Excerpt
Tim McCarver's Baseball for Brain Surgeons and Other Fans
INTRODUCTION
I was signed, I was traded, I was waived, I was released. I played it and plied it. I was angered by it, disappointed in myself because of it, gladdened and heartened by it. I was cheered in parades, I was booed off the field, I was treated with silent indifference. I was on world champions and cellar dwellers. I was a hero, and I failed miserably. I felt on top of the world and like I wanted to crawl under a rock. I spiked and was spiked, took out hard and was taken out hard. I was hit by “that little white rat” more times than I could count. I hit it hard, I hit it weakly. I lifted it, grounded it, popped it, and lined it. I hit it foul and fair while realizing there was nothing fair about it. Baseball. I’ve been thrilled about it and wearied by it, but more than anything else I’ve lived it—and always loved it. I’ve been talking about it for many years. Now I am writing about it.
During the Philadelphia Phillies’ successful run for the 1980 National League pennant, some of the fans at Veterans Stadium might have done a double take when they saw someone in a Phillies uniform conducting postgame interviews down on the field. I was the guy with the microphone. Having played for the Phillies from mid-1975 through the 1979 season, I had been activated in September so that I could become a rare four-decade major leaguer. Although I wasn’t on their World Series roster, I was part of the team and dressed for each game. I still had on my Phillies cap but was “wearing” my new hat, that of a Phillies broadcaster.
I had officially retired the previous October, and, as had been agreed on two years before, I became the fifth announcer in the Phillies’ four-man booth, joining the much-missed Richie Ashburn, Harry Kalas, Andy Musser, and Chris Wheeler, who’d be my partner on cable games. I had no training in the booth, so in preparation I spent three months with Chris honing my skills at an empty studio at Channel 17, WPHL, in Philadelphia. The first time we sat there, Chris put on a videotaped game minus the sound and waited for me to start describing the action as if I were broadcasting to people in their homes. Cowed by the silence, I looked at the television and looked at Chris. Finally, Chris said, “Go ahead.” I stammered, “Go ahead and what???” It was terrifying. In my broadcasting career, I guess you could say that was when I first started to find my voice, both figuratively and literally.
I worked for the Phillies through 1982 and in 1983 went to New York to broadcast Mets games for WWOR-TV and, for a time, SportsChannel. Ralph Kiner, who has been broadcasting Mets games since their inception in 1962, introduced me as Tim MacArthur, although I had arrived, not returned. I have been with the Mets ever since, doing play-by-play and color.
In 1984, I also started working with ABC. My first postseason experience as a broadcaster came that year, when I was a roving reporter in the stands during the Chicago Cubs–San Diego Padres National League Championship Series. I was on a per-game basis and was tickled to death that it went the full five games because I needed the money. In 1985, Howard Cosell came out with his controversial book and ABC fired him ten days before the World Series and assigned me to do my first Series. I stayed at ABC through 1989, then was with CBS from 1990 through 1993, including my Winter Olympics assignment. In 1994, I went back to work at ABC, where I was reunited with Al Michaels and Jim Palmer. We did five games, and then the strike hit, which blew us out for the postseason. In 1994, The Baseball Network, which was a joint venture of ABC and NBC, came into fruition. We split postseason play in ’95 with NBC.
In 1996, I found a home at FOX and began my partnership with Joe Buck, working strictly as an analyst. So today I divide my time between FOX for the Game of the Week, the All-Star Game, and postseason play and WWOR for Mets games, working with Ralph and the ubiquitous Gary Thorne. In my business they say, “Long season, small booth,” which means you have to hope for a good partner. I know I’m fortunate because I’ve heard of nightmare situations involving mismatched twosomes. One story that makes the rounds is of a broadcaster who couldn’t find his nineteen-cent Bic pen five minutes before the game started, and just as his partner was settling in, he boomed accusingly, “You know, it’s tough to work with thieves in the booth!” So I’ll joke with Gary sometimes: “Where’s my pen? It’s tough to work with thieves …” Fortunately, Gary and I have similar senses of humor.
