Late again this week...sorry about that. Soon enough, we'll have actual baseball in Arizona and Florida, though, and perhaps that'll get me back on track.
And then baseball everywhere. Without, oddly enough, Jon Miller and Joe Morgan on Sunday nights on ESPN. 21 years! Wow. Let's see...when I was a kid, Curt Gowdy and Tony Kubek did the Saturday afternoon NBC game of the week (the only baseball those of us without local major league teams ever saw outside of the All Star Game and October, and occasional Monday night games), and to me it seemed as if they had been a team forever, but apparently they were together not even one full decade, according to an unusually poorly organized wikipedia page. Monday Night Football's most famous team of Howard Cosell, Don Meredith, and Frank Gifford had about a decade together (but not consecutively); Miller and Morgan did the Sunday night games far longer than Cosell, himself, lasted on MNF.
Hmmm...it looks as if Pat Summerall and John Madden were a team from 1981 through 2001. Has anyone done it longer? I'm also wondering what the longest lasting local radio and/or TV pairing would be. Kruk and Kuip are getting there, but they only started in 1994, so they haven't even hit 20 years yet. Let's see -- it looks like Jerry Doggett did Dodgers games for 32 years (of course, with Vin Scully the whole time), so I guess that must be the record.
I know a lot of people don't like Joe Morgan very much as a broadcaster, but really: who was a better long-time team on national TV than Miller & Morgan?
Saturday, February 12, 2011
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I have always been partial to Vin Scully and Joe Garagiola but it may just be because they were the announcers on most of the games that I watched as a child.
ReplyDeleteTechnically, wouldn't Ralph Kiner and Bob Murphy hold the record, though Kiner was not a regular announcer in Murph's later years? Still they were together with the Mets for 42 years until Murph's retirement.
ReplyDeleteThey weren't the best, though. I lived in Philly for four years, coincident with Harry Kalas's debut, and the team of Ashburn, Byron Saam and Kalas were, over all, the best I've ever heard. (And, btw, I can still remember the cries of complaint when Connie Desmond left the Ebbets' Field booth to be replaced by 'that red-headed kid.' We didn't understand it, or know about Desmond's alcoholism, but we weren't happy with the change.
Kiner and Murphy were split up sometime during the early 1980s (I think), with Murphy going to radio (with Gary Thorne and then Gary Cohen among others) and Kiner staying on TV to announce with Tim McCarver, Fran Healy, etc. K&M were both Mets announcers for 40+ years but they weren't an announcing team for a good amount of that time.
ReplyDeleteKiner was a great announcer. IMO, he and McCarver (much more lighthearted in those days) were excellent together.