NYC Radio: Ed Coleman, A WFAN Original, Retires

Ed Coleman has retired

Ed Coleman, the longtime Mets reporter and a WFAN 660 AM original from the station’s 1987 debut, has decided to retire, reports Neil Best at Newsday.

Coleman, 72, had been expected to call some games from the booth this season with Howie Rose cutting back for medical reasons, but instead he opted to move on.

“It’s been a great ride,” Coleman told Newsday on Friday, shortly after Newsday broke the news of his departure. “It’s been more ups and downs than I care to think about with the Mets, that’s for sure.

“But I’ve loved the callers. I’ve loved the fans. The feedback that I got, I always got positive stuff from fans.”

Brad Heller is expected to succeed Coleman as the pregame and postgame host for Mets games on WCBS-AM, which has the same parent company as WFAN in Audacy.

The company still is considering candidates to fill in for Rose, who will skip West Coast games this season, and is focused on younger announcers for that role.

Coleman’s retirement is part of a wave of departures in recent years by WFAN fixtures. Newsday has learned that longtime update man Bob Heussler also plans to leave the station.

Since 2019, Tony Paige, John Minko, Joe Benigno, Mike Francesa and Steve Somers have left, and now Coleman and Heussler.

Coleman began his WFAN career as Somers’ overnight update man before later pairing briefly with Francesa and then with Dave Sims on the “Coleman and the Soul Man” midday show. He began covering the Mets in 1993.

Coleman said he had been thinking about leaving for a while, especially after the past two seasons were affected by COVID-19. He had to fill in extensively for Rose last year — often calling games off a TV monitor.