To succeed as a major leaguer, you must be able to adjust and adapt continually, and that’s what I’ve tried to do as a broadcaster. As I earlier indicated, finding a voice was my first aspiration, because in sports broadcasting that’s the equivalent of learning how to walk. Every step of the way in my second career, I’ve discovered that to find his voice, the good broadcaster must, oddly enough, learn when not to talk. At the very beginning, Richie Ashburn, the minimalist among sports broadcasters, said to me, “Tim, somebody told me years ago—I forget who it was—that if you don’t have anything to say, don’t say it.” A simple but wise statement. Former Phillies television producer Gene Kirby also gave me valuable “advice” when he told me, “Don’t talk through the goddamn pitch.”
I learned from experience not to start a long story (or ask a guest in the booth a complicated question) with two outs in an inning. And though I continued my eternal quest for the right adjectives, I learned, with prompting from Al Michaels, to eliminate the verb when doing play-by-play on television. On radio, a broadcaster will say, “There’s a ground ball to the left side. Vizquel plants his foot and throws to Thome. It’s in time.” On television, as Al would point out, you say, “Ground ball to Vizquel … over to Thome … one out.” If it’s a spectacular play, you can convey that with the excitement in your voice, and after your call you can go over it in more detail, perhaps with a video replay.
Television is a visual medium, and not talking at the right moment and allowing pictures to take over can be golden. On a FOX telecast, Cleveland’s Manny Ramirez belted a grand slam that broke open a game against New York and the home crowd went wild. I said nothing during the replays, although I had made comments every time we had gone to videotape before. I let it play for about twenty-five seconds—the only sound was the cheers of the crowd. In Game 4 of the 1997 American League Championship Series, Joe Buck, Bob Brenly, and I all gave way to the boisterous Indians crowd during replays of Sandy Alomar’s dramatic ninth-inning hit that beat Baltimore. Sometimes words add nothing and are distracting. It’s not dead air just because you’re not talking—it’s air that’s alive. If I’m channel surfing and pass a channel where a crowd is going bonkers, I’m going to stop. That’s human nature. Viewers don’t need to be told to listen to the crowd.
Richie Ashburn’s counsel not to talk unless I had something to say has stuck with me through the years. I think for some time it made me self-conscious because, knowing Ashburn, I believed he was insinuating that no one ever has anything so important to say that they must go into detail about it. But I decided to take his words at face value and came to the conclusion that whenever I had a point to bring up and the time was right, it was my responsibility to say it. As a broadcaster who had spent twenty-one years in the major leagues, I had been hired to talk about what I learned as a player, not to keep quiet.
And I had expertise. I had been schooled in the Cardinals’ system by such remarkable teachers as Eddie Stanky and George Kissell, and I played for such philosophical big-league managers as Gene Mauch. I had caught Hall of Famers Bob Gibson and Steve Carlton and a lot of other pitchers who used their wiles rather than dominant pitches to get out batters. I had batted against the likes of Sandy Koufax, Don Drysdale, Juan Marichal, and Tom Seaver. I had watched my Cardinals teammate Stan Musial battle pitchers, and I caught behind all-time greats like Willie Mays and Hank Aaron. Catching allows for observation denied to players in other positions. I had learned a great deal from playing the game-watching, asking questions, and from having been around some of the craftiest players, managers, and coaches the game has ever known. The strong opinions I found myself voicing in the booth were formulated during those many years I had spent down on the field. I had an eye for the game. I was cut out to think about baseball and I was cut out to talk about it.
But the one thing I didn’t take enough into consideration in the early years of my broadcast career was that my new audience was different from the players, managers, and coaches to whom I’d been talking baseball all those years. It dawned on me that finding a voice wasn’t sufficient; I had to find the right voice to be able to communicate all my knowledge of the game and genuine passion for it to the fans. My problem was that I would say things about the game matter-of-factly, as if everybody listening at home knew it as well as I did. It’s a trap many ex-ballplayers fall into. It took a while to realize that nobody outside the game knows it in the same way as people who are in it. What is routine to the player is not necessarily routine to the viewer. So you have to tell viewers at times what is and is not significant. It’s not hyperbole or anything; it’s knowing how to accentuate the points that you really think viewers should pay attention to. The hope is that the next time the same situation arises on the field, they will be able to think along with me, or be one step ahead—and maybe even disagree. That, in fact, is the premise of this book.
