Tim McCarver has died, at 81. McCarver had one of those monumental baseball careers that spans different eras, teams, and roles. He started as a teammate of Stan Musial and lasted long enough to call a World Series featuring Xander Bogaerts.
He was part of the famous Curt Flood trade that began the destruction of the game’s reserve clause and the beginning of the free-agent era. He broke into the National League as a catcher at age 17 in 1959 with the St. Louis Cardinals, played for 21 seasons in the majors, then started as a broadcaster with the Mets in 1983, where he called games with Ralph Kiner for 17 years. He worked regularly as a broadcaster until 2013 (the last year he did the national World Series telecast) and semi-regularly for another six years calling Cardinals games. He officially announced his retirement only last year, although he had not called a game since the start of the pandemic.
He played in three World Series with the Cardinals and for three division winners with the Phillies, and broadcast the World Series for 18 years on Fox, working with Joe Buck. Fans of the Cardinals, Phillies, and Mets all came to see him as part of the family. In 2012, he was inducted in the broadcasters’ wing of the Hall of Fame as a recipient of the Ford Frick Award.
McCarver was a fine ballplayer in his prime. In the 1964 World Series, he hit .478/.552/.739 and caught all seven games, including Bob Gibson’s three dominating victories. He caught every one of Gibson’s fabled World Series starts, and then extended his career as the personal catcher for the notoriously prickly Steve Carlton. It says something about McCarver — a white kid raised in Memphis in the 1940s with a garrulous personality — that he built such a rapport with both the black Gibson and the taciturn Carlton. In the booth, McCarver never tired of telling stories about Gibson, a man he revered for his competitive fire. He finished second in the MVP voting in 1967 to his teammate Orlando Cepeda, and while that somewhat overstated McCarver’s value, it was a sparkling season, as he batted .295/.369/.452 in the low-scoring late 1960s, good for (by more modern measures) a 136 OPS+ and 6 Wins Above Replacement. He enjoyed an offensive revival in 1975–1977 with the Phillies, batting .297/.408/.465. On July 4, 1976, in his most embarrassing moment on the field, McCarver hit a grand slam but was credited with only a single because he got overexcited and passed Garry Maddox on the bases.
McCarver’s signature as a broadcaster was his close analysis of the mechanics of the game, and he played up the “thinking man’s announcer” angle to an extent that occasionally rubbed people the wrong way, as with the title of his 1998 book “Baseball for Brain Surgeons and Other Fans: Understanding and Interpreting the Game So You Can Watch It Like a Pro.” In that sense, the down-to-earth Kiner was a great foil for McCarver, keeping him grounded while having the credibility (as a Hall of Fame slugger and former general manager) to complement McCarver with his own strong opinions about how the game should be played. At one point, Mets broadcasts featured a trivia section called “Ask Tim & Ralph,” and Kiner actually did much better than McCarver, solely because Kiner had seen so much baseball and could correctly answer things he knew from personal experience. It was McCarver’s work in the 1980s, broadcasting a young, rising team while himself still fairly fresh from the field, when he did the most to push forward the boundaries of what a baseball broadcast could do in analyzing the action on the field, much in the same way that John Madden was then doing in football. This is the Tim McCarver I remember:
RIP.