Howie Rose will go out as the generational Mets voice he never intended to be

This is the hour that provokes the poets, 3 o’clock in the afternoon in the middle of a September Tuesday, inside a quiet stadium. There is a high sun and a cloudless sky and an emerald diamond below being tended to by men with rakes and hoses. There are 42,000 empty seats; workers are sprucing them before the doors open. Craftsmen all around the yard.

And one up here, on the fifth floor at Citi Field, inside the Bob Murphy Broadcast Booth. We tend to romanticize all things about baseball, and so those of us foreign to radio booths might be stunned at how … cozy it is in here, inside a place that launches 81 different baseball conversations every year.

“They say radio is an intimate medium,” Howie Rose says, the smile still the smile of a legit Queens smart aleck. “I’ll bet you never knew how literal that was.”

Rose is set up in his usual spot: hard by the wall to the left of the front row, his laptop aglow and a stack of papers in front of him. This is the broadcasting equivalent of the old Table One at Toots Shor’s saloon, a place where you know you’ll find the best information and the best stories. Sometimes all it takes is to tune your radio to 880-AM.