Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 169: The Retirement of Tim McCarver/Is Clubhouse Chemistry Less Important Than it Used to Be?

Episode Date: March 28, 2013

Ben and Sam talk about Tim McCarver’s impending retirement and share their thoughts on broadcasting, then discuss whether changes in players’ routines have reduced the importance of clubhouse chemistry.

In my view, as good as the Yankees were in the first half of this game, that's how as bad they've been now. Good morning and welcome to episode 169 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Prospectus. I am Ben Lindberg. Joining me, no crickets tonight, is Sam Miller. Hello, Sam. Hi, Ben. How are you? Okay. We each have a topic, or we cooperatively came up with two topics today that we weren't sure would stand on their own, but we're going to talk about both of them together, and that will constitute an episode of our podcast. Which should we talk about first? I guess let's talk about McCarver.

Okay. So the news yesterday was that Tim McCarver is leaving Fox or retiring, I guess, after the season. It is his 55th season doing something in baseball. He is stepping down to just have more time to do things that aren't calling baseball games. And I kind of intentionally avoided the reaction to the news. I don't know whether you saw a lot of reaction to the news. I assume there was quite a bit of snark. I didn't see much. Yeah, I wasn't around all that much today. I also assume there was quite a bit of snark. I didn't see much, yeah. I wasn't around all that much today.

I also assumed there was a lot of snark because I was alive when Joe Morgan left. Right. So what was your reaction? Anything? Yeah, well, I don't know. I mean, I think it's good. I don't know. I mean, I think it's good. I don't know that the problems that are kind of inherent in national broadcasting necessarily are going to retire with him. It's a lot easier to hire somebody that we all collectively won't like.

Really? You do not think that Tim McCarver's replacement is going to be a sabermatrician? That is a controversial stance. I don't know who they'll get. I mean, there are certainly people that they could hire who would I think be great in the same way that I think generally Oral Hershiser has I think Oral Hershiser

generally has widespread support among the internet set. Do you think that's right? Yeah, I guess so, or at least no real enmity. I mean, the tricky thing is that it's not necessarily about the man they hire. It's really about the audience that these big broadcasts want to get. the audience that these big broadcasts want to get.

And I kind of feel a little bit conflicted about McCarver because on the one hand, I found him to be not very good at calling baseball games for the last 15 or 10 years or so. And very rarely did I feel like he taught me anything. But I bet he could teach me a lot. I mean, I'm quite certain that he knows a lot about baseball. He knows way more than we do. And the weird thing is that the incentives apparently just aren't there for him to tell us those things. That if he started talking about things that would appeal to you and I, I guess the idea is that he would lose the, uh, large majority of,

uh, viewers. And I'm not talking about like sabermetric stuff. I'm talking about deep baseball stuff, the sort of stuff that if you and I, or sorry, if you and he were, you know,

on a dugout bench watching batting practice that you might pick his brain and try to get him to talk about. I think part of the problem also is that um you know he just did it for so long and i don't remember him being bad until i don't know maybe the turn of the century but it's hard to say new things repeatedly yeah and he probably thought around like 1996 he probably thought well geez i've said all the things i know that's how we felt after our first podcast episode yeah i mean certainly by like our fourth or fifth yeah and we've done like 160 since then so there's a there's a kind of i don't know i think that there's probably good reason to change these guys up a lot um i don't know that it's a young man's game so much as it's a fresh voice, a fresh voices

game. I remember thinking in the 90s, I remember loving Joe Morgan. I thought he was the best. And granted, I was a kid and I didn't know a whole lot and maybe it was my problem. I also thought Ron Fairley was pretty good when he was doing Giants games. And the other day I listened to Ron Fairley do a Mariners radio game. And he's the worst announcer I've ever heard in my life by quite a bit. And so, again, my memories as a kid are not great.

But I was a teenager for Joe Morgan's first few years. And I remember him teaching me a lot, like nine ways to score from third with two outs, which was one of his regular bits. And by the third time you hear that bit, you're bored of it, he's bored of it, and he starts to sound like kind of an old cliche of himself. So it's probably a good idea to have a new guy every few years. It's probably a good idea to have a new guy every few years. Yeah, it's hard to say because as I think we've probably talked about on the podcast before, if you talk to people who listen to McCarver when he first started doing this, they will rave about how perceptive he was and how he always seemed to predict everything that was going to happen and he would predict strategic moves and pitch calls with just

astonishing accuracy. And it's kind of hard to square with the current McCarver. I think I remember Stephen Goldman first telling me how impressed he was by McCarver when McCarver started. Carver started. And I mean, when Carver started at Fox, I was maybe nine years old. So the things that would bother me when he says them today, if he'd said exactly the same thing then would not have bothered me. So I don't know whether it's that he has lost his fastball, as I have read a couple people say, or whether it's, I don't know, that we have learned more, possibly. I mean, we read so much more about baseball. We watch so many more baseball games now and are exposed to so many more announcers that it's hard to say.

