Gary Cohen: Pre-pitch clock broadcasts were ‘mentally exhausting’

Gary Cohen has been the voice of the New York Mets since 2006, calling games alongside Keith Hernandez and Ron Darling in what Awful Announcing readers have consistently ranked as the best local broadcast booth in baseball. Part of what has made that booth so special over the years is exactly what Cohen described on the latest episode of the Sources Tell Jeff Passan podcast, the ability to digress, riff, and go wherever the conversation takes them when the game itself isn’t demanding their attention.

The pitch clock, it turns out, has changed that dynamic more than most people realize.

“It’s ironic because those longer games gave us much more time to digress, which in some ways probably contributed to the way people view us,” Cohen offered. “Now, we have less time to get off the beaten path. The games are better. The games are crisper. But there’s less extraneous time to riff on other subjects. The bottom line is it’s good, but I think what baseball became helped us, in terms of establishing ourselves with our audience.”

What they stumbled into — and eventually perfected — was something closer to a long-running conversation than a traditional broadcast. The wandering tangents, the jokes, the moments where baseball almost became a backdrop to whatever was happening in the booth, that was the product. And all of it required time. Specifically, a three-hour-and-forty-minute Tuesday night game in May against the Marlins used to provide by the bucketful.

But Gary Cohen was quick to add that the personal toll of filling all that dead air shouldn’t be underestimated either.

“It was mentally exhausting,” he continued. “I mean, you’re talking about a half-hour every day where nothing happened, and that’s a half an hour every day that we had to fill off the top of our heads with whatever. And some of it was good. Some of it wasn’t good, but the mental strain over the course of a season, it was awful, and I’m very happy with the pitch clock.”

A half-hour of dead air every single day across a 162-game season is a staggering amount of time to fill. That Cohen, Hernandez, and Darling managed to make so much of it compelling television is a big part of why Mets fans recoil so hard when national broadcasters come in, and the SNY booth disappears. The pitch clock may have taken something away from what made them must-watch on a slow Tuesday in July. But Cohen seems at peace with the trade.

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