late 1970s and early '80s would show up in those very seats in Section 1.

"The players never saw them or heard them because they were too far away; no foul balls came up here," he said. "Those people were as devoted to this team, and still are, as any fan. To me, this is a tribute to those people."

Every baseball fan has a tale of his or her first major-league game, usually involving wonder at the size of the outfield and the green of the grass, and often from a distant view.

(Mine: July 27, 1970, so far out in the leftfield upper deck I was in fair territory. Seaver strikes out Mays three times. Mets beat Giants, 5-3.)

Cohen's first games were in the Bronx, because his father was a Yankees fan. But by 1966, he was smitten with Shea.

There he joined a slightly older fellow Queens kid he didn't yet know, Howie Rose.

"I was there so much in the upper deck, I should have had a mailbox," said Rose, Cohen's former partner on the Mets' radio team.

Cohen originally hoped to join Rose for a radio broadcast among the fans. By the time it happened, Cohen was a TV guy, and was accompanied by his new partners, former star players Keith Hernandez and Ron Darling.

Rose visited the trio in the sixth. "It's almost a catharsis sitting in that upper deck one last time," said Rose, who recalled taking his first date to Shea in '68. "She ditched me on the 7 train," he said.

So far the maddening 2008 Mets and their ornery fans hardly have gotten into a festive mood in Shea's final season.

But those involved regarded the nostalgic SNY stunt as a success. The weather was ideal, the game was close and the fans seated immediately to either side of the announcing team took many pictures but mostly stayed out of the way.

Hernandez accepted the offer of a free hot dog in the fifth, then bought a round of them in the seventh. He later said he had fun.

Cohen had hoped to work from near the top of the stadium, where he used to sit for $1.30. Logistics issues made that unworkable, so he settled for the fourth row of the upper deck, pretty good seats he once would have considered "like sitting in the front row."

Displaced fans were offered seats on the loge level. Some, including the Kennedy family of Stony Brook, were invited to watch from the unoccupied TV booth.

Ed Kranepool and Art Shamsky visited to reminisce and Darling and Hernandez offered their own childhood memories of Fenway and Candlestick Parks.

Cohen nearly pulled off a historic bookend. He was in the upper deck when Bob Moose no-hit the Mets for the Pirates in 1969. (Shamsky made the final out.)

Mike Pelfrey cruised through the first six innings without allowing a hit, raising hopes of a Mets first and a Cohen second.

See, no matter how bad things get on the field or in the clubhouse, fans both in the seats and in the booth have to get on with the business of saying a proper goodbye, just as in the Bronx.

"Sitting up here now gives me a great sense of nostalgia," Cohen said.

"It's very odd to see that big edifice [Citi Field] out there as opposed to looking out and seeing the Serval Zipper sign going on and off."

Serval Zipper! Wow. That's old school. But it was that kind of day in the upper deck, in that kind of season.