All-Star Catcher, Hall Of Fame Broadcaster Tim McCarver Dies

All-Star catcher Tim McCarver is a Hall of Fame broadcaster and Hall of Fame broadcaster. He is the favorite catcher of Steve Carlton and Bob Gibson. died At the age of 81.

McCarver made his debut with the St. Louis Cardinals at 17 years old, playing in eight games. McCarver was their starting catcher by 1963, having played in 127 games and batting.289. Gibson won the first of his two World Series Championships, which he shared with the Cardinals, in 1964. In seven games, the Cardinals beat the New York Yankees. The Cardinals won the Series with his three-run homer, which was in the tenth of the fifth inning. This was in a Series that saw him bat a staggering.478. Three years later, they won the Series again by defeating the “Impossible Dream” Boston Red Sox win seven games. McCarver was second in MVP voting that year with a.295 average.

“I remember one time going out to the mound to talk with Bob Gibson,” McCarver once made a joke. “He told me to get back behind the batter, that the only thing I knew about pitching was it was hard to hit.”

McCarver played later for the Philadelphia Phillies, starting in 1970 with the Montreal Expos and ending the 1972 season with them. He then returned to the Cardinals in 1973-74. McCarver also played a few games with Boston Red Sox at both the end of 1974 as well as the beginning of 1975. McCarver was then traded to the Phillies once more. He teamed up again with Carlton, who had previously played with McCarver on the Cardinals, but McCarver would pitch to McCarver by the time McCarver joined them.

“Behind every successful pitcher, there has to be a very smart catcher, and Tim McCarver is that man,” Carlton, nicknamed “Lefty,” He was recalled during his Hall of Fame Induction Speech in 1994. “Timmy forced me pitch inside. Early in my career I was reluctant to pitch inside. Timmy had a way to remedy this. He used to set up behind the hitter. There was just the umpire there; I couldn’t see him (McCarver), so I was forced to pitch inside.”

McCarver made a joke about the distance between the home plate and the pitching mound before he was elected to the Hall of Fame in 2017. “When Lefty and I leave this world, they should bury me 60 feet, 6 inches from him.”

“I think there is a natural bridge from being a catcher to talking about the view of the game and the view of the other players,” McCarver — who won six Emmys after he started his broadcast career in 1980 — Telled the Hall of Fame when he and Buck received the Ford C. Frick Award for excellence in broadcasting. “It is translating that for the viewers. One of the hard things about television is staying contemporary and keeping it simple for the viewers.”

“Some broadcasters think that their responsibility is to the team and the team only,” McCarver told The New York Times. “I have never thought that. My No. 1 obligation is to the people who are watching the game. And I’ve always felt that praise without objective criticism ceases to be praise. To me, any intelligent person can figure that out.”

McCarver was a baseball expert who also wrote the books “Baseball for Brain Surgeons & Other Fans” And “Tim McCarver’s Diamond Gems: Favorite Baseball Stories from The Legends of the Game.”