The Sporting Life:
The Public Professor’s
Saturday Sports Column
And another World Series drones to conclusion.
For longer than I care to remember, FOX has been broadcasting the Fall Classic with its team of Joe Buck (play by play) and Tim McCarver (color analysis) at the helm. McCarver is a former Major League catcher and Buck is the son of Jack Buck, the late, great baseball and football announcer with a plaque in Cooperstown. How and why sports 
announcing has become so incestuous that most people behind the mic are either former athletes or relatives of former announcers is another topic I’ll address at a future date. But for now, I’d like to focus on these two, Buck and McCarver, who’ve made watching the World Series an increasingly painful experience over the years, to the point that it has become excruciating.
When the now 69 year-old McCarver first came on the national scene as a baseball color analyst back in 1980, he was a breath of fresh air. He was smart and articulate. As the preferred catcher of Hall of Fame pitchers Bob Gibson and Steve Carlton, he brought tremendous insights to the booth. He was cerebral and serious but also had a sense of humor. That was 30 years ago.
As time has rolled by, McCarver has started to wear thin. Most New Yorkers got sick of him a while ago, over the course of his career calling Mets and Yankees games on local TV. 
However, from a national perspective McCarver has followed a path similar to another innovator in the field near the end of his career: John Madden. Like Madden during the turn of the century, McCarver’s insights have become repetitious and at times simplistic. His sense of humor has revealed itself to be little more than a penchant for very bad puns. And he’s showing signs of his age; he seems more detached of late, sometimes slow to make a point, and sometimes simply missing the larger point and instead getting stuck on the minutiae. Simply put, a once great announcer is near the end of the line.
But many who paid attention to Madden’s football announcing career agree that he was reinvigorated near the end. When he moved to Monday Night Football, and late Sunday Night Football, his new partnership with Al Michaels lit a spark. Michaels has 
his own faults, but he is still an excellent announcer in many ways, and for Madden he was a huge step up after leaving behind his longtime partner Pat Sumerall. Gifted with a wonderful voice, Summerall was never actually a great announcer, though it always seemed like he would make a top notch drinking buddy. Teaming up with Michaels seemed to give Madden the shot in the arm he needed to go out on top of his game, and he did. So why hasn’t working with the younger Joe Buck done the same for McCarver?
My guess is that it might be because Joe Buck is really, really, really bad. As in no good. As 
in listening to him call a baseball game makes me think about opening a vein. As in Joe Buck’s play by play of baseball games makes Baby Jesus cry.
So why is Buck so ubiquitous? Well for starters, the 41 year old Buck made the most of his father’s connections to get plumb positions at a very early age. Father Jack Buck, rightly a legend in broadcasting, called St. Louis Cardinals games on radio and TV from 1954-59 and again from 1961-1999. He was also prominent in national broadcasts in baseball and football, with career highlights that included 11 World Series, 4 All-Star Games, and 18 Super Bowls. Any coincidence that his son Joe began doing play by play for the Cardinals at the age of 21? Or that he was calling NFL games for FOX three years later? And the World Series by the age of 27? I don’t know, is it a coincidence that Will and Jada Pinkett Smith’s boy gets top billing in a karate movie with Jackie Chan even though he’s barely old enough to sit in the front seat of a car?
Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not resentful about it. This is the way the world works. As former Tammany Hall politician George Washington Plunkitt once famously put it: “I seen my opportunities and I took `em.” Kudos to the young man. You get a shot, you take it.
But here’s the thing. When Joe Buck calls a baseball game, Baby Jesus has the waterworks going so bad you’d think the little drummer boy was just dragged to death by the donkey after getting his foot caught in a loose stirrup. It’s that bad.
Clearly influenced by his father’s minimalist approach, it comes across as if Joe Buck doesn’t even really like baseball, that he’d rather be hanging out with his frat buddies from Sigma 
Nu, watching a football game. Instead of his father’s rich, engaging baritone, he offers a dry, tenor drone that is a paean to monotony and disinterest. Some of his favorite tactics include uninspired readings of his scorecard, slowly rehashing something you just saw, second guessing managers, players and coaches who understand the game a thousand times better than he does, and beating simple observations into the ground by stating them over and over and over.
So yeah, no, his teaming with Tim McCarver over the last 15 years has not helped reinvigorate the aging color man. To the contrary, they’ve tightly hugged each other and entered a twisting, spinning death spiral of mutually reinforced boredom. And they’ve made watching the World Series more and more difficult each year.
I’ve felt this way for a while. But the Prof. had an epiphany about it during this year’s American League Championship Series between the Yankees and Rangers on TBS.
Confession Time: The Public Professor hasn’t had cable for over 7 years. The Baltimore
monopoly is held by the scumbags over at Cablevision, and I am absolutely done with them. Finito. Never giving them another dime, ever. Sure, I could get a dish, but I’ve come to enjoy a life with much less television. For example, it gives me time to write drivel like this. Fun, huh? And with the money I save, I can buy more tweed and pipe tobacco.
So anyway, I’m walking through Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport (best name of an airport, ever) and I spot the game. I sit down, I watch, I listen. I was stunned. Who are these announcers, I asked myself. They’re . . . they’re . . . they’re . . . good. They’re really good. Turns out the team was Ernie Johnson (play by play), and Ron Darling and John Smoltz (color).
Were they perfect? No. And in truth, I only heard them do a grand total of 4 ½ innings, so I’m not making an absolute judgment on them. But in relative terms, they were so much 
better than Buck and McCarver that I almost began crying like the Baby Jesus, but out of joy, and not because of a terrible donkey mishap. Why aren’t they doing the World Series, I demanded to know of the strangers around me. And how embarrassing is it that some guys on cable (why the playoffs are on cable is a whole other issue) are clearly so much better than the household names who cover the World Series? Sad.
So let me close with an open memo to FOX. Yes, Buck and McCarver are established household names to sports fans across the nation. But is that helping you “brand” the World Series? Wake up. No one outside the Buck and McCarver families is watching the World Series because Buck and McCarver are calling the games. People watch the World Series because, you know, it’s the god damn World Series!
So FOX, please do what’s best for the nation. Relegate Buck to football (which he’s somewhat better at), ease McCarver into retirement, bring over the TBS guys to do your games, and send a box of Kleenex and some chamomile tea over to the Baby Jesus’ place so he can pull himself together and enjoy some baseball next year. You know he’s a Padres fan, right?