What about the time when McCarver was so convinced that Kerry Wood was going to pitch the 9th, that he thought the pinch-hitter in the on-deck circle was fictional? He was actually flabbergasted when the pinch-hitter went from the on-deck circle to the batter’s box to take his turn at bat. Has any manager in the history of baseball ever sent a pinch-hitter to the on-deck circle when he had no intention of making the substitution? Yet McCarver was so convinced that Wood would be allowed to pitch a complete game, that the fact that Wood’s ass was planted on the bench wasn’t enough to dissuade him. And of course Joe Buck went along with him, like he always does. What a pair of cretins.
That’s my favorite piece of McCarver/Buck idiocy. The best part is, they got it ass-backwards. The knob of that bat-shaped weathervane points into the wind, so when it’s toward the dugout, the wind is blowing the opposite way, which is out. That’s because a weathervane is a simple device that has a big end and a little end. The big end is more affected by the wind than the little end, so the wind forces the big end away, leaving the little end pointing into the teeth of the wind. On a bat-shaped weathervane, the knob is on the little end. It was especially obvious with this particular weathervane, because there was a flag about 3 feet away from it, and that flag was blowing out, away from the dugout.
Apparently they needed a former batting champ to explain weathervanes to them, but they must have misunderstood the explanation, because I refuse to believe there can be three people that stupid on the planet. They even noticed that the flag was blowing out, but they said that you have to ignore the flag and read the weathervane instead! So they thought the flag was somehow giving a false reading of the wind direction, because the weathervane (the way they were reading it, i.e. ass-backwards) was indicating that the wind was blowing in the opposite direction. Somehow that made sense to them. They’re just imbeciles. I honestly don’t know how they’re able to dress themselves in the morning.
Ohhhh, it’s on now.
I think it was in the 3rd to last game this season with the Orioles, and Michael Reghi was on the Cubs’ bandwagon, and made some daft comment about Wrigley Field (I am not insulting Wrigley Field here, just making the point that Reghi had no clue what he was talking about), and pressed Jim Palmer for his opinion, and without thinking, Palmer blurted, ‘Why in the hell do you think I care?’
Palmer drives me mad with his ‘Well, I remember this game I pitched on 15 Sept 1397’ self-absorption, but I wanted to have all his babies at that point.
I think of Steve Lyons as a Lite Diet John Lowenstein. But honestly, he is no where near as painful as Jim Traber. I cannot emphasis this enough. Especially when Traber decides he has to sing.
I have a collection of John Lowenstein tales that actually are funny, dunno if they’re apocryphal: his debut with NBC (seriously explaining on-air that he was wearing sunglasses during a night game cos he didn’t want the NBC officials to see he was hung over), his comment whilst calling an Indians game (something like, ‘Yes, typical Cleveland, shitty weather and no attendence at the ballpark’), personally observed, his tendency to shout ‘Fuck!’ whenever someone got hit by a pitch. The John Lowenstein Apathy Club – ‘I don’t know who this Jack Lowenstein is, and I don’t care, either.’
I’ve even got a list somewhere of stuff he used to say during ballgames…maybe I need a life, but remember,
Brother Lowe once said, ‘Preparation neutralises chaos.’
Yeah? What are you going to do? Have your team choke in the playoffs again? 
Wasn’t there an experiment years ago, maybe late 70’s, where (IIRC) NBC broadcast a game with no announcer and minimal camera angles, two or three, tops?
You gotta admit, the whole “impartial” Yankee fan banter between Buck, Boone, and McCarver in Game 1 was great. They sounded like three guys sitting at the corner bar, ragging on the guy.