Baseball, New York Mets, SNY
by Staff

The worst SNY Mets broadcast of 2019

On Friday night, June 7, 2019, the SNY broadcast team of Gary Cohen, Ron Darling and Keith Hernandez broadcasted the game from outside the Jim Beam highball lounge at Citi field. They promptly turned the broadcast into their worst one of the season.

We are going to add this caveat right here. When Gary, Keith and Ron are “on”, when they are locked in, focused and are actually calling the game, they are terrific. When they are working together, there are few broadcast teams that are better.
But the more that SNY presents a broadcast with silly extras, the worse the broadcast team gets.
When they are “on” they are one of the best. When the broadcasters are “off” it can be tough to listen to.
Last night was the second part.
SNY started with having the team broadcast from outside the Jim Beam bar. This immediately made the entire broadcast feel like on big commercial.
While that was bad enough in it’s own right, that is not what made the broadcast the worse of the year. So let’s get into it.

 

Here’s what I saw and heard last night:

Early in the game, the Mets broadcasters spent an entire inning talking about how Keith hates cotton candy. They stopped calling the game, including the play by play. For a whole inning. This is at the beginning of a game in early June, while the Mets are in the middle of a tight division race, and they had their ace on the mound. And there’s no play by play. No analysis. Just talking about cotton candy for 20 minutes

This is not why I turned the game on.

Next: they had Steve Gelbs interview Rico Brogna (career WAR: -1.1) , on camera, while the game Mets were batting. I like these interviews, and it’s good to see the former players coming back. But there has to be a better way. The booth took the entire half inning off. No play by play from “the best booth in the business”. We didn’t hear one word from them.  SNY showed Brogna and Gelbs more than they showed the action on the field.

I wanted to watch a baseball game. Not 15 minutes of Steve Gelbs. 

 

And last but certainly not least: again, with the Mets batting, the booth spent the half inning being served food, and then describing and eating that food. Again, the action on the field took second place to what was going on in the booth.

Michael Conforto hit a homer, and Gary was a bit late with the call, possibly because he was chewing food. He was at the very least distracted with what was going on.  Keith completely missed the home run, and asked for a replay so he could see it.

I turned the game on to watch baseball. Not to hear 3 guys eating ballpark food.

I watch a lot of baseball games. Including other broadcasts. I’ve never seen a booth stop calling the game so they could eat. I’ve never heard a broadcast team miss a homerun because they were distracted. ESPN turns away from live game action, to do these same type of interviews, and Mets fans go crazy. SNY does the same thing, and I hear ‘we have the best booth in the business’.

Last night’s game was the worse night of the season, for the best in the business.