Nows and Forevers

As a journalist, you sometimes get to spend time with famous people. For a stretch of my career, I might have overindexed on this because I had been a media and TV reporter for The Hollywood Reporter and Mediapost.

I was sad to see, a few weeks ago, that veteran baseball player and longtime broadcaster Tim McCarver passed away at age 81.

I would talk to McCarver every once in a while for stories, and even spent several hours in the booth with him and his then-broadcast partner, Joe Buck, at the 2004 ALDS Game 1 at Yankee Stadium. It was for a Hollywood Reporter article. (That’s where I also met George Steinbrenner, although that’s a whole other story.)

After the game, McCarver and I sat in the booth, talking. I told him I remembered him not only for being on the Cardinals in ’67 when they beat my Red Sox — my first World Series on Earth — but also as a backup catcher for the Red Sox when I was first a fan. And that my father and I both enjoyed listening to him on the WOR Mets broadcasts in the ’80s and ’90s, since the Mets were the closest team to where I grew up and also except for 1986, I’ve kind of always liked the Mets.

I asked McCarver, after I was done with what I needed for the story, who he thought was gonna go all the way in ’04. Remember, as a Red Sox fan, it was here that the Red Sox lost to the Yankees a year earlier. I’d be lying if I said that I wasn’t still smarting from that loss, the toughest since the ’86 World Series against the Mets and then the one-game playoff (against the Yankees, of course) in ’78 that happened to be my birthday.

McCarver thought about it and then said, you know, I think the Red Sox have what it takes this year.

He listed the strengths and weaknesses of the teams, and that the Red Sox were the ones who had the pitching that he thought was key along with the explosive power of Big Papi and Manny. He said even though I know it’s what you want to hear, I really do believe they’re going to win it all.

A week or so later, when the Yankees were up 3-0 against the Red Sox, I thought about what McCarver said. Two weeks later, when the Red Sox had won the next four games against the Yankees in the Greatest Baseball Comeback of All Time, I thought about it even more.

And, of course, that night when he and Buck got to call the first Red Sox World Series win in 86 years. Because Tim was right.

RIP, Tim McCarver.