BIG-LEAGUE CATCHER AND BROADCASTER
Tim McCarver, a durable big-league catcher who played in four decades, made two All-Star teams and won two World Series championships but whose greater renown derived from his career as a Hall of Fame broadcaster, died Thursday in Memphis, Tenn. He was 81.
His death was announced by the National Baseball Hall of Fame.
Known for his shrewd analysis of strategy, his literate use of metaphor and his penchant for predicting what was about to unfold on the field, often correctly, McCarver was sometimes a play-by-play announcer but most often a color man, a role that better suited his gift of gab.
His career spanned more than 30 years, from his start in Philadelphia in 1980, to his famous pairing with former slugger Ralph Kiner in the New York Mets’ booth, to his national appearances on four different networks, to stints with the New York Yankees and the San Francisco Giants.
Throughout, his informed, perceptive and articulate observations of the game were widely admired, and his gravelly tenor with a hint of his Tennessee upbringing in it became one of the game’s most familiar voices.
Like all long-serving talking heads, he 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, and he was mocked on “The Simpsons.” Atlanta Braves outfielder Deion Sanders once took exception to a McCarver criticism and dumped a bucket of ice water over his head in the locker room after a game.
But more numerous were those who appreciated his independence of mind and his alertness to situational nuances in the game.
McCarver called a total of 24 World Series.
For the first, on ABC in 1985, he was a replacement for Howard Cosell. In some ways, McCarver’s progression from behind the plate to behind the mic was a natural one. A catcher is often a ballclub’s on-field professor, its gatherer of knowledge and dispenser of experience. Many have become managers; many others, Joe Garagiola and Bob Uecker among them, have become broadcasters.
That said, he was a solid big-league ballplayer but not a candidate for the Hall of Fame. He spent most of his career, which stretched from 1959 to 1980, with two National League teams: the St. Louis Cardinals and the Philadelphia Phillies.
As a player, McCarver is probably best known as the battery mate of choice for two of the greatest pitchers in big-league history, Bob Gibson and Steve Carlton. Both were on the Cardinals in the 1960s, and McCarver was behind the plate for Gibson’s 1968 season, in which his earned run average was a minuscule 1.12, the lowest for any pitcher in over a century.
Carlton joined the Cardinals in 1965, and McCarver caught his first two All-Star seasons, 1968 and 1969; after that, they followed each other.
In 2012, McCarver received the Ford C. Frick Award, essentially a lifetime achievement citation presented annually to a broadcaster by the National Baseball Hall of Fame for “major contributions to baseball.”
Four years later, he was inducted into the Sports Broadcasting Hall of Fame.
“If you’re going to talk about the best baseball analyst in the history of television,” Dick Enberg, himself a Frick Award winner, said on that occasion, “Tim McCarver’s name has to come up immediately.”