Shut Up Tim McCarver

I love baseball, and watching the World Series should be the peak of my enjoyment. What could be more entertaining than the two best teams facing off for supremacy?

But my enjoyment is lessened by Fox’s announcing team of Tim McCarver and Joe Buck. Now, I was already tired of McCarver and his hectoring lectures over twenty years ago, having suffered through his early announcing years when he was doing Mets games (yes, I’m a Mets fan, thanks for the sympathy). Well, he ain’t getting any better.

Here’s a particularly egregious gem from Game One: When the Phillies’ ace relief pitcher Brad Lidge came into the game – as usual, at the start of the inning – McCarver stressed, as he did in the exact same situation in the League Championship Series, that Phillies catcher Carlos Ruiz had to be ready to block Lidge’s sliders in the dirt. But there were no runners on base, of course. Lidge could start by bouncing six consecutive sliders in the dirt and have Ruiz disdainfully spit on them as they went past and clanked against the backstop every time and Ruiz’s not blocking them wouldn’t make a difference to anyone except the ball boy.

That during his playing career McCarver was a catcher makes this line of thought both inexplicable and inexcusable.

Also, he kept pronouncing Rays pitcher Scott Kazmir’s name as “Cashmere.”

His partner in the announcing booth, Joe Buck, is just as annoying. In Game Two, after Rays starting pitcher James Shields was relieved, Buck delivered this nugget of blinding obviousness: “He can only be a winner if he gets a decision.”

I’d turn down the sound on my TV and listen to the radio broadcast, but that features Joe Morgan and Jon Miller, who are just as bad.