WFAN original Ed Coleman retires
Ed Coleman, the longtime Mets reporter and a WFAN original from the station’s 1987 debut, has decided to retire.
Coleman, 72, had been expected to call some games from the booth this season with Howie Rose cutting back for medical reasons, but instead he opted to move on.
“It’s been a great ride,” Coleman told Newsday on Friday, shortly after Newsday broke the news of his departure. “It’s been more ups and downs than I care to think about with the Mets, that’s for sure.
“But I’ve loved the callers. I’ve loved the fans. The feedback that I got, I always got positive stuff from fans.”
Brad Heller is expected to succeed Coleman as the pregame and postgame host for Mets games on WCBS-AM, which has the same parent company as WFAN in Audacy.
The company still is considering candidates to fill in for Rose, who will skip West Coast games this season, and is focused on younger announcers for that role.
Coleman’s retirement is part of a wave of departures in recent years by WFAN fixtures. Newsday has learned that longtime update man Bob Heussler also plans to leave the station.
Since 2019, Tony Paige, John Minko, Joe Benigno, Mike Francesa and Steve Somers have left, and now Coleman and Heussler.
Coleman began his WFAN career as Somers’ overnight update man before later pairing briefly with Francesa and then with Dave Sims on the “Coleman and the Soul Man” midday show. He began covering the Mets in 1993.
Coleman said he had been thinking about leaving for a while, especially after the past two seasons were affected by COVID-19. He had to fill in extensively for Rose last year — often calling games off a TV monitor.
“In 2020, it was a mess,” he said. “And last year was a mess — or a disaster . . . It just hasn’t been a lot of fun, to be honest with you.”
Coleman was reluctant to travel extensively, and was especially reluctant to miss watching his daughter, Emma, play lacrosse at Bryant University this season.
“The travel didn’t appeal to me as much as it used to, let’s put it that way,” he said.
He said he is leaving on good terms and thanked Audacy executives Chris Oliviero and Tim Scheld for how they handled his situation and eventual decision. In the end, he said, he sensed the generational shift at the station, had other priorities to tend to and decided it was time to move on.
Coleman said he has offered to fill in in a pinch if needed.
“So maybe I’m not officially, totally, retired,” he said. “But if I don’t work again, that’s fine with me, too.”
Coleman said he got to feel for Mets fans one last time with the news of Jacob deGrom’s injury preceding the news of his retirement by only an hour or so.
“They’re great fans,” he said. “I grew up in Boston, a Red Sox fan, but they welcomed me, and I tried to give that back to them when I was here. I had a lot of fun. Had a great time with it. It meant a lot to me.
“It’s been a huge part of my life, to say the least. You’re there since 1987, at the dawn of the station. To be able to last as long as I have, it’s meant an awful lot to me, and they’ve meant an awful lot to me, the fans and the callers over the years.”
Neil Best first worked at Newsday in 1982, returned in 1985 after a detour to Alaska and has been here since, specializing in high schools, college basketball, the NFL and most recently sports media and business.
