NEW YORK – Tim McCarver, the all-star catcher and broadcaster Hall of Famer who won two World Series titles with the St. Louis Cardinals in 60 years of baseball and has long been one of the most recognized, incisive and talkative television commentators in the country died on Thursday. He was 81.
McCarver’s death was announced by the Baseball Hall of Fame, who said he died Thursday morning in Memphis, Tennessee, where he was with his family.
Among the few players to appear in major league games in four different decades, McCarver was a two-time All Star who worked closely with two future Hall of Fame pitchers: the boisterous Bob Gibson, whom McCarver pitched for St. Louis caught, and the introverted Steve Carlton, McCarver’s fellow cardinal in the ’60s and Philadelphia Phillies teammate in the 1970s. Shortly after his retirement in 1980, he switched to television and is best known to national audiences for his 18-year partnership with play-by-play man Joe Buck at Fox.
“I think there’s a natural bridge from catching to talking about the game’s point of view and the other players’ point of view,” McCarver told The Hall in 2012, the year he and Buck received the Ford C. Frick Award for Excellence in Broadcast. “It translates that for viewers. One of the difficult things about television is keeping it contemporary and keeping it simple for viewers.”
McCarver was 1.80 meters tall and powerfully built. He was the son of a Memphis police officer who was involved in more than a few fights in his youth but otherwise played baseball and football and impersonated popular broadcasters, most notably Harry Caray of The Cards. He was signed by the Cardinals while still in high school for $75,000, a generous offer at the time; only 17 when he debuted for them in 1959 and in his early 20s when he became the starting catcher.
McCarver attended segregated schools in Memphis and spoke often about the education he received as a newcomer to St. Louis. His teammates included Gibson and outfielder Curt Flood, black players who didn’t hesitate to confront or tease McCarver. When McCarver used racist language against a black kid trying to jump a fence during spring training, Gibson recalled “jumping McCarver right in the face.” McCarver liked to tell the story of how he had an orange soda on a hot spring training day and Gibson asked him for it and then laughed when McCarver winced.
“Perhaps Gibby, more than any other black man, helped me to overcome my latent prejudices,” McCarver wrote in his 1987 memoir Oh, Baby, I Love It!.
Few catchers were strong in the ’60s, but McCarver hit .270 or higher for five straight seasons and was fast enough to become the first in his position to lead the league in triples. His best year came in 1967, when he hit .295 on 14 home runs and finished second to teammate Orlando Cepeda for most valuable player as the Cards won their second World Series in four years.
McCarver met Carlton when the left-hander was a rookie in 1965, “with an independent streak wider than the Grand Canyon,” McCarver later wrote. The two initially clashed and even feuded during games on the mound, but became close and were reunited in the 1970s after both were traded to Philadelphia. McCarver became Carlton’s designated catcher, though he admittedly had a below-average throwing arm and was not on par defensively overall with Phillies regular catcher Gold Glover Bob Boone.
“Behind every successful pitcher there has to be a very clever catcher, and Tim McCarver is that man,” Carlton said during his 1994 Hall of Fame induction. “Timmy forced me to pitch. At the beginning of my career I was hesitant to throw myself in. Timmy had a way to fix this. He used to build behind the hitter. There was only the referee; I couldn’t see him (McCarver) so I had to hit it.”
McCarver liked to joke that he and Carlton were so in sync on the field that if both were dead, they would be buried 60 feet, six inches apart, the distance between the gum on the pitching mound and home plate.
During his 21-year career, when he also played briefly for the Montreal Expos and the Boston Red Sox, McCarver batted .271 overall and only batted 40+ times twice in a single season. He averaged .273s in the postseason and had his best game of the 1964 series when the Cards defeated the New York Yankees in seven games. McCarver finished 11-to-23 with five walks, and his 3-run homer at Yankee Stadium in the 10th inning of Game 5 gave his team a 5-2 win.
He was first known to younger baseball fans from his work on the broadcast booth, whether at local games for the New York Mets and New York Yankees, partnering with Jack Buck at CBS, or with son Joe Buck for Fox from 1996-2013. McCarver won six Emmys and became a brand name enough to be a punchline on Family Guy; writing a handful of books, making guest appearances in Naked Gun, Love Hurts and other films, and even recording an album, Tim McCarver Sings Songs from the Great American Songbook.
Knowledge was his trademark. In his free time, he visited art museums, read books, and could recite poems from memory. At work, he was like a one-man scouting team, adept at the smallest of details, spending hours preparing before each game. At times he appeared to have psychic powers. In Game 7 of the 2001 World Series, the Yankees and Arizona Diamondbacks were tied and the Yankees drew in their infield with loaded bases and an out at the bottom of 9th place. Relief ace Mariano Rivera faced Arizona’s Luis Rodriquez.
“Rivera throws left-handers in,” McCarver noted. “Left-handers get a lot of broken-bat hits into the flat outfield, the flat part of the outfield. That’s the danger of putting the infield on the mound with a guy like Rivera.”
Moments later, Gonzalez’ Bloop drove into the short midfield on the winning run.
“If you consider the pressures of the moment,” ESPN’s Keith Olbermann told The New York Times in 2002, “the time he had to say it and the accuracy, his call was the sporting equivalent of Bill Mazeroski’s home run in the seventh inning to beat the Yankees in 1960.”
Many found McCarver informative and entertaining. Others found him annoying. McCarver didn’t cut himself off from explaining baseball strategy or taking on someone’s performance on the field. “If you ask him the time, he’ll tell you how a clock works,” Sports Illustrated’s Norm Chad wrote in 1992 of the Braves/Atlanta Falcons full-back throwing a bucket of water over his head. In 1999, he was fired by the Mets after 16 seasons on the air.
“Some stations think their responsibility is just to the team and the team,” McCarver told the New York Times shortly after the Mets fired him. “I never thought so. My #1 commitment is to the viewers of the game. And I’ve always had the feeling that praise without factual criticism is no longer praise. To me, any intelligent person can figure that out.”
McCarver and his wife Anne McDaniel had homes in Sarasota, Florida and Napa, California. In recent years, McCarver announced part-time work for Fox Sports Midwest, occasionally working on card games, before suspending the 2020 season over COVID-19 concerns. In addition to the Frick Award, he was inducted into the Cardinals Hall of Fame in 2017.
“By the time I was 26, I’d played in three World Series and I was like, ‘Man, that’s great, a World Series almost every year,'” he said during his acceptance speech. “Uh-uh. The game has a way of keeping you honest. I’ve never played in any other World Series.”
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