For years, Fox Sports executives refused to add a third voice to the World Series broadcast booth. But after Tim McCarver’s departure last year, Fox replaced him with Harold Reynolds, the former Seattle Mariner best known for his studio work, and Tom Verducci, a baseball writer at Sports Illustrated. The result has been predictable: too many voices saying too much, a sin of three-man booths.
Verducci is an astute observer, a reporter bursting with ideas and details. But when he is a game analyst filling airtime with short bursts of information, his writerly elegance is diminished.
At his best, Reynolds is reliable, but he needs to slow his excitable pace of speech to be heard better and to improve his focus. He tends to swallow his words and get tangled up in sentences. Plus, he says odd stuff that does not feel fully thought out. Late in Game 4, with the San Francisco Giants leading the Kansas City Royals, 11-4, he said, “The score doesn’t indicate how tight it was at one time.”
Such were the vicissitudes of a game that started out scoreless and ended with the Giants scoring 10 unanswered runs.
During Game 7 on Wednesday, in the midst of Madison Bumgarner’s magnificent, five-inning relief appearance for the Giants, Reynolds played down the effect of Bumgarner’s pitching nearly 270 innings, citing his size, as if pitchers measuring 6 feet 5 inches and 235 pounds were immune to arm trouble. Another odd moment: Reynolds wondered what Giants starter Tim Hudson had learned about the Royals’ lineup from watching Jake Peavy, the Game 6 starter, without offering context: Peavy was knocked out after one and a third innings. What was Hudson to learn? Don’t do what Peavy did?
There is an experience imbalance to the Fox crew. Joe Buck, the play-by-play man, has called many more games than his new partners, and while they are a friendly group, their chemistry needs time to develop, if it ever does. And Reynolds’s and Verducci’s enthusiasm for just being at the World Series, as well as their over-the-moon passion for the concept of a Game 7, was excessive for men with decades of work in baseball.
A small aside about Reynolds: If you’re going to talk about your history as a player, be precise. During the series, he claimed that he made his major league debut in 1983 in Kansas City at Kauffman Stadium. Actually, his debut was as a pinch-runner at the Kingdome in Seattle. His first game in the Mariners’ starting lineup came three days later in Kansas City. Second, he said that he broke Royals second baseman Frank White’s streak of Gold Glove awards. Which one? White had a six-year streak that Lou Whitaker broke in 1983. In 1988, Reynolds ended a two-year White streak.
If Reynolds skewed his background a bit, however innocently, Fox offered a skewed analysis in Game 5 about Kansas City pitcher James Shields. Ken Rosenthal, a Fox reporter, said Shields had made an adjustment from Game 1 by starting his windup with his hands at his waist, not at his chest. But with nearly every pitch immediately before Rosenthal’s comment, and until the end of the inning, Shields started his windup with his hands at this chest. Twice, Fox used a split screen of Shields from Game 1 and Game 5 to prove the change. But the next inning showed that Shields’s windup started with his hands at his waist only without runners on base.
In Game 7, one play illustrated what Fox lost without McCarver’s aptitude for getting ahead of a play. In the fifth, the Royals’ Omar Infante singled off Bumgarner. There was no criticism of Alcides Escobar when he twice squared to bunt or before he laid down a sacrifice. Only as a second-guess did the crew suggest that Escobar was swinging too well to have the bat taken out of his hands, or that it wasn’t the time to bunt, or that Nori Aoki, the next batter, was hitless in 16 at-bats against Bumgarner and 1 for 12 in the series. All that would have been relevant in advance.
Still, much was commendable about the Fox production, like the extreme slow-motion shots of batters making contact with the ball; audio so sharp that the sound of Hunter Pence’s feet pounding the grass after scoring a run could be heard; the graphic showing the 116,000 square feet of fair territory in Kauffman Stadium; and the replay of Infante ignoring a stop sign from Mike Jirschele, his third-base coach, and running around him to score. Fox’s camerawork definitively showed why the Royals’ Eric Hosmer was out when he slid headfirst into first base on a double play in Game 7.
But there were still plenty of empty-calorie shots of managers and coaches in the dugouts and too many commercial promos between pitches, like a Chevrolet ad, with music, wedged in when Lorenzo Cain faced a 1-2 count in Game 7. There was also that sweet but intrusive Game 6 interview by Erin Andrews of a woman who had gone into labor during Game 1. With her husband and newborn with her, the interview took place during Alex Gordon’s at-bat in the fourth inning. A worthy story of extreme fan devotion, certainly, but one that should have been part of the pregame show.
And Game 7 offered the return of the absurd shift graphic, which identified the Giants’ infielders and their positions when they shifted for Mike Moustakas. Suddenly viewers needed help finding fielders who had moved a little to the right on the screens for a pull hitter? TBS also uses this graphic. Stop. Now. Please.
And please — alert to all leagues — prohibit the appearances of any sponsor’s executives presenting an award at a postgame ceremony. Somehow, a sweaty, winded, nervous Chevy regional zone manager executive named Rikk Wilde found his way into the Giants’ clubhouse to present the series M.V.P. award to Bumgarner. In what seemed like a “Saturday Night Live” sketch, Wilde praised the vehicle awarded to the pitcher: the 2015 Chevrolet Colorado, the subject of a recent recall because of airbag problems.