I wonder whether he is actually worse or whether the people who remember him so fondly do so because they didn't know quite as much as they do now when they first started hearing him. And as you say, maybe he's recycling his material, which is inevitable when you have to talk about baseball for three hours, however many times a year that he does that. So it's hard to say. But I guess I would be surprised if the replacement for Tim McCarver is much more beloved by the Internet than he has been lately. Yeah. Well, I mean, I think like certainly if they got david cone in there everybody would

rejoice um but like i think ron darling does a great job and i think dennis eckersley does a great job when he gets a chance and i think that uh i remember al lighter being very good although i might be remembering wrong it's uh it's interesting it's all catchers basically who are managers right but I think that maybe pitchers are the most interesting broadcasters there's just something about maybe being a pitcher that feels like you have it seems like pitchers have knowledge that other people don't have more than second basemen ever do. I mean, certainly you can be a good broadcaster in a second baseman. But there's just something about a pitcher, I think, that maybe it's the fact that you're sitting there five days, four days out of five, watching, that you're charting pitches.

I mean, you really have to. I think as a pitcher, you have to. Pitching is the most interesting thing about baseball, probably. You would think though that a catcher would have some of the same insights though. But maybe it's the fact that a pitcher has to, I mean, a pitcher really has to reinvent himself many times over his career in a way that position players really don't. A position player gets stronger and then he gets weaker, and that's basically the whole story. Whereas a pitcher, you know, a pitcher doesn't, when a pitcher comes up at 24,

he doesn't resemble the guy who got drafted a lot of the time. And that's just 24. By the time he's 38, he's usually gone through two or three or four of those. And so maybe that's why pitchers are so insightful but um yeah i mean i i think that it's totally possible that they could hire somebody good without um you know without breaking the mold all that much it's just how long can we stand that guy yeah i'm i'm gonna miss mcarver probably just because he gave us so much material uh i mean even if you weren't mocking something he said you could get a post out of

something he said basically every game just kind of listening him to him repeat some uh maxim that maybe is not true or is not backed up by the stats. And you could look at the stats and see whether it confirmed or rejected what McIver said. And either way you had something to write about. So I will kind of miss that. If there is someone who comes on and makes statements that are only backed up by data, then we have nothing to talk about. I kind of, to be honest, I kind of got sick of picking on him.

talk about i kind of to be honest i kind of got sick of pick of picking on him um and partly that's because when i started picking on him um you know it was to a much smaller audience and the bigger your audience gets the kind of more aware you are of what a jerk you are um so it um i mean i i i I mean, I still will point out broadcaster sort of lunacy, but I find that I very rarely even attach a name to it. It's almost like I'm subtweeting the guy, which is slightly less jerky. But I think that the peak of McCarver ripping was probably like 2009, and it's been a little bit diminishing returns ever since then.

It will be nice if they intend on hiring somebody who sucks, which they might be, it will be a welcome new person who sucks. If they're going to hire someone terrible and they hire Kevin Millar or something like that, it would be a fun three person who sucks. Like, it would be, I mean, if they're going to hire someone terrible and they hire Kevin Millar or something like that, it would be a fun three or four years before we got sick, not of him, but sick of making fun of him,

which is weird to say, but we will get sick of the people we're sick of for being sick of them. Mark Langston, by the way, does angels games also uh he last year was his first year also very good and also a pitcher well broadcasting is hard we can't talk for 15 minutes a day without saying something stupid or repeating yeah we can't we can't it's uh but on the other hand it's i've heard it said you know many times about how hard

it is and occasionally some smart writer will be behind the microphone for a minor league game for an inning. And then he'll talk about how impossible it is. Now he went blank and he couldn't keep track of the field. But I do wonder if it's really hard once you have some experience. Because the people who do it, they don't do it well a lot of times. But it doesn't seem like there's a real high bar to clear to do it. I think play-by-play is probably pretty hard, and I think that being a very good broadcaster is probably really hard.

I'm just not ready to concede that the job itself is hard once you've done it. It might be simply that once you've done it for a few weeks, it's actually not that hard. I'm not saying it is. I'm just not willing to concede that it is. I hope that you can get a chance to call some Angels games this year. I think it'd be fun to do a season. I've thought occasionally about a second career and trying to go find a minor league club somewhere, a high A club that would let me do it. I mean, not let me do it. I'd have to go get an education.

But I think it'd be a lot of fun. I hope that happens someday. I really like the broadcasters I like. I really like the broadcasters I like. I really like. I mean, I have a relationship with them that is probably second only to the musicians that you have an imaginary relationship with musicians when you're a teenager. I listen to them say thousands of words every day for six months, and I really like them a lot. There's a lot of them I like like i like a lot now these days mostly play-by-play guys i like a lot of play-by-play guys okay all right all right that is one topic uh the only the other thing that we wanted to address uh bob nightingale wrote a story for usa today and it is about the fact that there is not much beer in clubhouses anymore, partially

