Gary Cohen is never looking to end his season in September.
The Mets play-by-play voice, alongside his partners Ron Darling and Keith Hernandez, said on an episode of SI Media with Jimmy Traina that not being able to call playoff games is the hardest transition from radio.
“It’s by far the worst part of the job,” Cohen told SI Media. “When I made the move from radio, where I got to do all the postseason games, it was the thing my wife and I talked about the most because I knew what I was getting into and I knew that was part of the deal. But it never stops being painful.”
Cohen has been the voice of the Mets since 2006, when the team debuted on the Mets-owned SNY network. MLB, though, controls postseason broadcast rights, which leaves local market broadcasters out of the picture come October.
Cohen was previously on the radio as a broadcaster and was well known for his call of Endy Chavez’s Game 7 home run robbery in the 2006 NLCS, when he was on the radio part-time to get involved in the broadcast someway.
Other broadcasters have shared in this frustration, as local announcers know the team intimately calling 120-plus games for the team over the course of the year.
“I have a real rough time with it every year when the Mets are in the postseason, and I know Michael Kay and all the other people who are in a similar situation feel the same way,” Cohen said. “But it’s part of the gig, and it’s the thing we have to live with, but it’s not fun.”
Kay recently vented about his frustrations about not being able to call the Yankees’ opener this season, which airs on Netflix on Wednesday night.
Many fans have called for the league to offer the option to watch local broadcasts of nationally televised games when available in their area.
Whether fans get their wish where local broadcasters have an opportunity to call postseason games is unknown but it would surely be welcomed by fans of teams who have consistently complained about networks like Apple and Netflix coming in and butchering the broadcasts.
