Like everyone else, Gary Cohen doesn’t know if there will be a baseball season. The novel coronavirus has postponed it for now, along with all the other professional sports.
But the Mets’ SNY play-by-play announcer believes MLB should hold out as long as possible, even if it means starting as late as September, before canceling the season.
“Everybody hopes that there is some remnants of a season, and to me even if you can’t come back until the middle of September and you play 40 games through the end of October and then a postseason, if that’s safe to do, I’d be fine with that,” he told The Post in a phone interview. “I think some season is better than no season.”
Some disagree, that baseball would be better waiting until 2021 if it can’t get started soon. Hall of Famer Mariano Rivera recently said he doesn’t believe the winner of a 60-game season should be able to call itself a champion.
“I think something is better than nothing, whatever that something might be, even if it’s a 25-game sprint,” said Cohen, who is filling his free time reading, exercising and cooking. “I think it would be different. But it would certainly be better than nothing.”
In the absence of games, SNY has been simulating the Mets’ season in the video game, “MLB The Show.” For the first time, it had Cohen, along with boothmates Keith Hernandez and Ron Darling, call Tuesday night’s game against the Astros (8 pm, YouTube, Twitter). The three did the open for the season opener, and Cohen suggested they call a game.They taped it Monday night.
“None of us, Keith, Ron or myself, have ever really been exposed to video games, so the whole concept of it to us is a little different,” Cohen, 61, said.
“’MLB The Show,’ which is what they’re using, is very realistic, and it almost sucks you in, and you’re thinking you’re really watching something real. Every once in a while, something quirky happens that reminds you it’s just a video game, whether it’s the movement of a player or some odd thing that wouldn’t happen in real life.
“The timing of it was different, too. They move the game along quicker. Like if there is a foul ball, they go right to the next pitch. We all had to figure that out on the fly. There was a part of it that felt like we were doing a game. The interactions between the three of us were much like what you would have if you were doing a real game, of course the difference being it wasn’t a real game and we were sitting in three different places watching this simulation.”
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The Mets are struggling in the simulation, off to a 2-7 start, with three losses in extra innings. But Michael Conforto just returned from the oblique injury he suffered in spring training and with a day off on Monday, the team skipped Michael Wacha in the rotation, pitting Jacob deGrom against Justin Verlander to open the series in a showdown of Cy Young Award winners. In the simulation, Verlander didn’t suffer a groin injury that required surgery, as he did in real life.
“It was fun, but it was kind of weird at the same time, to think that this is all we’ve got,” Cohen said. “But I think that people will enjoy it, because we sit down and we call a game, which we haven’t gotten to do in some time.”