because of all the DUIs that have kind of been a problem for baseball, and just partially because when you think about it, it's kind of weird for a company to provide beer for its employees, possibly. Super weird. of weird for a company to provide beer for its employees, possibly, when those employees are elite athletes and have to be in excellent shape and train and go to sleep after games so they can be awake for the next game. So there are many reasons why that probably makes sense, and we could talk about that. But I wanted to talk about something that isn't really the the main thrust of the story but was was the most interesting part of it to me um is that there was kind of a theme in the

comments of the players who were quoted in the article talking about how clubhouses are just sort of less colorful and just less crowded these days, that clubhouses are just sort of empty now for various reasons. Eric Chavez says social media changed everything. The trust factor went away. And Nightingale sort of says that the lack of technology was something that used to keep teams together or that the omnipresence of technology today is something that keeps them apart. And then just the fact that, you know, and he tells anecdotes about various players kind of holding court after games while the whole team drank beer and various other bonding activities. team drank beer and various other bonding activities. And I don't know that that's something every team did with regularity. But as Nightingale says, these days, the clubhouse

often is a ghost town by 11 p.m. Scott Proctor is quoted as saying, nobody hangs out anymore. You used to sit down and have beers in the clubhouse and it's not even part of the game anymore. That's what I miss. And so it's kind of interesting to think about whether clubhouse chemistry means as much to teams as it used to. It's kind of hard to read about how players are always suspicious because of social media and there aren't a lot of activities that bring a lot of them together. They all make so much money that they travel places by themselves and are kind of in their own little cocoons away from the ballpark a lot of times. Obviously, there are exceptions to this,

and maybe young players spend more time together. And, I mean, certain players are friends and do things together, and you still hear players talk about the importance of clubhouse chemistry, but it's kind of hard to imagine that it could have the same impact today in this world where the clubhouse is empty at 11 p.m. as it once might have. Does that seem fair to you? I, you know, I don't, I'm not going to be able to say definitively, Does that seem fair to you? I'm not going to be able to say definitively,

but my guess is that the extra hour that you might spend in the clubhouse might be important bonding time and all that, but it's a small portion of time considering how much they're actually together. They still arrive four and a half hours before the game uh they have an hour and a half where the media is allowed there and then they do batting practice but then they're they're in the clubhouse for two and a half hours alone before the game they play the game they travel together they fly all over the place together um you know the they play words with friends together and they text each other when they're not there. And it seems to me that, I mean, when you talk about clubhouse chemistry,

the clubhouse is kind of just a metaphor in this case. I mean, the chemistry is really supposed to be on the field and it's sort of, in the larger sense, it's not actually restricted to the clubhouse. And I would guess that a lot of chemistry still happens or still doesn't happen but never happened because guys just didn't like each other for whatever reason even in the 70s and 80s when they were drinking beer and doing cocaine well into the evening yeah i wonder i mean i don't know in my experience during the time that say the media is allowed into a clubhouse, there is some interaction among players and there's laughing and there's talking and there's joking. But I mean, most players just sort of sit by themselves at their locker and hope that no one comes to talk to them. Yeah, but they're worried about media talking to them, not each other. I wonder whether...

Sitting and having long, in-depth conversations over a beer while the media is around, because we wouldn't want that to happen. Yeah, I think that it's conceivable that the media, which is not named in Bob Nightingale's piece, but I don't know this. Again, I have not been around very long, but it wouldn't surprise. I mean, it does feel like the media has a chilling effect on everything. And I mean, one reason that guys leave, maybe the most important reason that guys leave is because they just don't want to sit around and talk to us. And so like in Mike Socha's clubhouse,

the clubhouse usually opens about 10 minutes later than other teams' clubhouses open. And you can see players sort of racing to get out before any of us get in there. As would I if I were in their place because you're incredibly annoying. When he, when, was it Beckett or was it, I think it was Beckett who also talked about the, you know, the sort of lack of trust factor because of like the, you know, the sort of controversial stories that come out of clubhouses. I would think that they mostly blame the media for that stuff and that basically there's just an idea that the media is going to, you know, run with things a lot more quickly than they ever would have before. And so maybe there's just, maybe nobody's comfortable. Maybe everybody's a little bit tenser for that reason. It wouldn't surprise me at all. Yeah.

So I don't know. I mean, a baseball team is never going to be like your typical office where you go in in the morning and sit in your cubicle all day and maybe say hello to someone at the water cooler and then you leave at five and maybe you get drinks after work, but maybe you don't. There's always going to be certain factors that are bringing teams together because they are traveling all over the place, even though they probably have their own room and might not have to have a roommate and might take separate transportation to the games or something. I think there's probably less communal traveling going on than there used to be,

but there's still a certain amount that really you can't get away from. But I do wonder if a team with bad chemistry or just without the potential for good chemistry can kind of weather that more easily than maybe one day or than it would have at some point in the past when people actually had to spend more time together and talk. And if they didn't enjoy each other's company, then possibly that could have been more of a problem than it would be now. All right. We did it.

We will be back with one more episode tomorrow, Friday. If you're listening on Friday or on Friday, everything will be free at BP also on Monday. So make sure to come and read everything while you can. And send us emails at podcast at baseballprospectus.com so we can answer them next week.