A Local Tragedy

On Memorial Day the Harrisburg Patriot News baseball columnist David Jones (My Two Cents) wrote about 600 poetic words on Phillies telecaster Tom McCarthy which he called “When less really is more.”

“As a Philadelphia Phillies fan, as a fan of baseball, I want three things when I watch a game on television: I do not want to be told things I already can see. I do not want to be told things I already know. I want interludes when I’m not being told anything at all. I want to listen to the sounds of nothing happening. In no other game do the sounds of nothing in particular going on sound quite as they do at a baseball game. ”

David Jones must, and if he hasn’t heard it, would adore the world’s most beautiful song “Knoxville: Summer of 1915” composed by Samuel Barber born in West Chester, PA, with lyrics by novelist James Agee who wrote: “We are talking now of summer evenings in Knoxville Tennessee in the time that I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child.”

…“On the rough wet grass of the backyard my father and mother have spread quilts. We all lie there, my mother, my father, my uncle, my aunt, and I too am lying there. They are not talking much and the talk is quiet, of nothing in particular, of nothing at all in particular, of nothing at all…”

Knoxville: Summer of 1915 was commissioned by Metropolitan Opera soprano Eleanor Steber from Barber in 1949. It was a big hit then and continues to be one of the most well loved songs in the American canon. Barber , Agee and Steber gave us 1915 America. Baseball is America right now and the America in our bones. Until something actually happens, nothing happens; time just passes, out of mind, suspended, eternal.

When Harry Kalas died Tom McCarthy took over. He’s exactly like the Catholic boys from Villanova we never dated in the Fifties when I was growing up on the Main Line. They were so earnest, so sincere. So devoid of cool. David Jones writes: “Not only does McCarthy talk too much, he does it with that voice of the golden-throated pitchman, as if I’m being sold to nonstop. It’s like spending an evening with a Realtor (Italics mine). I’m already on-board with the Phillies. I don’t need them sold to me. Everything is over the top. The effect is this: When something awesome happens, like Roy Halladay’s perfect game, it just sounds like another 100-decibel pitch out of McCarthy’s mouth.”

Great stuff, right? McCarthy’s timbre tires me the way my mother’s did at breakfast while she bashed my long-gone Dad. Heaven forefend I might have been allowed to get up earlier to avoid her. But I can turn the sound of McCarthy off and hear the witty radio guys Larry Anderson and Scott Franke whenever I want to.