Baseball is always at its best when brought to you by local broadcasters — a fact that always seems to elude MLB's "brain trust."
My parents separated when I was very young. I had few memories of my father until I went and found him in my early twenties. I was not close to my grandfather, either. In fact, I had no male role model in my life at all. It was left to me to decide which sports teams I would root for, although the limitations of broadcast television played a significant role. In those days, entertainment still came into houses over an antenna.
The Mets won my heart in baseball, mainly due to the relative strength of Channel 9's reception. Where I grew up, a suburb of New Haven, Connecticut, WOR's signal was the strongest of all New York stations. (Even so, tuning in a watchable picture was often challenging.) When the Mets won the World Series in 1969, my first year rooting for them, I thought it would go like that forever. Little did I understand what I was getting myself into.
Still, I was spoiled in one respect. The Mets' broadcasting crew of Ralph Kiner, Lindsey Nelson, and Bob Murphy were all outstanding. I grew up in baseball, learning the fine points of the game from this legendary group and taking it all for granted. It took me many years to realize that most teams' crews were far less talented. For a boy who grew up without anyone capable of explaining the game to him, the excellence of the Mets broadcasters was formative and essential.
Things began to change in a big way in 1979. I had turned 20 the previous October, starting the first decade of adulthood. Lindsey Nelson left the Mets to head out west to San Francisco, breaking up the band after 17 years with Ralph Kiner and Bob Murphy. The Mets were amid one of the worst stretches in their history, and the cable tv network SportsChannel New York began to carry some of the games. My neighborhood was not yet wired for cable, so, for the first time in my life, some Mets games broadcast on television were unavailable. As for the ones that still were, Lindsey's replacement Steve Albert just didn't click for me. When Albert left after 3 seasons, I didn't mourn the loss.
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