Ultimately, Fox decided it would take two men, Harold Reynolds and Tom Verducci, to replace Tim McCarver with its A baseball team.
Why the threesome with Joe Buck navigating extra traffic? The principles explained yesterday in a teleconference.
From Richard Deitsch at SI.com:
Fox Sports management said it has known that Buck, Reynolds and Verducci would be its lead MLB team for a couple of months after the three had a practice broadcast together in St. Louis late last year. Rehearsal games often do not go well in sports broadcasting, but management said it was particularly impressed by the chemistry between the three men. Said Shanks: “The thing you look for in television is, do the guys like each other? Do they respect each other? Do they work hard to make the guy next to them look good? That’s what we found. It was surprising right off the bat that it was there, so we have high hopes.”
Network executives said they did not enter the search with a preconceived notion about using a two-person or three-person booth. John Entz, the executive producer for Fox Sports, said that he was impressed by the hundreds of hours Verducci and Reynolds worked together in the studio at MLB Network.
“It would be a heavy decision in any case but when you have someone taking the mantle from Tim McCarver, I think we all felt an extra layer of pressure,” Entz said. “We had several meetings on it and it was the topic of conversation over dinner, hallway conversations. This was not a simple one and done meeting where we decided it.”
Buck said he was nervous during the practice broadcasts because he had developed such an innate feel with McCarver over 18 years together. But he came away feeling very positive.
“I can tell you literally, within five minutes, this was going to be the combination if my opinion had anything to do with it,” Buck said. “This felt very easy, and three-man booths are not easy. But I think the three-man booth can work when the two guys come at it from different perspectives and they can debate something or they look at different parts of the game or different parts of a pitching sequence or whatever it might be. I told anyone I knew: We found it and this is going to be really, really special.”
Special? Obviously, that remains to be seen.
As I wrote previously, the sportswriter in me is hoping the Tom Verducci component works. If it did, it might open the door for more sportswriters to sit in the analyst’s chair for games in all sports.