Howie the puppy and the broadcaster who earned his name

Doges Editorial · 2026-06-28 · 6 min read

An eleven-week-old yellow Lab just arrived at Citi Field for the longest training of his life. The name he carries belongs to a man who gave forty years to the game.

The first thing Howie had to master at Citi Field was the popcorn. Not steal a kernel—just ignore it entirely. That's one item on the long checklist of a service dog puppy who arrived at the Mets' home stadium on June 25, 2026, ears still soft, the concrete echoing around him in ways that no eleven-week-old dog has a framework for yet.

He's named after Howie Rose, the team's radio voice for the last four decades, who announced he would retire at the end of the 2026 season. The people behind the naming thought it was a good joke. Rose himself leaned into it: "Four-legged Howie," he said, "immediately becomes the best looking Howie in the organization." But the joke is a container for something heavier—because what this particular puppy is training to do has almost nothing to do with baseball.

A $50,000 education

America's VetDogs is the nonprofit behind Howie's training, and they don't work small. The organization partners with veterans and first responders living with PTSD, traumatic brain injury, mobility disabilities, and other service-related conditions. A single service dog costs over $50,000 to train fully. The process takes between fourteen and eighteen months. At the end of it, the dog is matched with a specific person based on both the person's needs and the dog's developed strengths—a process that takes the match seriously, because the bond that follows will run for years.

The clinical case for that investment became measurable in June 2024, when the first National Institutes of Health-funded trial on psychiatric service dogs for PTSD was published in JAMA Network Open. Researchers found that veterans paired with a service dog had 66% lower odds of receiving a PTSD diagnosis after three months, compared to veterans waiting for placement, along with significantly lower anxiety, depression, and feelings of social isolation (Leighton et al., 2024; jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2819452). About 29% of veterans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan carry a PTSD diagnosis, which the VA considers among the highest rates of any military era on record.

The Mets' partnership makes the team the first Major League Baseball organization to work with America's VetDogs as a puppy raiser. The role is practical: Citi Field offers Howie the kind of environment that money can't otherwise buy for a training program. A baseball stadium is a graduate seminar in distraction—echoing concrete, unpredictable movement, the press of crowds, the sharp smell of food everywhere. If a dog can learn to hold steady in that, a quieter setting starts to look manageable.

Citi Field provides a wide range of valuable training opportunities for our service dog Howie, as he is learning to ignore distractions such as stray popcorn.

What the training is actually building

The work of a service dog is usually described in physical terms: retrieve a dropped item, open a door, interrupt a nightmare, provide deep pressure in a moment of acute anxiety. These are real and specific skills, and they matter. But what the training is also building, slowly and across hundreds of repetitions, is a kind of reliability—the dog's ability to stay regulated when the person they're with is not. That's harder to teach and harder to measure, and it doesn't fit on a list of tasks.

Miller spoke about a previous partnership the organization had forged with the Mets organization. A retired NYPD officer named Richie Carter had responded to the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. He was eventually paired with a dog named Shea—also named for Mets history, the old stadium. Miller described what followed in the careful language of an outcomes report, but the weight of it came through anyway.

Since being paired with Shea, Richie has experienced a dramatic improvement in his quality of life, including reduced anxiety and far fewer PTSD-related nightmares.

Far fewer nightmares. Reduced anxiety. Each of those phrases is doing a lot of work. They're describing sleep that finally stabilized. Someone able to be in the world without bracing for it. A dog sleeping at the foot of a bed, and the particular safety of knowing that, night after night.

The broadcaster who gave the name its weight

Howie Rose started calling Mets games on television in the 1980s and moved to radio, where he stayed. Forty years is a long time to be the voice of anything—longer than most players' careers by a factor of five. He called celebrations and collapses. He narrated the long slow middle innings of August, and the kinds of final games that make cities go quiet. His voice became part of the furniture of summer in New York in the way that few things ever do.

When the Mets announced his retirement, the organization paired the news with the introduction of the puppy bearing his name. Rose's response caught the occasion cleanly. "Loyalty begets loyalty," he said. "For our veterans and first responders who have given so much in service to their communities, having a loyal companion to assist them is the least that we can do."

The word loyalty moved through the sentence twice, and both times it meant something slightly different. The first was an observation about how fidelity tends to circulate—given honestly, it tends to come back. The second was a version of a debt, the kind that communities owe to people who protected them. A puppy sat somewhere between those two meanings, still learning to hold still around the popcorn.

Not every dog graduates

America's VetDogs is careful about this: not every dog who enters the program reaches the end of it. Some are too stimulated by busy environments. Some develop anxieties around specific triggers that can't be reliably managed. Some simply don't match the profile of the person they'd otherwise be placed with. The ones who don't graduate are typically placed as family pets or therapy dogs—the skills they've built still count for something, just not for this particular work.

The ones who do graduate are matched with intention. A dog whose strengths lean toward nighttime interruption—waking someone from a nightmare, staying close in the hours before dawn—isn't necessarily the right fit for someone whose primary need is mobility assistance. The match matters. The program takes it seriously. The placement that follows will define both lives for the next seven to ten years.

A baseball team and a different kind of win

Baseball takes its time. It unfolds across 162 games in a season, and over those games, a team's identity gets built in increments—the pitcher who stays reliable in August, the fielder who always positions himself correctly before the ball is hit. Part of what teams do, over a long season, is show you who they are.

Partnering with America's VetDogs doesn't change a team's standings. But it says something about what the organization thinks its reach is—beyond the stadium, beyond the season. The first MLB team to enter this partnership did it by naming a puppy after someone who gave the sport four decades of his voice. Both choices seem true to the same idea.

For now, Howie the yellow Lab is learning Citi Field. He's learning what sounds are just sounds. He's learning that the thing on the floor that smells incredible is not something he's allowed to investigate. He's building the long patience that will eventually make him someone's most reliable companion.

The broadcaster who gave him his name called it loyalty. That sounds exactly right.