Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. Call Trump's lawyers, Judge Mershon, do it now, do it right now, and tell them to put their client's fat ass on a plane and get it back to New York within six hours, or you will jail their client and them for contempt of court. At roughly two forty five Eastern yesterday, you told the defendant and the prosecutor please refrain from making statements that are likely to incite violence or civil unrest. Do not use rhetoric that could jeopardize the rule of law. At roughly eight forty five Eastern time yesterday, the defendant incited violence and jeopardize the rule of law. And he attacked the district to turn. Then he attacked the district attorney's wife, and he attacked you, Judge Marchon, and he attacked your family, And on behalf of the rule of law, and on behalf of civil peace in the United States of America, and on behalf of yourself and the DA and the inviolability of the courts, dragged defendant Donald Trump back into your court today and hold him in contempt and then put him into a cell. At Riker's Island. This is where we are right now. I have a Trump hating judge with a Trump hating wife and family whose daughter worked for Kamala Harris and now receives money from the Biden Harris campaign, and a lot of it. The criminal is the district attorney because he illegally leaked massive amounts of grand jury in fromotion for which he should be prosecuted, or at a minimum, he should resign. And Alvin Bragg's wife can firm to report that claimed her husband has Trump nailed on felonies. She has since locked down her Twitter account. What more does the defendant have to do, Judge mer Chan, He already threatened death and destruction. He already reposted an article with a photo of him wielding a baseball bat next to a photo of the head of the district attorney. And yesterday, as you were warning him, but also as you were bending over backwards to protect his First Amendment rights, as you were saying those things to him, his idiot sons, Junior and Fredo were doxing your own daughter on every social media site they could find. And if you don't put them under a gag order, what exactly does the rule of law mean in this country. What exactly is the point of having laws in this country? What exactly, your honor, is the point of having judges and district attorneys and cops if their words mean nothing, and a psychotic, narcissistic, piece of shit criminal like Donald Trump can leave your courtroom and gun on his private jet and go to his private club and pick up right where he left off. Not merely endangering you and your wife and your daughter, and the DA and his wife and everybody connected with law enforcement in New York and Washington in America, but endangering, as you yourself phrased it, the rule of law, by as you yourself also phrased it, making statements that are likely to incite violence or civil unrest. What more does Trump have to do pull out a gun on Fifth Avenue and shoot you, or say something like that again, or inspire one of his brainwashed, gun fetishizing, hate filled fascist mob to attack your daughter. Trump is in contempt, of course right now. Jail him. He is in fact in contempt of America. He is always and will forever be in contempt of America. America means nothing to him. Your words mean nothing to him. The law means nothing to him. He will understand only punishment. Punish him, Judge Mershon, as you were warning him, as you were calmly, responsibly, even handedly warning the defendant and the district attorney to avoid dangerous rhetoric the defendant's sons, we're putting out your daughter's photo so she can be threatened and attacked and added to the list of the hundreds and hundreds of upstanding and honest Americans who have become the targets of the mob because it's violent, depraved, despotic leader has made them the targets of the mob at the very hour, your honor, And then they hid behind the argument that no, they weren't doing that. They had simply posted an interesting article about your daughter from a British newspaper, and it wasn't their fault that the article had her picture on the link. And anybody who says they posted her photo is lying. And the descendant of nazis literally one of the hacks defending Donald Trump Junior doxing your daughter, Judge by calling the reporter who called Junior out a quote actual descendant of Nazi war criminals and heir to a Nazi fortune unquote. That's where we are in this country right now, Judge Marshahn, hours after you bent over backwards to protect Donald Trump, the defendant, the vile creature who has already stochastically threatened your daughter twice since you warned him to tamp down the rhetoric, put a gag order on Donald Trump Junior, your honor, put a gag order on Eric Trump, your honor, put a gag order on them, and put their madman father in jail. Because your gesture of fairness and balance and integrity did nothing but to embolden these mentally defective bullies, and the results were immediate. And they do not just endanger you and your daughter and your family and Alvin Bragg and his family, they endanger America. Please refrain from making statements that are likely to incite violence or civil unrest. Six hours after you made those statements. And by the way, your honor, those statements were made not in the controlled environment of a courtroom, nor even in the one dimensional world of social media. They were made live on national television in this country. Because we have laws about exactly where on the wave frequency Channel thirteen somewhere can put out its signal, but there is not a damned thing, not one damn thing that can even begin to influence the billionaires who have just bought the nation's original all news cable channel for the sole purpose of neutralizing its reality and corrupting it into another right wing propaganda machine. CNN, Your honor, CNN carried the entire goddamned Trump speech without warning, without editorial judgment, and Trump used them. Trump used the idiots who now own and run the fascists who have balked CNN to amplify the attack on you, and on your daughter, and on Alvin Bragg, and on his wife and on America. Because having learned nothing from twenty sixteen or twenty twenty, CNN televised the entire hate filled, narcissistic, paranoid speech by the defendant live, not just the start through the first reference to Bragg, and then showing clips of anything relevant, but saying we cannot show this live. God knows what he will say or what he will tell his idiot followers to do, but the whole thing was shown live, the entire catalog of Trump repeatedly and unsuccessfully trying to hammer in the last nail in self crucifixion after self crucifixion, literally going back as far as but her emails, but focusing on his newest targets you and Alvin Bragg. It was