Deal With It: McCarver Wins the Ford Frick Award

Forgive me, but this post is (largely) not very funny. Some of you might argue that my posts are never funny. Those people are wrong. Wrongity, wrongity, wrong. To quote the great Lt. Steven Hauk:

 

Anyway, there are a couple agitators in the comments section around here who are distraught…in every post…that Tim McCarver has won the Ford C. Frick Award. On the one hand, it’s a little understandable. Tim McCarver has been off the top of his game for quite some time now. He still has a strong handle on what a pitcher and catcher are thinking at a given moment, and especially about catcher technique, but it’s entirely reasonable for someone to conclude, based on his recent body of work, that McCarver’s selection is ridiculous.

But one of my favorite things about baseball is being able to talk about the past. In the past, Wally Moon’s unibrow was deemed by God so beautiful that He modeled the caterpillar on it. In the past, a doof like Ron Davis was considered an intimidating closer. In the past, Don Zimmer had an average face. And, in the past…perhaps the distant past…Tim McCarver was a very good broadcaster of baseball games. He provided timely insight. His homespun wisdom was a little less homespun. He did his homework before games. And his clichés were not quite so clichéd. I have DVD evidence of this from the 1991 World Series.

I’m tired of the commenters I’ve read elsewhere denigrating Ron Santo, and the Veterans Committee’s decision to finally rectify one of the biggest oversights in Hall of Fame history. And I’m tired of people pretending that Tim McCarver didn’t have a career before he met up with Joe Buck. The guy was a very good color commentator, is undeniably an important figure in broadcasting history, and not every winner can be Vin Scully (though I wouldn’t mind Vin winning every year). So Timmy, this one’s for you: