Why there's a camera inside the SNY booth for Mets games
SNY Mets broadcaster Gary Cohen. Credit: New York Mets/Mark Levine
Mets fans have heard Gary Cohen’s voice narrate big plays since 1989, but more recently they have seen what that looks like.
It often is a match for the drama on the field.
SNY long has kept a camera trained on its booth, and it has evolved into a sponsored “Play of the Day” feature on social media.
Generally, this involves images of Cohen excitedly describing a play while tossing a writing utensil and/or punching the air for emphasis, often while analysts Ron Darling and Keith Hernandez impassively write in their scorebooks.
Does Cohen mind the intrusion? Does he enjoy it? Does he play to the camera, even subconsciously?
“I don't think about it in the slightest,” he told Newsday. “I try to concentrate on what I'm doing.
“They introduced it a few years ago and it's a little invasive, but it's the [current] world. I don't think about it for one second.”
Cohen said the booth camera is part of a larger philosophy led by producer Gregg Picker of “taking people behind the curtain.”
“That’s something Gregg Picker feels extremely strongly about, that demystifying the idea of how television is done is a good thing, that it enhances people's enjoyment,” Cohen said.
“The one thing that people have to understand if they see that is my reactions, my physical reactions, are in punching the words. It’s not celebrating. It's not rooting.
“It's more helping me do my job by lending a physical nature to my words. And I think most broadcasters do that to a certain extent when they make a call where they have to really push the words.”
Picker said, “It’s all genuine. People I think really get a kick out of seeing the passion. They get an equal kick out of seeing Keith and Ron stone-faced next to him. The paradox is kind of interesting, Ronnie and Keith are kind of gathering their thoughts on what they’re going to say as they’re observing and Gary’s just genuine passion.
“It gives you an idea of the energy that is invested in doing his job . . . He’s got an impeccable intuitiveness of when to get excited and when to be a little more even-keeled.”
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.
