Howie Rose meets Sir Paul McCartney to cross off 'bucket list' item
Mets radio announcer Howie Rose. Credit: Kathleen Malone-Van Dyke
Mets fans listening to Saturday night’s Subway Series game on ESPN NY 880 wondered why Howie Rose wasn’t in the booth for the late innings.
Rose had a pretty good reason for skipping out early (with permission from his bosses): He went to the season finale of “Saturday Night Live” and got to meet musical guest Paul McCartney at an after-party.
“It was for a fleeting maybe 10 seconds,” Rose said during the third inning of Sunday’s Subway Series game. “But maybe the biggest item on the bucket list has been crossed off, getting to meet Sir Paul. It was surreal.”
Rose, who will retire after the season, has said meeting living Beatles McCartney and/or Ringo Starr and getting to call the final out of the Mets winning the World Series are his two biggest bucket-list items.
Even after Sunday’s thrilling 7-6, 10-inning comeback victory over the Yankees, the Mets winning the World Series remains a long shot.
But as for meeting Sir Paul, who will turn 84 next month, the 72-year-old Rose said: “Here I am speaking for a living for over 50 years and I must have sounded like the biggest bumbling moron. I was trying to say something along the lines of thank you for everything you’ve meant in my life. Words to that effect might have dribbled out in different order, sounded different than their design. It was nuts.”
Rose later added: “It was a very strange feeling to meet somebody who’s been part of your life in a sense for what did I say to him, ‘62 stinking years,’ words to that effect. You just wish that you had a little more time to have a discussion. But that’s not the forum, that’s not what it was. I was absolutely blessed and thrilled to have that opportunity . . . I’m sorry if I sound like a little teenager, but last night I was one.”
Anthony Rieber covers sports media and business and professional sports (you know, games and trades and things). He has worked at Newsday since Aug. 31, 1998, and has been in his current position since Jan. 1, 2026.
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