The Best Live TV Show in New York Is Neither ‘SNL’, ‘Today,’ Nor ‘The View’ — It’s Gary, Keith, and Ron

This year, Major League Baseball has instituted several rule changes designed to create a more entertaining product, particularly for those watching at home. There’s a pitch clock to quicken the game, a ban on defensive shifts that will hopefully produce more offense, and a limit on the number of pickoff attempts to encourage more aggressive baserunning. The jury is still out on whether these changes will increase viewership, but if MLB wants the game to be more entertaining, they might try looking at the three guys who have been sitting in a booth in Queens for the last 18 years.

Gary Cohen, Keith Hernandez, and Ron Darling—known simply as “Gary, Keith, and Ron” to fans, or even just “GKR”—have been calling Mets games on SportsNet New York since 2006, making them the longest-tenured broadcast booth in Mets history. Their inimitable chemistry makes each game a must-watch even when the team is mired in a slump. They really earn their paycheck during blow outs. When a particular game flies off the tracks, Gary, Keith, and Ron are there to keep your attention with digressions into old ballplayers, the day’s news, or whatever else happens to be on their minds. It’s not just a broadcast. According to Jerry Seinfeld, a huge Mets fan and frequent guest in the booth, “it’s a television show.” He would know.

So would their audience. New York is the live television center of the world. It started in 1952 with the first live broadcast of the Today Show, which spawned imitators like Good Morning America and The Early Show. Saturday Night Live came around in 1975, emphasizing both the “live” and the “New York” parts in its famous cold opens. Later, the live morning show evolved into Live with Regis and Kelly (now Live with Kelly and Mark) and The View. As a setting, New York is a logical choice for live television, since a taped version can be aired in various other American time zones. Mistakes can be fixed in the editing room. Curses can be bleeped. But it also fits perfectly into the ethos of a city whose residents often feel like they’re flying without a net.

Over the last nearly two decades, the Mets broadcast has slowly evolved into an amalgam of all the great live television New York has spawned—and maybe the best. There is comedy to rival SNL (including performers who routinely break), a daily recap of the day’s news like Today, and digressions in which the hosts bounce off each other in unpredictable ways that make the broadcast feel like a men’s version of The View. Everyone has their role to play. Ron is a professorial straight man, a crucial element of any comedy team, but he’s also a master of eloquence who chooses his words wisely.  Keith is the comic relief, pushing the boundaries of decency with the occasional off-color remark. Gary is the crucial center, one of the absolute best game-callers in the business who can mix it up with the ex-pros as well as anyone. The result is the only broadcast team in sports with their own social media account, their own shirts, and even their own next-day highlights. (And yes, even their own bobbleheads!)

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I visited the trio in the booth before a game against the Phillies a couple weeks ago.  My first impression of each was exactly what I expected.  Ron was alone in the booth when I entered, diligently preparing his scorecard. Gary was at manager Buck Showalter’s pre-game press conference. Keith was….somewhere. When I ask Ron about the entertainment factor he and his boothmates bring to the broadcast, he waxes poetic about “writing a 162-page novel” every year. He said they know when to call a game straight, but they really prove their worth in the dead time.

“Take the Johan Santana no-hitter in 2013,” he says. “You give us that game, and we’ll baseball the shit out of it. That’s education, but then there are a lot of games in which you have to entertain. We’re more cognizant of that than some other broadcasts, and we know that it’s vital. There are so many things New Yorkers can do other than watching our broadcast. We try to hold them for that extra ten minutes.”

Moments later, Keith ambles in holding a small soft serve ice cream in one hand and an open box of peanut M&Ms in the other. It is 11:45 AM. Keith is the willing clown on the broadcast, although his sharp opinions and expert analysis is an equally large part of his value. When asked about his comedic touch, he cited perhaps television’s most famous sidekick as his inspiration. “When I was in A-ball, my roommate had a soon-to-be-wife, and it was a one bedroom, so I was always exiled after the game into the living room, and I watched Johnny Carson that whole summer. I loved the way Ed McMahon and Johnny interacted. I always remembered how good they were together, how natural and funny it was.” McMahon never had Keith’s underlying credibility—Hernandez is the best defensive first baseman of all time and was the captain of the World Series-winning 1986 Mets—but Keith has nonetheless embraced his role as the booth’s fun uncle.

