Tim McCarver, an analyst for 24 World Series across a 40-year broadcasting career with ABC, CBS and finally FOX, died Thursday at age 81.
For a sport replete with famed broadcasters, perhaps none are more identified with baseball on national television than McCarver, whose run of World Series broadcasts spanned three networks and four decades. He called the Fall Classic in all-but-two years from 1989 to 2013, missing 1999, 1997 and half of 1995, when ABC and NBC split the World Series. The most decorated baseball broadcasters, from Vin Scully to McCarver’s one-time partner Jack Buck, largely spent their careers as local institutions, their times as national voices relative footnotes in their careers.
The reverse may be true for McCarver, who despite a long career calling games locally — first in Philadelphia, then New York for both the Mets and Yankees, and most recently in St. Louis — will best be remembered as the lead voice for national games over the course of a generation. His longevity in that role put him behind the mic for some of the most memorable moments in baseball history. It was McCarver who stopped mid-sentence as an earthquake disrupted the 1989 World Series, which he was working for ABC with Al Michaels and Jim Palmer.
McCarver was no stranger to criticism during his career, owing in part to his old-school style and to his utter ubiquity on the game’s biggest stage. Most famously, Deion Sanders — then a two-sport athlete on the Braves and NFL Falcons — repeatedly doused him with water when he was covering the Braves’ pennant-clinching celebration in 1992, retribution for critical comments he made about Sanders splitting time between the Braves and NFL Falcons.
Like Joe Morgan and Billy Packer, whose tenures as top broadcasters also stretched from the 1980s into the internet era, McCarver was no favorite of observers in the sports blogosphere or on social media. It is worth noting that his replacements on FOX — Harold Reynolds and Tom Verducci in 2014 and ’15 and John Smoltz ever since — have not fared much better.
After retiring from FOX, McCarver remained in broadcasting for another several years with the Cardinals, not officially retiring altogether until April of last year.
