New Fox baseball team: Tom Verducci joins Grantland Rice as sportswriter to call World Series

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The Big Lead’s Jason McIntyre reports that Fox Sports plans to go with a three-man booth for its new No. 1 baseball team this year. Harold Reynolds and Tom Verducci will join Joe Buck.

The move to bring in Reynolds, who has been at MLB Network since 2009, as a replacement for Tim McCarver hardly is a surprise. His name has been at the top of speculation for months. It will cap a huge comeback for the former Seattle Mariner, whose broadcast career was in shambles after he was dismissed by ESPN in 2006 over sexual harassment allegations. He later sued for wrongful termination and the case was settled out of court.

The decision to give Verducci such a high-profile role is a major surprise. The veteran baseball writer for Sports Illustrated has some experience calling games for TBS, MLB Network and Fox Sports.

But serving on Fox’s A-team is a whole new ballgame for Verducci. With the exception of Howard Cosell, who still defies description, Verducci would become the first World Series analyst in the booth in the modern TV era who did not actually play the game.

In fact, considering that Verducci still is best known for his work as a sportswriter (he’s still one of us!), he now would have something in common with Grantland Rice. As near as I can tell, Rice, who did World Series games on radio in the 1920s, is the only sportswriter to ever be on the call for the Fall Classic. If that isn’t true, please correct me. There are some names on the list compiled at Wikipedia that I don’t recognize. Regardless, it can’t be a long list of sportswriters working as analysts on World Series games.

(Update: It has been pointed out to me that a New York Times sportswriter W.O. McGeehan also did some World Series games on radio in the early ’20s).

So congratulations to Tom. Your fellow sportswriters will be cheering for you.

 

 

 

 

 

2 thoughts on “New Fox baseball team: Tom Verducci joins Grantland Rice as sportswriter to call World Series”

  2. Bill Corum was involved in the broadcasting of the World Series in the 1940s, but doing pre- and post-game and between innings color with Red Barber and Mel Allen, among others. The funny thing about this history is that Grantland Rice and W.O. McGeehan were polar opposites as sportswriters–Rice looked for the good in everything, it appeared, while McGeehan wrote some beautifully cynical and deflating stuff without becoming TOO cynical.

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