Todd Frazier found legendary Mets voice Gary Cohen to be too negative for his liking.
The former Mets third baseman revealed that he begged Cohen to “start rooting for” the team after a confrontation with SNY’s play-by-play player over what appeared to be critical analysis.
“When I got home, people kept saying to me, ‘This guy is tearing you down, he’s tearing the Mets down.’ I’m like, ‘Oh, that’s what they’re doing, right?’ . ” Frazier said of “foul territory.” Early this week. “You start looking into it. Players are like, ‘He always did this.’ Hey, we can’t stand it.
“One time I went up to him and said, ‘Gary, we need to talk.’ I said, ‘What the hell is going on here?’ Mets fan I thought so. ‘He was like, ‘That’s me,’ and he kind of got mad at me, so I said, ‘Okay, let’s start rooting for us.’ ”
Cohen is a die-hard Mets fan, and few question his loyalty to the team.
But unlike some announcers, Cohen doesn’t hit home runs on the air or just root for the Mets blindly. She said Cohen, along with Keith Hernandez and Ron Darling, stands out on the broadcast staff for his ability to be critical when needed, something that was common with the Mets.
Frazier played for the Mets from 2018-20 before being shipped to Texas, and his only successful season with the team was in 2019.
He also played for the Reds, White Sox, and Yankees before appearing in 66 games with the Yankees during the 2017 season, and the New York market is known to be tougher on players than other markets.
Frazier seemed determined to stand up for his teammates when he brought up the topic with Cohen.
“We had a lot of conversations. Good 10- to 5-minute conversations,” Frazier said. “It was actually in front of some of the players, it was actually in front of the people. We had a new respect for what he was doing and what I was doing. It was fine after that. We are both men. If we have a problem, we immediately go to the source of the problem. That’s how I was raised. I feel better about it. I was, and I hope he was too.
“In the back of his mind, it was in the back of his mind that we were listening, that there were people gathered around us, that our families at home were listening. There’s no need to bash it, that was part of the conversation, and I hope he respected what I said and I respected his comment back.”
