Tim McCarver, a friend to all, was greatest color man ever
In the old days at Shea Stadium, those good old days when the ‘80s Mets were the best baseball show in town, Tim McCarver was the essential narrator for that show on television, like the stage manager in “Our Town.” There were other voices, of course. Ralph Kiner was with Tim on television and Bob Murphy was still on the radio doing the games, and then the happy recaps. But the sweet Memphis voice of Tim McCarver was the one to remember.
We were in the dining room at Shea once, and he was getting ready to do that night’s game, and his notes were spread out in front of him and his reading glasses were at the end of his nose and an unlit cigar was in the ashtray in front of him. He was telling stories from his wonderful baseball life. He always seemed to be telling stories, on the air and off, about a baseball career that saw him play in four different decades, from the time he was a kid catcher with the Cardinals until he got famous near the end for being Steve Carlton’s personal catcher with the Phillies.
And on this particular night, I innocently asked him about the 1968 World Series, when the Tigers came back from three games to one down to beat a Cardinals team that went to three World Series in five years in the ‘60s and should have won all three.
“How long did it take you to get over the ‘68 Series?” I said.
Tim put down his pen then and looked over his glasses at me and quietly said, “You never get over it.” Then he went back to preparing for that night’s Mets game.
More than anything, he was a baseball man. He worked for the Phillies and Mets and even for the Yankees briefly. He ultimately broadcast more World Series games than anybody ever has or ever will. But in his heart the old catcher was a baseball man, seeing things in the game he was watching that not even some managers saw, so often before they happened.
“He was the king of the first guess,” Bob Costas was saying on Thursday when we were talking about the passing of our friend at the age of 81. In fact the last time I had been in McCarver’s presence, apart from all the phone conversations we kept having across the years, was in Cooperstown, when he came to see Costas get the same Ford Frick Award for excellence in baseball broadcasting that McCarver himself had won.
McCarver was as deserving of that award as any baseball broadcaster who ever lived. Because here is what you need to remember about McCarver: Most of the other legendary broadcasters, including those enshrined in Cooperstown, were play-by-play men, Vin Scully and Jack Buck and Al Michaels and Costas and, well, go through the rest of the list from there. McCarver was the greatest color man of them all, and I mean no disrespect to Joe Garagiola or Tony Kubek or any of the others who did that job. Tim got older. The Memphis voice never did. And there are generations of young fans who grew up feeling as if there was never a World Series game when they weren’t sitting next to Tim McCarver.
“It was like I was still behind the plate,” he said to me one time, “just up a little higher.”
We were all luckier for it. So much has been made since the news of his passing about his first guess when the Yankees had the infield in against the Diamondbacks in the bottom-of-the-9th of Game 7 of the 2001 World Series, and rightly so. Mariano Rivera was on the mound and Luis Gonzalez was at the plate and it was McCarver who spoke of the dangers of bringing in the infielders against Mo’s cutter, especially with a left-handed hitter at the plate, just because of how many bats Mo broke with cutters in on the fists.
Of course, in the next moment, Gonzalez dunked a cutter from Rivera over Jeter and the Diamondbacks won the first and only World Series in their history.
Then there was Game 4 of the ‘96 World Series, when
Joe Torre’s Yankees began all the winning. But before they did, they were about to go down three games to one in old Fulton-County Stadium in Atlanta. The Braves led 6-0 and still led 6-3 when it was their closer, Mark Wohlers, against Jim Leyritz.
McCarver, in the moment, talked about how Wohlers was throwing Leyritz too many breaking balls; how the game was on the line with two runners on for the Yankees and Wohlers couldn’t risk getting beat throwing his third-best pitch.
In what felt like the very next moment, Leyritz took Wohlers over the leftfield wall and the game was tied, a game the Yankees would go on to win, evening the series.
When the ball was over the wall, McCarver simply added this punctuation mark: “... another slider from Wohlers.”
He was that good, in the
biggest games. And if you were lucky enough to live in New York City in the 1980s, or had access to Mets games on television, you will always believe, as I do, that the best of it from McCarver was when he was with the Mets; when it wasn’t just those of us listening to him starting to appreciate his intelligence and humor and passion for the game (and how much, truly, he appreciated Ralph Kiner and loved working with him), but the whole baseball world.
He had already worked postseason games before he got his job with the Mets. He worked his first World Series in 1985, as a late replacement for Howard Cosell. Eventually he would work 23 Series for CBS and ABC and Fox, where he worked for years and years with Joe Buck.
And please know that his company was as fine when he stepped away from the microphone as when he was behind one. He loved music and loved to sing, and there was one night in Chicago when he liked a particular song on the jukebox and slowly got up on those old catcher’s knees and began to dance. He hit a big home run as a kid for the Cardinals in the ‘64 World Series against the Yankees, a series in which he ended up with 11 hits and a .478 batting average. He was 22 that October.
He was a white child of the South from Memphis and when he got to the big leagues with the Cardinals, Bob Gibson, a Black legend of the game out of Omaha, wasn’t just pitching to him. He became McCarver’s best friend, which he would remain until Gibson died in October 2020.
I asked Tim one time what his proudest accomplishment in baseball was. He didn’t hesitate.
“That Bob Gibson honored me with his friendship,” he said.
Tim McCarver is gone now, just as we begin another baseball spring. There will never be anyone quite like him. Baseball man, baseball broadcaster. He wasn’t just my friend. He was everybody’s.