Evan Roberts

It was a little bit of a curse at first because coming from a talk show background and morphing into a full-time play-by-play career, I had to learn to edit myself.

I was told quite often early on that it's okay to use 100 words rather than 1,000 to say the same thing.

And so between that and, as you guys know, the need when you're doing a talk show not only to be personable but opinionated.

Yeah.

You can't be a wet blanket when you're doing a talk show.

You've got to have opinions and you've got to be able to share them and be a little compelling and even controversial if necessary.

That does not always mesh with what you have to do as a play-by-play announcer.

And it took me a couple of years to kind of shake off my talk show sensibilities and just stay on the track that a play-by-play announcer needs to travel on.

It was one of my two most memorable nights on the air doing a talk show at FAN because, and it's so complicated for me now when I think about Tom, because like so many others, he was my idol when I was a teenager.

I mean, he broke in when I was 13 and I don't have to explain what Tom Seaver meant to the Mets and Mets fans.

So, you know, he was a hero to me in the baseball vernacular.

And then I got to work with him later on as a colleague and through that became what I would consider a friend.

That just kind of sort of blew me away.

But I wasn't at that point yet when Tom retired and ultimately was elected to the Hall of Fame.

I believe he went in in what, 92?

92, yes.

Yeah.

92.

So he was elected with the biggest mandate in Hall of Fame history, 98.8% of the vote.

And he agreed to come on with me the next night on WFAN.