There might not be too many bigger New York Mets fans in this world than WFAN’s Evan Roberts. In the public eye, he might be the biggest. He gets to talk about them daily into a microphone and with an audience he has never met. If it wasn’t for this, Roberts might be one of those sports fans you end up in a conversation with at a game and can never find a polite way to wiggle away from.
You know the kind. It’s the unusual person you share one passion with that seems to know everything about the team’s history and what’s currently going on. Just to be safe, you make sure they don’t see what car you get into.
Fortunately, he does have the outlet of speaking on sports radio daily and over the years he has become a voice for Mets fans. But is he the best representation of the average person who bleeds orange and blue?
Does Evan Roberts accurately represent Mets fans everywhere?
One doesn’t have to agree with everything anyone says—unless you’re newlyweds then those people agree with everything the other days. Roberts has had plenty of points over the years that were difficult to get on board with. However, there is often a logic to his way of thinking when it comes to baseball.
The same isn’t true about some other aspects of his life. Roberts is, first and foremost, a baseball fan. He knows other sports well, too. As only a casual fan of them and someone who has as much interest in the Brooklyn Nets as he does seeing the third Human Centipede film (two was enough), I’ll have to take his word on what he thinks about them.
Roberts has been fortunate to work for the big radio station in town full of Mets fans over the years. His former partner, Joe Benigno, couldn’t have been much more different personality-wise. That was, of course, until he partnered with Craig Carton at the end of 2020. His sports talk has definitely declined since the change. It’s only on his Saturday show where he gets to speak up on behalf of the average Mets fan—or does he?
Evan Roberts remains a strong voice on New York sports radio for a couple of reasons. He is the longest tenure pure sports nerd there which isn’t a bad thing. The Morning Show has never been about sports first—which is a good thing and typical on sports stations—and the change in the midday to Tiki and Tierney is feeling more like an ESPN television broadcast where the point of the day is to create buzz around a hot take. Roberts’ current show with Carton couldn’t be less about sports some days which can drive the diehards away at times.
This isn’t about being Andrew Marchand. This is about declaring whether or not Roberts can speak on behalf of Mets fans everywhere. His first sports passion, Roberts has gotten away from what first made him great: his Mets obsession.
When those moments do come, however, Roberts does as fine of a job as ever speaking on behalf of the Mets fan. It’s his understanding of the game and the pain he feels for being alive yet not old enough to remember the 1986 championship that makes him a voice of reason.