Rant #3,076: Talk Talk

Now, Tim McCarver is gone.

I am sure a lot of you don’t know who he was, but if you give me a few minutes, you will find out who he was right here.

He came to national consciousness as one of the best catchers of his generation. He played across four decades (1959-1980) for several teams, primarily the St. Louis Cardinals and the Philadelphia Phillies.

While he was just a cut below being a Hall of Famer as a player, he sure caught plenty of them, including Bob Gibson and Steve Carlton during their most dominating seasons, some of the most dominating seasons a pitcher has ever had in baseball history.

Although he had a great 21-year Major League Baseball playing career, he is perhaps best known as a local and national baseball broadcaster for several teams and networks, including the Mets, the Yankees and the Giants, as well as for Fox Sports.

He cut his teeth as a broadcaster with the Mets, who he spent 16 seasons with, continued that honing of his craft with the Yankees, who he spent three seasons with, and that set him up for the national stage, where he called two dozen World Series and countless other games.

He finished up doing both Fox games and Giants games, retiring about a year ago after COVID convinced him that the time had come to hang up his microphone.

He was the first baseball analyst—or at least was said to be the first baseball analyst—to openly criticize players and teams while on the air, even if he was calling games for the local team and criticizing them on local broadcasts.

He had a wealth of knowledge, and often said that his 21 years as a catcher gave him the perfect perch to describe the nuances of the game to fans, and do it on his own erms.

To say that he was well liked by everyone—teams and players and fans—would be an absolute lie.

He was respected, like John Madden was in football, but not universally loved, as Madden was in football.

He had one famous skirmish with Deion Sanders, the a two-sport football and baseball star who he criticized for playing both sports on the same day, walking out on the Braves in the middle of a playoff game.

McCarver got in over his head in knocking Sanders, stating that the Braves should look into legal proceedings to stop this from happening.

Sanders did not take kindly to that and later on, dumped water all over McCarver while he was being interviewed by the broadcaster … not once, but several times.

Ted Williams, maybe the greatest all-around hitter baseball has ever seen, took him apart after a broadcast, and forced a meeting where he told McCarver everything he knew about hitting, a situation where McCarver said he “just had to take it” because it was coming from Williams, the last player to hit .400 during a season and a Hall of Famer …

Which McCarver became as a broadcaster some years later.

And not all fans liked him either.

I was one of them.

I felt he over-criticized teams and players too much, but I also think that he gave fans an inside peak at what made a baseball team run, but never told viewers the whole story.

He seemed to give us what he thought we could handle, and then pull back a bit, so as not to break into the game’s “inner spectrum” fully.

He was brash, too opinionated for my taste, talked way too much, had an ego the size of the Grand Canyon, and said things that got under players’ skins.

But he has many disciples in the booth, and you can hear them today on just about any baseball broadcast.

And he did know what he was talking about, and he kind of made you know that.

During the 2001 World Series, he correctly predicted the outcome of the deciding game down to the final pitch, that from the Yankees’ Mariano Rivera to the Diamondbacks’ Luis Gonzalez, who had a broken bat hit that won the Series for the team from Arizona.

Rivera through a cutter, and he correctly predicted that the left-handed hitting Gonzalez would be able to handle it, even if he barely hit it, which he did, and the rest is history.

I will give him credit.

McCarver knew the game probably better than anyone, but his style rubbed me the wrong way, almost like, “I know the game better than you and don’t you forget it.”

And I think he rubbed many players the same way with this attitude … but you can’t knock the 40 years he spent in the booth, couple with his 21 years on the field.

He and Vin Scully had widely different styles, but they were arguably the two most famous baseball broadcasters in the history of the game, along with Mel Allen and Red Barber, who also had different styles, and yes, except for Scully, they all often rubbed people the wrong way.

So here is a toast to Tim McCarver, an excellent player and perhaps even a better broadcaster, a guy I never really was attuned to, but who I respected greatly for his more than 60 years of baseball acumen.

R.I.P.

Have a great weekend, and I will speak to you again on Monday.