By Gary Topping–
I’ve been a lifelong baseball fan. As a little kid in the late 1940s I used to listen to the World Series on the radio with my mother, long before anyone in southwestern Oregon had ever heard of television. It was usually the Yankees vs. the Dodgers, and we were Dodgers fans—a sin I have since repented of, though I’ve never become a Yankees fan either.
As I write, my thoughts are turning to baseball again: the pitchers and catchers are already in spring training, to be joined next week by the rest of the teams. But the joy of my anticipation is marred by the news of the recent death of the great catcher and broadcaster Tim McCarver. McCarver, for one thing, was my age, and whenever anyone my age turns up in the obits, it’s a pointed reminder of my own mortality. Even more than that, though, it was McCarver who taught me more about baseball than anyone else, both through his game broadcasts and through his 1998 book, Baseball for Brain Surgeons and Other Fans.
I have read and reread that book, in whole or in part, during pretty much every baseball season for the last twenty-five years, and with high enthusiasm I recommend it to any baseball fan who wants to learn to watch the game more intelligently. Even today I can open it almost at random and learn something new. I appreciate it most though, I think, for its infusions of McCarver’s ironic Irish Catholic humor and illustrations from his own experiences as for its instructive value.
Catchers, I think, if they are articulate, make the best baseball commentators (think Joe Garagiola as well as McCarver) because they have to know the game better than anyone. They are a part of every play, from calling the pitches and positioning the fielders even to calling pickoff plays at first base, where they don’t actually handle the ball. Thus McCarver reserved his scorn for ignorant scouting reports: when one of the scouts reported that a certain opposing batter had “trouble with the breaking ball low and outside,” McCarver scoffed, “Hey, Saint Peter has trouble with the breaking ball low and outside”!
One of his best anecdotes illustrates the shibboleth that base runners absolutely have to make sure that a batted ball clears the infield before starting for the next base. While with the Cardinals in a game with the Dodgers, McCarver found himself on third when the batter hit a ground ball. He jumped the gun and started for home before he realized that the ball had been picked up by an infielder and fired to the immense Dodger catcher, Johnny Roseboro. He realized that his only hope at the late point was to run into Roseboro and try to dislodge the ball from his mitt. Roseboro, a “moveable brick wall,” as McCarver characterizes him, loved such confrontations and was not only waiting for him, but charging down the baseline to meet him. It was one of the most memorable collisions in baseball history. Both of those huge catchers were injured, but McCarver “left the left side of my face on Roseboro and his equipment; the skin from below the eye to my lip was gone.” When McCarver came to the plate again, Roseboro was still in the game, though he would have to miss the next two weeks recovering from his own injuries.
“Are you all right”? he asked McCarver.
“Yeah, I’m fine. Are you?”
“Oh, fine.”
“There was a beat,” McCarver continues, “and he said, ‘That’s the way you’ve got to do it, you know.’ My respect for the man went up a hundredfold.”
*Gary Topping is a writer and historian living in Salt Lake City, Utah. He is the retired archivist for the Catholic Diocese of Salt Lake City and has written many books and articles. Signature Books recently published his latest work titled D. Michael Quinn: Mormon Historian.
