Is there any conceivable reason for Tim McCarver being allowed to announce baseball, let alone have announced the World Series for... I don't even know how long? It's just brutal listening to him. I'm not a huge fan of Joe Buck either, but Buck is at least tolerable. I don't really like his announcing style, but he's certainly a very playable play-by-play man. The problem is when McCarver tries to interject something playing off of what Buck had just said and it comes out not making any sense whatsoever.
The thing is, McCarver is one of serveral announcers covering major televised sports whose continued employment is simply confounding to me. Before he finally retired, (a couple of years after he said he was going to retire initially) Fox would trot out Pat Summerall, who for all I knew was asleep during half of the games. There would be times going into or coming out of a commercial break in which you would expect the play-by-play guy to give a summary of the current situtation in the game, where Summerall would just sort of meekly say "The Bears.... lead......" and sort of trail off while you just sat watching a shot of the field in complete silence before the producer finally figured out, "Oh shit, he's not gonna say anything else." Hawk Harrelson does this a lot announcing White Sox games, but he does it because he's pissed that the White Sox are losing. Summerall just seemed completely disinterested in anything going on around him. Aliens could attack the stadium and Sumerall would just sort of say, "Well... we've got some... aliens."
Dick Stockton, who just announced the Cubs/Dodgers NLDS (making it that much more painful for me) sounds equally disinterested in what he's doing except he talks more. So instead of 3-hours of mostly silence you sort of get 3 hours of a long stream of monotone like HAL-9000 or something. The thing uniquely bad about Dick Stockton is that he can't seem to be bothered to learn how to pronounce anyone's names. In 2007 in the Cubs\Diamondbacks NLDS he consistently pronounced Mike Quade's name "Kwade", rather than "Kwah-dee." This year, every time he tried to pronounce Kosuke Fukudome it was a struggle. I've seen clips of old NBA Finals games with Dick Stockton announcing, and while I still don't really like him as an announcer in any era, back in the day he wasn't nearly as monotonus and sleepy sounding as he is now. How do these old crumugeons keep getting work in the biggest of sporting events? Is it just loyalty for the seniormost guys? TV executives are always thought of as being obsessed with ratings to an extraordinary degree. I've never once heard anyone say, either online or face-to-face, "You know who I love is that Tim McCarver!"
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Speaking of the World Series, Game 5 was just suspended in a 2-2 tie in a brutal cold rain in Philadelphia. After it was delayed in the bottom of the 6th, with the Rays having tied the game in the top half of the inning, Chris Meyers interviewed the Chief of Operations (I think that was his title) and he said that the tying run being scored had nothing to do wtih the decision. Yeah, I'm gonna call bullshit on that. He described conditions as having "deteriorated," but they were pretty brutal when the game was still 2-1. There was noticable water pooling on the corners of the infield. Had the game been delayed at 2-1 and not restarted, the game would've ended since 5+ innings had been played, and the Phillies would've won the World Series. From what I've heard, ratings have already been bad for these playoffs. Baseball isn't going to end the season on a rain delay. I wouldn't be surprised if the rules for calling World Series games were changed in the offseason. Its not like they have other games to schedule around. I guess there's TV to consider, but FOX is going to televise the conclusion of Game 5 tomorrow despite the fact that they were supposed to have new episodes of stuff on. At any rate, with Game 3 having ended at about 12:45 Central because of a rain delay and now this, this has been a pretty messed up World Series.
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