Sports
Class of the color commentators
Tim McCarver became a television companion for legions of baseball fans
This is a tribute on Tim McCarver, who broadcast a record 24 World Series. That is one more than his former Fox play-by-play partner Joe Buck and four more than Yankee announcing legend Mel Allen. McCarver died in February, 2023.
By Scott Benjamin
Before that morning in May 2008 the closest that the news reporter had ever come to meeting Tim McCarver was hearing him deliver the message some years earlier on the voice-mail system at sports columnist Mike Lupica’s home in New Canaan.
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In that instance, persistence paid off. After a number of phone calls, he got the interview scheduled with Lupica, who was then writing Bill Parcells’ memoir. He had one anecdote after another to offer, including one on Reggie Jackson, whom he had collaborated with to write Reggie memoir.
“After the book came out, Reggie said that if Hemingway had written it, it would have been a number-one best-seller,” Lupica said. “Let me tell you: The only thing Reggie knows about Hemingway is that Margaux is cuter than Marial.”
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The reporter was mildly surprised on that 2008 morning that he was being asked to call McCarver hours later at his home in Sarasota, Florida.
The editor said that McCarver’s daughter Kathy lived in the area and had inquired about getting a story published that week since McCarver would be signing his recent book, “Diamond Gems,” at the iconic Hickory Stick Book Shop in Washington Depot that Saturday.
The reporter primarily covered the municipal government, the school district and the applicable state and federal officials.
At that point, the closest that he got to sports was hearing Bob Silvaggi – then Brookfield’s first selectman – describe his career as an assistant football coach at Eastern Middle School in Greenwich. One of his players was quarterback Steve Young, the NFL Hall of Famer, who when he came out for the team couldn’t fully grip the football and instead threw it like a shot put.
However, the reporter did spend one week each March at Spring Training in Tampa to see the Yankees and some of the other Grapefruit League teams nearby.
“Diamond Gems” included excepts – ranging from Hank Aaron to Warren Spahn to Derek Jeter – from televised interviews on the syndicated Tim McCarver Show.
George Will, who wrote the forward for “Diamond Gems,” stated that if the Baseball Hall of Fame had a wing devoted to baseball’s best conversationalists, Tim would have been enshrined in the first class.”
The reporter spent 20 minutes that afternoon on the phone with the famed catcher-baseball analyst, who was second in the National League Most Valuable Player balloting in 1967 for the Cardinals as they collected their second World Series title in four years.
McCarver delivered not only vanilla but also the other 35 flavors. Also, as veteran Chicago sportswriter indicated in a 1967 Baseball Digest profile, McCarver was “polite.”
He said that recently he and Fox play-by-play announcer Joe Buck had done a typical Friday interview session with each of managers for Mets at Phillies game to be telecast the following day.
In the hallway following the discussion with then-Mets manager Willie Randolph, he had told Tim that he needed “to go easy” about the previous season’s collapse when the Mets were leading the National League East by seven games with 17 games to play and did not make the playoffs.
McCarver said that he replied, “‘Willie, the Phillies were up by six and half games with 12 games to play in 1964 and the Cardinals ended up one game ahead of them for the National League pennant and the berth into the World Series. It is 44 years later and there are people in Philadelphia still talking about that. How can you say we have to go easy on this?’ ”
On another topic, he praised Terry Francona, who had managed the Red Sox for the second time in four seasons to the world title, by noting that he kept his players happy by strategically placing them in the line-up periodically even when they were not regular starters.
For example, Coco Crisp had been a standout with Cleveland, but was now a fourth outfielder in Boston, but still got a number of at bats each week through spot starts and pinch-hitting assignments.
McCarver noted that he would be renting a house in Washington, CT. that summer to be near his daughter and grandchildren and was pleased that with so many assignments for home Yankee, Mets and Red Sox games he could just drive to them in a rental car instead of flying from Sarasota.
New York baseball writers Bob Klapish and John Harper wrote in their 1993 book on the Mets, “The Worst Team Money Could Buy,” that McCarver was one of the few baseball television analysts who regularly offered constructive criticism of the players
In 2023 in The New York Times, Bruce Weber wrote, “Like all long-serving talking heads, McCarver had his detractors. Some said he talked too much, belabored the obvious, too often tangled his grammar and was overly thrilled by his own cleverness; examples abounded on a now-defunct web page, shutuptimmccarver.com.”
“But more numerous were those who appreciated his independence of mind and his alertness to situational nuances in the game,” he added.
In his 2005 book, “Voices Of Summer, baseball broadcast historian Curt Smith rated McCarver 17th all-time among baseball broadcasters.
