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Fired Joe Morgan

Discussion in 'Sports and News' started by TigerVols, Nov 8, 2010.

  1. Azrael

    Azrael Well-Known Member

    If statistical mastery is the yardstick here, or the historical verifiability of old-timey first-person "when we was on the road with the Cards in '47" stories, we'd have never had Kiner or Rizzuto or Garagiola or even Uecker.

    Be careful what you wish for.
     
  2. YankeeFan

    YankeeFan Well-Known Member

    If you don't have the sound on, how do you know when to look up from your book?


    All of these guys had a sense of humor about them. They didn't take themselves nearly as serious as Morgan.
     
  3. terrier

    terrier Well-Known Member

    What does Adrian Bel-TRAY! think about Miller's ouster?
     
  4. Azrael

    Azrael Well-Known Member

    Likeability is certainly important in a broadcaster. Maybe most important, long term. Morgan's demeanor was his undoing, because that's what brought down all that obsessive scrutiny on his big, big head.

    But the same purposeful fisking would have been the undoing of everyone I named. And many beloved others, including Harry Caray.

    The tension in baseball has always been between folklore and "science."

    We disregard the folklore at our peril.
     
  5. Dick Whitman

    Dick Whitman Well-Known Member

    This sentence doesn't mean anything to me.

    What are you saying? That provably wrong statements on a live national broadcast have some sort of value? What value?
     
  6. sgreenwell

    sgreenwell Well-Known Member

    I think that's BS. I enjoy listening to Joe C. on Red Sox broadcasts, yet I love Baseball Prospectus and own every edition, and there isn't a ton of intersection between those two. You can still be entertaining and not know a lick about stats. Joe Morgan was not knowledgeable or entertaining; he was the opposite of one of the game's characters, like Joe or Harry Carey, just some grumpy old bastard who didn't want to hear spit about your OBPs.
     
  7. Dick Whitman

    Dick Whitman Well-Known Member

    I think the closest analogue to Joe Morgan is Hawk Harrelson. Harrelson is grating in his own way because of his dismissiveness about anything more scientific than judging a player by the shape of his tobacco spit, but at least he's entertaining.
     
  8. Azrael

    Azrael Well-Known Member

    I'm sure that's not literally true, or you wouldn't have bothered posting.

    Don't worry, I'm not knocking the importance of accuracy.

    I'm simply asking if we want to start fact-checking Rizzuto's stories about dinner with Joe D at Toot Shor's.
     
  9. Michael_ Gee

    Michael_ Gee Well-Known Member

    Joe Morgan said the same five or six things about baseball during every three hour plus broadcast of a baseball game he was ever on. For almost twenty years. That drove people crazy, and rightly so. People listened to Harry Caray wondering what crazy thing he'd say next. You KNEW what Morgan would say before he said it. And said it. Over and over and over.
     
  10. LongTimeListener

    LongTimeListener Well-Known Member

    It was long past time for Morgan to go, no doubt. Fans seem to be pretty universal on that. But the saberheads believing he counts as a scalp on their wall, that is definitely an unsavory part of this.
     
  11. Ben_Hecht

    Ben_Hecht Active Member

    Willful dissemination of disinformation/horseshit is not constructive, in virtually any context.
     
  12. Dick Whitman

    Dick Whitman Well-Known Member

    I love it that he's going to be working in the Reds front office. Dusty Baker and Joe Morgan together, unleashed, the last two men in the baseball universe who believe that a high on-base percentage reflects poorly on a player's productivity.
     
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