CLEVELAND — The times I heard Bob Murphy’s smooth baritone as a kid, it often was muffled by a pillow.

The little AM/FM radio I had stashed near my bed didn’t have a headphone jack, and games — West Coast games in particular — often seeped well into the time I should have been asleep. But how do you turn off a legendary broadcaster like Bob Murphy anyway?

Answer: You don’t.

I never lost that appreciation for listening to baseball on the radio.

I’m fascinated by how Howie Rose can paint a portrait so vivid that you can almost smell the blades of grass.

John Sterling’s whimsy reminded me that this is a kid’s game, but his theatricality taught me that it didn’t mean that this game was unimportant.

Laura Albanese, center, does an inning of analysis with the late John Sterling, left, and Suzyn Waldman, right, the only other woman to call a Mets game on the radio, in 2016 at Yankee Stadium.

Suzyn Waldman showed me that broadcasters are reporters as well as storytellers, and as I grew older, I learned she wasn’t just a pioneer but a sequin-adorned battering ram who wrestled to open doors for the women who came after her.

So naturally, when I was asked to be the color commentator for the Mets’ radio broadcast this past week, I wanted to run so far in the opposite direction that it would have taken Ferdinand Magellan himself to find me.

The text from Ray Martel, executive producer of Mets radio, came at 12:08 p.m. on Saturday. My response:

“I think that would be awesome.”

Comfortable being uncomfortable

And so there I was in Cleveland on the Tuesday after the Aug. 3 trade deadline, in the booth with play-by-play broadcaster Keith Raad, ready to be on the call for a three-game series against the Guardians.

My experience included exactly zero broadcasting classes, a handful of one-inning pop-ins with the Yankees’ and Mets’ booths in the 11 years I’ve covered baseball full-time, and a gig this year when, as Newsday’s Mets beat writer, I joined Raad and Rose to provide analysis for home games during the “Newsday top of the fourth” segment.

Joining the Mets booth with Howie Rose, left, and Keith Raad, right, for the first time in 2026 during the Newsday top of the fourth.

To paraphrase Rose, who was there when I did a radio cameo in 2015: “The first time you came in here, you left a puddle of sweat.”

For the sake of my dignity, I hope he meant that metaphorically.

But it’s true: While this is a dream come true for any baseball fan, it’s also extremely daunting. Many of us aren’t naturally made for TV or radio, and I consider myself to be among them. Throughout my career, and while occasionally working as an on-air analyst for SNY, I’ve grown to appreciate how important it is to be comfortable with being uncomfortable.

Also, baseball has taught me a thing or two (even if it hasn’t taught me how to actually pitch . . . at all):

1. Failure isn’t an enemy as long as you let it be a teacher.

2. No one thinks about you as much as you think about yourself.

3. If you’re scared, do it scared.

And that’s why I said yes.

Reader, it was a journey.

Being in the booth is a surreal experience, and I was attempting to do it while fulfilling all the obligations of my “real” job, which often entails traveling to flyover states across America to interview and write about men playing baseball. This experience, though, was new, and I knew the first step to knowing how to do something is acknowledging that you have no idea how to do it. So I called in the cavalry.

Prep work ahead of the third Game of the series against the Guardians on Aug. 6 in Cleveland.

I spoke to Raad, spoke to Martel, spoke to Rose, spoke to retired WFAN icon Ed Coleman, and I even touched base with Keith Hernandez. They told me to be myself, trust the knowledge that I’d accrued and try to create a natural rapport with the listener. Coleman told me to prepare “a few” notes. I took this to mean that I should buy a dedicated broadcasting notebook and four different color gel pens, and to ask the hotel front desk if they could kindly print out 19 pages of research material (they did).

A whole new ballgame

Then it was time. Media access typically begins three to four hours before first pitch, but I arrived much earlier, having flashbacks to cramming for AP exams that I had neglected to study for until a week before taking them.

The first-day jitters were real and I struggled with pacing — trying to figure out when to talk and when to shut up. Raad is a pro’s pro, and he smoothly glossed over the times my analysis went too long, cutting into the pitcher’s setup.

STORYWIDGET: spALBANESE260809_blurb

The game was a hair over 2½ hours — a breeze that, for me, felt like an eternity. I tried to pack too much in, given the flurry of deals the Mets made at the deadline, and sometimes forgot that listeners aren’t watching this live and need verbal descriptions to feel like part of the action. No one cares about a player’s WAR when what they really want to know is exactly how close Carson Benge came to crashing into the rightfield wall or how frustrated Francisco Lindor looked after a strikeout.

Then came a bit of good-natured hazing — a spontaneous ad read. It was the simplest thing in the world: Say the attendance and mention that the sponsor sells a drink described as “candy-coated chaos.”

And on that day, I learned I could not say “candy-coated chaos.” It took me three tries.

Jumping at the opportunity

The second day was better, but now obsessed with pacing, I thought I sounded stilted, and that felt almost worse. I tried to remember the advice given to me by the inimitable NBC sports broadcaster Bruce Beck, who essentially told me that while people certainly remember what you say, what they most remember is how you make them feel. Are you quippy? Funny? Likable?

I like to think I’m funny, despite my propensity for cringe-inducing puns, but on Day 2 — an extra-inning affair with plenty of excitement — it took me a few innings to feel like myself. Thankfully, I also had the gift that was Jefry Yan, an effervescent bullpen arm the Mets called up after the deadline, whose flamboyant strikeout celebrations pumped up the dugout and helped get me out of my own head.

It was around that point that I realized I needed to loosen my death grip on the Baseball Savant web page and describe the action as I saw it. There were definite lulls, but Raad filled them in without missing a beat — a first-chair violinist playing over the kid who just learned how to read sheet music. Producer-engineer Chris Majkowski was the expert conductor, providing feedback and support throughout.

But alas, for the strides I had made, the candy-coated chaos remained my persistent nemesis.

Finding my groove

By the third game, I was exhausted but excited, believing I had learned a few lessons from my mistakes. It was a day game after a night game, and that, along with staying late to write and report out six or seven articles over the course of the series, meant I was usually the first one in and one of the last ones out. But it also reminded me that I know this team, I know how to do my job, and that one of the reasons I’m here is because I like a challenge.

So I packed my luggage for my postgame dash to the airport, grabbed my 20-pound backpack and chugged into the clubhouse. I conducted a few interviews, both for stories I intended to write and for whatever I could use on the broadcast, spoke to interim manager Andy Green and spent only about 40 minutes on my notes — having been able to borrow from the prep work I had done in the preceding days.

Was it perfect? No. But was it better? Absolutely.

I felt unencumbered in a way I hadn’t before. I got to joke around. I began to fully enjoy one of baseball’s best qualities: It’s not rock, it’s jazz — sauntering to and fro, allowing you to riff along the way.

Over the course of three days, I got to talk about the movie “Spaceballs,” midges, the genesis of a town called “Normal, Illinois” and the time I accompanied a co-worker to a fondue restaurant and saw him eat his chicken medium rare.

Finally, as the Mets were about to sweep the Guardians, it was time. The attendance for that game was 26,764.

And that, I said, “is brought to you by Fruity Rainbow Five-Hour Energy. Sip the fruity candy-coated chaos.”

Nailed it.

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