The top five were all play-by-play voices, in order: Vin Scully, Mel Allen, Ernie Harwell, Harry Caray and Red Barber.
John Filippelli of Greenwich, the president of the YES Network, has said that Bob Costas, whom he worked with in the 1980s at NBC Sports, is one of the few people who could substitute one night for Ted Koeppel on ABC’s Nightline and the next night stand in for David Letterman on NBC’s Late Night.
McCarver’s range wasn’t as versatile. Yet, he did co-host the 1992 Winter Olympics for CBS with Paula Zahn.
At the Hickory Stick four days after the interview, McCarrver signed the reporter’s copy of “Diamond Gems” and then asked, “Are you a Jim Bouton fan?” after he saw him wearing a Yankees jersey with Bouton’s name and his number “56.”
The reporter said he had attended a Little League banquet in Southington four years earlier that Bouton, a 21-game winner for the Yankees in 1963, had keynoted.
The reporter noted that Bouton was the winning pitcher in games 3 and 6, and the victory in Game 3 had put the Yankees up two games to one.
Then for some peculiar reason, he added the name, “Barney Schultz,” and McCarver did not retaliate.
Schultz, a knuckleball relief pitcher gave up the walk-off home run that Mickey Mantle slugged into the upper deck in right field in Game 3, with McCarver behind the plate. That put the Yankees up two games to one. In effect, the Cardinals won the series by taking Game 4 and Game 5, both at Yankee Stadium.
McCarver had clubbed the game-winning home run at Yankee Stadium in Game 5, which was pivotal in the 1964 World Series.
Hall of Fame pitcher Bob Gibson was the Most Valuable Player in that series with complete game victories in Game 5 and Game 7. However, you can make the case that McCarver should have won the sports car. In addition to his game-winning round-tripper, he stole home plate during the series and led the Cardinals with 11 hits and five walks.
One week into the 2009 Major League Baseball season, the reporter got a chance to interview McCarver again by phone for 50 minutes as a prelude to his talk to raise money at the Washington Montessori School, which his two grandchildren attended.
Approaching age 35, questions had arisen about Yankee Hall of Fame shortstop Derek Jeter’s declining defensive agility.
McCarver said that although shortstop Dick Groat had won the National League Most Valuable Player award in 1960, he was in the final phase of his career and slowing down when he came to the Cardinals in 1963.
McCarver said, that Jeter could play 60 to 80 games a season the way he had a decade earlier, however, as had been the case with Groat circa the mid-1960s, he would have to concentrate more than usual on being in the right position to get to balls batted in his direction.
Regarding age in general, McCarver said that with advances in conditioning and medical science more players in the future would have the option of playing into their late 30s and early 40s.
The reporter said that Sports Illustrate d’s Frank Deford, a longtime Westport resident, had complained years earlier that sports columnists would too often write that “sports is a business” and then ignore the fantasy elements of the games.
McCarver said he believed that fans still enjoyed that fantasy element, but that you could not ignore the economics of baseball when the salaries had become “staggering.”
The reporter remembers that In early 1990 Stratford native Mark Hirschbeck, then about to enter his third season as a Major League Baseball umpire was noting that people at the variety store in his neighborhood were talking about Will Clark getting $2.25 million from the Giants. How would the middle class respond if that continued?
Now, 33 years later, Yankees outfielder Aaron Judge commands $36 million a year
On his podcast, Lupica has said that when he asked McCarver in the 1980s about how long it had taken him to get over making the last out in the 1968 World Series - after the Cardinals had been up three games to one to the Tigers -McCarver replied, “I still haven’t gotten over it.”
It is going to take even longer to get over McCarver not being a part of baseball.
Resources:
Tim McCarver with Jim Moskovitz and Danny Peary, “Tim McCarver’s Diamond Gems,” McGraw Hill, 2008, 270 pages.
Curt Smith, “Voices Of Summer, Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2005, 419 pages.
https://retrosimba.com/2014/05/23/tim-mccarver-challenged-bob-gibson-for-world-series-mvp/
John Harper and Bob Klapish, “The Worst Team Money Could Buy,” Bison Books, 1993, 258 pages.
Mike Lupica podcast 2019.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Judge
Phone Interview with Tim McCarver, The Litchfield County Times, Tuesday, May 20, 2008.
Tim McCarver book signing at the Hickory Stick Book Shop, Saturday, May 24, 2008.
Phone interview with Tim McCarver, The Litchfield County Times, Sunday, April 5, 2009.
Baseball Digest, December 2022.
