PARTISAN HOMETOWN SPORTSCASTERS
ARE DISPLACED BY NETWORK HACKS
IN  ERA  SINCE  HOWARD  COSELL

Night games in frigid weather
not the Fall Classic of old;
no ‘color,’  no ‘flavor’

Making double-plays sound like brain surgery;
Fenway Park is ‘World’s Largest Beer Cooler’;
still  ‘no place like home’  for broadcasters
 
By David Maril
 
Baseball purists complain about the World Series, with late-night games being played in the cool- weather autumn season, and often reminisce about the mystique of Fall Classic day-games.

Television, which feeds the game’s profits, is the driving force behind multiple layers of playoff rounds that extend the season so it nearly approaches winter.

Prime-time scheduling makes the games available to a wider national TV audience but often forces local fans of the competing teams to chill-out in late-night frigid conditions, making Boston’s Fenway Park, the site of the first two World Series games this year, the World’s Largest Beer Cooler on late October evenings.

However, one of television’s greatest influences on the World Series is often overlooked these days: The removal of home-team announcers from the network coverage of the two league-championship teams.

Local voices used to enhance the color and flavor of the network broadcasts, but no more.

If this year’s World Series teams were playing in the golden era of baseball, you’d turn on the TV and hear Curt Gowdy, Ned Martin or Ken Coleman from the Red Sox, and Harry Caray or Jack Buck representing the St. Louis Cardinals. (Caray later went to Chicago, calling games for the White Sox and finally the Cubs.)

If you heard Mel Allen’s voice, you’d know the Yankees were playing. If the Pirates were in the spotlight, you’d listen to Bob Prince, whose deep, coarse voice epitomized the tough, blue-collar nature of the Pittsburgh team and its fan base.

The same type of team identification could be said of Red Barber and Vin Scully with the Dodgers, Russ Hodges with the Giants, Ernie Harwell with the Tigers, and of course Chuck Thompson with the Orioles.

Vin Scully just completed his 64th season with the Dodgers, the longest tenure of any broadcaster in professional sports history with a single team, dating back to 1950. Russ Hodges did play-by-play for the Giants, both in New York and San Francisco.

This year, if the traditional broadcasting policy were still in effect, it would be the mincing, singsong tones of Boston’s Joe Castiglione and the earthy but earnest play-by-play of the Cardinals’ Mike Shannon.

These announcers, who have been with the teams for 162 regular-season games and through the playoffs, would add special insight and hometown flavor by virtue of having covered their respective teams all season. More importantly, they are the teams’ “voices,” reflecting the personality and character of their ball clubs.

With rooting interests, they would do a natural job of conveying the excitement and pressure of World Series competition.

If you watch a rebroadcast of Game 7 of the 1968 World Series you can feel Harry Caray’s disappointment and sadness when the Tigers upset his St. Louis Cardinals in a thriller. Even though the rebroadcast tape is in black and white, you can see the color has drained out of Caray’s face, as in the wrap-up on camera with Curt Gowdy.

The Tigers’ Harwell, on the other hand, glows in a subtle but up-tempo manner conducting post-game interviews.

The only thing today’s generic network announcers pull for is for the series to go seven games so they can get more national air-time to fatten up their egos.

Although many of the local team announcers were recognized as partisan homers during the regular season, they were extremely fair professionals when they were broadcasting over the national network airwaves.  And the great part was that there was that extra hint of excitement in their voices because you knew they had a rooting interest.

Sadly, this all came to an end in 1977 when ABC outbid NBC and gained the rights to televise the World Series. The network made the decision that since it had paid a lot of money for the prime-time telecasts it had the right to use its own announcers.

So for a number of years we were stuck on ABC listening to Howard Cosell do an unconvincing job of pretending that he cared or knew anything about baseball.

And thanks to this change, the World Series today on Fox requires us to listen to the monotonous ramblings of Tim McCarver, who makes double-play grounders sound like brain surgery.

Fortunately, he has announced this will be his final season serving as the lead color-man for Fox.

At least when McCarver isn’t babbling away, his partner, Joe Buck, provides smooth, albeit uninspired, play-by-play. However, Buck lacks the classic, deep smoky baseball voice that epitomized his father, the legendary Cardinals’ sportscaster Jack Buck.

Whether the Cardinals, Yankees, Red Sox or Philadelphia Phillies are playing, the younger Buck always sounds the same and could be mistaken for a number of other cookie-cutter smooth-but- bland network voices.

In the end, when it comes to World Series baseball broadcasters, there’s still no place like home.
 
davidmaril@hermanmaril.com
 
“Inside Pitch” is a weekly opinion column written for Voice of Baltimore by David Maril.

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