Howie Rose is stepping away after this season, and the timing could hardly be more fitting for the kind of Mets year he’s been forced to narrate. The veteran broadcaster has spent the summer describing a team that keeps trending toward the wrong kind of history, and on Sunday he delivered a line about Jorge Polanco that landed with the kind of comic sting only Rose can pull off.
Polanco came to the plate against the Miami Marlins batting .135, and Rose couldn’t resist the number. The line that drew the laughs was simple and brutal: “Here’s Jorge Polanco, batting .135… wait!
135? That’s not a batting average, that’s the Seaford Oyster Bay Expressway!”
That was the kind of call that reminded Mets fans exactly what they’re going to miss. Rose doesn’t dress things up when the team is sinking, and he doesn’t pretend the wreckage is anything else. With the Mets stuck well below .500 and not having been at that mark since early April, the booth has become one of the few places where the frustration comes wrapped in humor instead of just misery.
Polanco, meanwhile, has become the clearest symbol of the mess. After an 0 for 3 showing on Sunday, he’s now 4 for 51.
Whatever the explanation is, it has gone far beyond a normal slump. The source of the frustration is obvious: he was never going to replace Pete Alonso, and asking him to do Brandon Nimmo’s job was a stretch from the start.
That disconnect is part of why the criticism has kept circling back to David Stearns and the offseason decisions around this roster. Rose didn’t mention Stearns in the joke itself, but Polanco’s season has become tangled up with the larger argument over what the Mets thought they were building. The roster fit never made much sense, and the results have only sharpened that point.
Rose is leaving at a moment when the Mets are heading toward a finish that calls for more spin than celebration. Bob Ojeda added to the noise during the 1986 Mets reunion by taking shots at Stearns, and the temperature around Citi Field has only climbed from there. The last truly meaningful game the team played even had snow in the forecast, which tells you plenty about where this season has gone.
For now, the best snapshot of it all might be Rose’s line about Polanco. It was funny, sharp, and a little too on the nose. In one sentence, he captured the season’s mood better than any long breakdown could.
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