Joe Morgan fired from ESPN Sunday games. (Miller too).

The rumors are that Orel will stay on and Bobby V. will join him.
Dan Shulman will get the play-by-play duty.

That’s it! They need to bring in Jon Miller’s dad, Julius Sumner!*
*If you get this, you might be old.

Can’t let this thread go without referring to Troy McClure SF’s epic impression of Joe Morgan, from this thread:

FJM’s done brief “reunions” on Deadspin the last two years. Still awesome.

Joe Morgan was just painful to listen to. For someone who was so good at playing the game, I’m surprised at how little baseball knowledge he has. He’d go off on some umpire’s call or some play on the field that even a casual fan would know is within the rules and he’d spend 10 minutes going on about how that was “against the rules.” And strategy? He’d go off on how a “hit-and-run is the best call here” in an obvious situation where you would NOT want to hit-and-run. Honestly, if he wasn’t a hall of famer, from his broadcasts I’d have guessed he never played the game.

But I like Jon Miller. Pair him up with Steve Stone. I never heard Stone say anything that wasn’t insightful, clever, or interesting. That guy knows baseball AND broadcasting baseball.

How about Steve Phillips and Harold Reynolds?

I hate you. You do realize that just by typing that out, someone at ESPN just thought of that as a possibility, right? And somewhere there’s a sexual harassment lawyer who just wet himself at that idea as well.

Phillips is gone from ESPN, don’t fear.

So’s Reynolds, but let’s not tempt fate.

I hadn’t seen these deadspin articles. They’re gold.

Now do it in a McCarver voice. Same effect but screechier.

I have to wonder if Miller could still be any good, after all those years with Morgan. He couldn’t have been too uncomfortable with the situation, right? I just can’t get too upset about him getting canned too, really.

I sort of liked Joe Morgan. But I liked John Madden’s football commentary to, so take that for what it is.

You are Bizzarro Stink Fish Pot!

Joe Morgan is truly a bizarre case in that he was a fantastic player who, as an announcer, would underrate the hell out of someone who played like Joe Morgan.

Ha! Glad it’s made such an impression.

I won’t miss Joe Morgan at all.

I also won’t miss Jon Miller at all, either, because now he’s free to do all 162 of my Giants’ games.

Neener. :slight_smile:

A great player who had absolutely no idea why he was great. You’d think he’d embrace Sabermetrics since they Sabermetricians loved him (as a player).

That is just silly now. Old school baseball fans could as well recognize and did recognize how valuable Joe Morgan was as a player.

When I saw this post, I literally made a sound that was half yelp and half laugh. Highlight of the week and possibly the month.

I’m only halfway through the first article (on Jim Caple’s inane “runs are the most important stat” piece), and now I’m sad all over again that FJM is no more.

Of course he was a great player in his peak years. But he really contributed, in ways that didn’t impress a traditional fan, even in his off-seasons as well, hitting much better than it seemed in the Astrodome in his early years, and in his later years contributing with OBP (while hitting few HRs and a low BA) just before OBP became universally acknowledged as the most valuable offensive skill.

Wait 'til you get to this year’s David Eckstein diatribe. The bit about Adrian Gonzalez is one of the funniest things I’ve ever read.

OBP is a SABER stat now? I’ve been using it along with many others since the 70s. One of the great values of Willie Randolph was his high OBA or OBP. It made him more valuable than his BA appeared to be combined with his high success rate at stealing bases.