It’s good to be Matt Kemp these days. He makes millions playing a game that he is fantastic at and also today we learned that he might be blissfully unaware of the existence of Tim McCarver. I have no idea if Kemp was joking or not because this ten second clip is literally all the background I have on the situation because I had a different FOX game in my area. Anyways, here’s the video that comes our way via twitter by MetsKevin11.
Like I said I did not have the Dodgers/Mets game in my area. Instead I had Tigers/Rays with the diabolical announcing duo of Dick Stockton and Tim McCarver mucking up the game.
Of course we had the expected amount of “Straight Outta Stockton” moments along with McCarver acting curmudgeonly that you’d expect when either of these two are in the booth. But these two together in the booth had a team fire going that lasted all 9 innings. Here’s some of the “highlights.”
-Tigers/Rays served as the warm-up act to an Earth, Wind & Fire concert that was to happen at the conclusion of the game. McCarver and Stockton had a conversation about how “fire and wind” weren’t present in the domed stadium but “Earth” was as the cameraman zoomed in on a patch of dirt. Insight.
-Much of the game was spent with McCarver regaling us with stories of players from the past. In true McCarver style he somehow managed to make these stories a chore to listen to. Hilariously, he realized at one point that many of the viewers probably did not know what he was talking about and encouraged the audience to “youtube” clips of these players. Of course MLB is still stuck in its archaic ways and you won’t find these clips on youtube. When McCarver is more forward thinking than MLB you know there’s a problem.
-An actually cheerful McCarver hyped up a montage for nearly an inning. When the montage aired it was seriously just clips of where players looked after they struck out. He hypothesized that players were reluctant to look at their dugout following a strikeout because they felt shame. For some reason both Stockton and McCarver thought this was incredibly interesting and played amateur psychologist for an extended amount of time analyzing why a player reacted in such a way.
-The Tigers won the game 6-2. The Tigers scored in both the 8th and 9th to pad their lead in conventional ways (a 3-run HR and a single that knocked in two). In both the bottom of the 8th and the 9th, Stockton and McCarver talked about how different this game might have been if those runs weren’t scored. They perceived that runs being scored in pretty much as standard a way as possible were somehow quirky events. This by a slim margin won the prize as the most inane conversation of the night, narrowly defeating strikeout pyschology.
Stockton consistently flubbing the score/situation/names combined with McCarver bringing back that Billy Packer charm while ranting about pine tar and ignoring the game was just awful. This game did what I thought was impossible and made me wish that Joe Buck were in the booth instead. For a nationally broadcasted game on FOX, there’s no excuse for putting such a poor product out there.
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