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This Is The Game That Tim Built

We look forward to the ballgame, though we would have done that without Tim McCarver’s help. Well, I shouldn’t speak for everybody. There’s a generation of Mets fans who were welcomed to Mets baseball by Tim McCarver the way I was welcomed to Mets baseball by Ralph Kiner, Bob Murphy and Lindsey Nelson on radio and television every single time there was Mets baseball. I don’t know that I would look forward to the ballgame as I do without those three having narrated my origin story. So OK, if you came to baseball and the Mets sometime between 1983 and 1998, there’s a very good chance you look forward to the ballgame in great part because the voice of Tim McCarver read off the list of participating sponsors on (W)WOR-TV or set the scene on SportsChannel.

If you had already matriculated as a student of Mets baseball prior to 1983, especially if your trio of instructors had been Kiner, Murphy and Nelson, you found yourself enrolled in grad school under Prof. McCarver. It was a whole new ballgame when Tim, accompanied by straight man Steve Zabriskie, showed up at Shea, sat next to Ralph, and started telling us what we were about to see. Never mind the sponsors. Here came the substance.

We look forward to the ballgame the way we look forward to the ballgame, and we consume baseball the way we consume baseball, I sincerely believe, because Tim McCarver made us look forward to the ballgame in a way no announcer before him did, and sixteen years of him guiding us through New York Mets games left us consuming baseball as we would forever more. He made us look for elements of a ballgame. He made us pay attention to every discipline: pitching, hitting, fielding, throwing, catching. He knew from catching. He’d been an All-Star receiver and the primary handler of a couple of first-ballot Hall of Famers in a career that spanned the end of the 1950s to the beginning of the 1980s. He surely knew his craft. But he knew so much more.

And he knew how to tell it and share it and bring us into the game, inviting us inside in a way that nobody who spoke to us to that point ever had. What was the meaning of a two-two count? Why was a middle infielder shading this way or that with a runner on first? Why, oh why, wasn’t the right fielder moving in if the batter wasn’t a power threat? McCarver’s trademark recurring criticism of Darryl Strawberry’s stubbornly deep defensive positioning notwithstanding, it occurs to me Darryl simply might have been showing his respect for an announcer who himself never came across as shallow.

Tim McCarver talked to us, and we listened. Tim McCarver talked to Ralph, and Ralph perked up. Ralph’s original on-air partnership with Bob and Lindsey was over by 1983. Nelson had moved on to San Francisco in 1979. Frank Cashen separated Murphy and Kiner like a teacher who didn’t want old pals sitting together in the back of the classroom. No more shifting hither and yon between audiences. One dedicated radio anchor, Murphy. One familiar voice tethered to TV, Kiner. Plus whoever happened to join them. In Ralph’s case, “whoever” didn’t work out well in 1982, his first season wholly detached from Bob. Ralph’s career, like the broadcasts in which he represented the vital tissue that connected past and present, needed a transfusion of future-facing blood.

Enter McCarver, the convivial, sophisticated retired player of recent vintage. Tim, quite clearly, adored Ralph. Ralph, quite clearly, took a shine to Tim. You could easily imagine them ordering a nightcap at their “libraries and museums” of choice during road trips. Steve, low-key amid two high-wattage personalities, played well off both of them. It was a booth on the rise ready to match the team it was about to have the pleasure of describing, and that we would have the privilege, as Mets fans, of experiencing — as if this was what Mets baseball was supposed to be all along.

Straw and Doc.
Mex and Kid.
Mookie and Lenny.
Knight and Hojo.
Wally and Teufel.
Ronnie and Bobby O.
Aggie and El Sid.
Jesse and Roger.
Davey and confidence.
Wins and more wins.
Ralph and Tim and Steve, with Bill Webb calling the shots.
Plus Murph and Thorne on the radio side.

It was the best of times. It was the best of sounds. On TV, especially when it was a Channel 9 night, it was baseball’s version of the Friars Club. A couple of all-time greats smoking cigars, holding court, spinning stories, laughing it up, and spreading the news that these Mets were the dominant team in this game. Kiner had us covered for the ’40s and ’50s and the Casey-Gil days and growing up in California before the war and his brushes with Hollywood glamour. McCarver’s insights stemmed from the ’60s in St. Louis, the ’70s in Philadelphia, coming of age in Memphis, keen eyes and wits suited for 1980s New York.

If we as fans tend to first-guess and analyze virtually everything before it happens, we learned that from Tim when Tim commenced doing that for our benefit…though Tim probably compiled a better guess-to-outcome ratio than the rest of us. If we as fans zero in on and articulate what was once widely considered little more than minutiae, we likely picked that up from Tim, too. (Viewers unquestioningly watched pitchers reach first base and don a jacket to protect their pitching arm from getting cold until Tim protested that, c’mon, it’s the middle of summer!) If we’re not shy about blending our view of life with our view of baseball, that’s also a Timmy trait that lives on. Staying on top of the action before Tim McCarver brought us Mets baseball meant knowing what the score was. Staying on top of the action after Tim McCarver brought us Mets baseball means heightened awareness of everything that touches this game we love and love to think about.

It’s Tim McCarver’s ballgame, and we’ve been reveling in it for forty years. Even with him now gone [1], we continue to look forward to the next game he’s brought us.