This piece by Rob Neyer on Baseball Nation relates to two recent entries on the Bookshelf, one about Tim McCarver calling it a broadcast career, the other about the poor job FOX does producing the World Series.
Among my favorite passages from Neyer:
- About Tim McCarver’s Baseball for Brain Surgeons and Other Fans: “There are a lot of books like this one — penned by the likes of Joe Morgan and Keith Hernandez and Jerry Remy and Ron Darling and others — and for some reason I’ve never been able to finish even one of them. I’m sure that says something about me, but that something is a subject for another day, maybe.”
About FOX’s use of ancillary reporters: “I’m sure I missed some nuggets of wisdom, but I was also struck by how little time McCarver’s actually got. Thanks to the in-game interviews with managers, sideline reports from Ken Rosenthal, and whatever the hell Erin Andrews was doing, [my emphasis] there’s just not a great deal of time for McCarver’s analysis. Or there’s less time, anyway, than there used to be. This situation is at its worst in Fox’s postseason baseball coverage, but of course it’s leaked into the local broadcasts as well. Even as our baseball knowledge has grown more sophisticated, the broadcasts have become ever more dumbed down. And this isn’t the fault of Tim McCarver or his fellow analysts; it’s almost solely the fault of the producers who put these packages together.”- On the posibility of another McCarver book: “I would love to someday watch a baseball game with Tim McCarver, free from the demands of “other fans” television. I would love to someday read a true memoir (assuming, of course, a good collaborator; Danny Peary, as usual, did great work on Baseball for Brain Surgeons).”
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