Over the years, fans have assembled supercuts of their favorite GKR moments and posted them to YouTube. These are not the great calls, but rather the goof-off moments that come out of nowhere and elevate the broadcast into pure comedy. In nearly all of them, Keith is the fulcrum, either for his ignorance of a widely-used term, his phone going off during a broadcast, or his inadvertent double entendres. One time, he went on a three-minute comic rant about being scammed by a telemarketer. Does Keith have a favorite comic moment in his 18 years in the booth? He thinks about it for about two seconds, and then locks eyes on me. “I always like the girl with the footlong hot dog,” he says. “That one comes to mind.”

Mercifully, Gary Cohen comes in at this exact moment to save me from Keith’s piercing stare. Cohen has received extra attention this week, as he was just days away from being inducted into the Mets Hall of Fame, an incredible honor for a broadcaster (Keith and Ron were previous inductees). Still, he perks up as he hears the end of my conversation with Hernandez. “Keith is a relentlessly surprising individual. I’m constantly raising my eyebrows at things he has said, but that’s the larger point. We listen to each other. It sparks my interest and it changes the conversation. It’s a matter of paying attention as much as anything else.”

If you had to pick a single dynamic that makes this booth work, maybe it’s this one: Cohen spent his childhood in the upper deck at the old Shea Stadium. He spent his formative years worshiping the team and its players—he bleeds blue and orange, as Mets alums like to say—which makes him a nifty audience surrogate. The awe of working with two Mets legends may have faded, but he still has a fan’s curiosity. He asks them the same questions Mets fans have in their heads while watching a broadcast. Still, he’s not an outsider. Darling refers to him as “my brother,” perhaps the highest honor that any non-player can receive. To the fans, Cohen is already as much a Met as the players on the field, but seeing a kid who spent his childhood cheering from the upper deck at Shea Stadium accepted into the brotherhood of players is a special thrill. 

Cohen is famously diligent in his preparation for the game action, but he believes—and the whole team agrees—that spontaneity is the key to the trio’s appeal. “We prepare in terms of what we’re going to say on the air less than any other TV broadcast that I’m aware of. The game dictates where the conversation goes, whether it’s relating back to something that happened yesterday or 5 years ago. It’s just a conversation. A natural outgrowing of the three of us and our relationships and what we bring to the table.”  He shrugs and sighs, “I don’t know how it works or why it works, but somehow it does.” Keith gives his booth leader a little more credit.  “99 percent of our digressions are orchestrated by Gary,” he says. “He’s the maestro. He’s the Leonard Bernstein, Ronnie’s the bass section, and I’m the horns.”

When pressed, Gary, Keith, and Ron all insist they never had a vision for what the broadcast would become, but if anyone is responsible for guiding it in the right direction, it might be coordinating producer Gregg Picker, who has been leading the broadcast team since SNY’s inception in 2006. Like everyone I spoke with on his team, Picker insists that the broadcast has evolved organically, without a clear directive from him or anyone at SNY to be funnier. But he also acknowledges his own influences. “My first job was as a page at NBC, giving tours in a blue blazer. I ushered for Saturday Night Live and the old David Letterman show. Watching Letterman, whether it was Rupert in the deli or dropping stuff off the roof, I think it has been an influence, for sure. We have a lot of that same humor, like when we put Keith in a parking attendant booth a couple years go.”

Like a true comedian, Picker feels the hijinx serve a higher purpose beyond their ability to keep viewers locked in and his advertisers happy when the Mets are suffering a blowout loss. “The world has gone a little mad,” he said. “We’ve lost a lot of our sense of humor. I hope that when we do our show every night, people watching are really able to enjoy the baseball coverage, but they’re also able to escape and have a laugh.”

For Mets fans, comedy is not a digression. It’s a necessity. With last season ending in disappointment and this one mired in mediocrity, the joy Gary, Keith, and Ron bring to the broadcast every night eases their pain.

For Mets fans, comedy is not a digression. It’s a necessity. With last season ending in disappointment and this one mired in mediocrity, the joy Gary, Keith, and Ron bring to the broadcast every night eases their pain. It allows fans to forget their troubles and simply enjoy the game, with an inkling of the innocence they had as children. Baseball is a beautiful game, but it has gotten uglier in recent years. From dissent over Pride Day to sticky stuff on the pitchers’ hands, the sport seems to move from one thorny controversy to another, making the SNY team something of a small miracle. Here are three guys who know how to take baseball seriously and goof off at the same time.

Noah Gittell (@noahgittell) is a culture critic from Connecticut who loves alliteration. His work can be found at The Atlantic, The Guardian, The Ringer, Washington City Paper, LA Review of Books, and others. He is currently writing a book on baseball cinema that will be published in spring 2024.