unconscionable, unjournalistic, unforgivable, and, as I have suggested here four months, your Honor, part of the quest by the new ownership of that channel to show itself to the fascists, to tell them that if the fascists regain power in this country, they should let CNN live and keep making money. And also part of the quest by CNN's desperately failing in over his head drowning president, a man named Chris Lickt, to show himself to that new ownership and to beg that they not fire him and end forever his career of remarkably consistent mediocrity, manipulation and maschination, a man who could not tell the moral difference between a fascist and an old fashioned And it's only too goddamned bad, your Honor, that you can't issue a warning to Chris Lickt that if a television channel his or anybody else's amplifies the hate speech of the defendant, as he violates the orders of the court, your court, that the network can be held liable that it's president and owners can be held liable for the threat, the ever mounting threat against the judges and the district attorneys, and the families and the friends, and the cops and anybody else who tries to thwart Donald Trump, or tries to get Donald Trump to behave like a human, or just tries to get Trump to not light this country ablaze. This cannot continue, Judge, marchn This man will destroy this country, and he will not have to do as much as try to rise from his chair to do so. It will be done for him by proxies and servants and worshippers and the scum whom he has enabled to hate and pursue and attack. They will have destroyed America before any of us can do a goddamn thing about it. But you, judge, you can do something about it now, maybe enough to stop it now. You told Trump what not to do, and he immediately did it again, as he always does it, again and again and again, on national television, in front of crowds, in front of mobs, in front of the simple minded, in front of those who dream of killing other humans because they would think it was fun. Bring Trump back into your courtroom and scream at him for thirty minutes, and then have the guards drag him to a cell for twenty four hours, or forty eight hours, or the rest of his goddamned life for all I care, because that is the only thing he will ever understand, and the only thing that the slime that follow him and emulate him and seek to be the same as he is. That is the only thing they will ever understand. And if there had been a shadow of a doubt that this was true, it was erased. Last night. Your instructions went in one ear and out the other in less than six hours. Save this country, Judge Mershon. Donald Trump's contempt for you and for the rule of law is more than just the technical violation of a warning you gave him in court yesterday. It is the essence of his being. And Donald Trump's being is sick and evil and uncontrollable, and left unpunished, it will destroy everyone and everything that is good about this country we call home. Happily, I can report a victory in the American fight against American fascism. In the election yesterday to decide control of the Wisconsin State Supreme Court. Janet Protassuwich defeated Dan Kelly, giving the Liberals a four to three margin there for the first time since two thousand and eight. That not only protects choice in Wisconsin, but it would preclude the extremely aggressive antidemocracy forces in that state from using the state Supreme Court to alter or erase the presidential choice of Wisconsin's voters next year. Four three Liberals. Now you may know, I did two episodes yesterday, the regular Countdown podcast and a special update in the afternoon after the arraignment of Trump, and I think we can both agree jump get me started on that again. I need a psychological break from all that, at least for a little while. Normally that's the new baseball season at this time, if you're nearly a week into it, it struck me that something's missing, something's wrong in baseball. It is as if I am at a great game and the seats on either side of me are empty. It dawned on me last night, finally, why I feel that way? Those seats are metaphorically empty. Two of the greatest poets and conveyors of the game are gone. Permit me to spend the rest of this edition of Countdown remembering again our irreplaceable losses of Tim McCarver and Vince Scully. That's next, This is countdown. It was the night I was writing the third episode of this series of podcasts August second of last year, and just as I prepared to record the show, the sad news came in. My friend had died. My friend, Vince Scully, saying those four words had been one of the great privileges of my life for about thirty five years. There is sports in this podcast. I was a sportscaster. I worked for ESPN four different times. But this was and is primarily to be a news and politics podcast, and I had no hesitation that no matter how much I wanted this to be news and politics, I knew how the episode for August third, twenty twenty two should begin in memory of Vince Scully. On April fourth, nineteen ninety nine, the New York Yankees played an exhibition game against the Los Angeles Dodgers at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, and my friend, the Yankees play by play announcer, Michael Kay, was shaking like a leaf. He spoke softly to me, almost in a whisper. Michael does not speak softly. I need you to do me a favor. I'm nervous just asking. I'm embarrassed just asking. Can you He sighed heavily and ran a hand through his hair. Can you introduce me to Vince Scully. Michael Kay was starting his eighth season that day as a Major League Baseball play by play announcer. He had that in common with Vin Scully. They did the same job. He also went to the same college as Vin Scully, Fordham University. He had no reason to be nervous about meeting Vin Scully, except that's Vin Scully. I told Mike there was no reason to be nervous, though I knew he would be, But I also told him sincerely, there really was no reason to be embarrassed. I first moved to Los Angeles in August nineteen eighty five, and I went right to the top of the guys doing sports on the local TV newscasts there back when that meant something. Soon I was also on the all news radio station during drivetime, which in LA has literally drivetime. Vince Gully was technically a colleague of mine, and that did not matter a lick Through the rest of the nineteen eighty five baseball season, I could not summon the courage to go and introduce myself to Vince Scully. Through the rest of the nineteen eighty sixth season, I could not summon the courage to introduce myself to and through the rest of the nineteen eighty seven season, through almost all the nineteen eighty eight season, and then late in that year I switched jobs got a big pay raise. I was nearly thirty, and I said I have to do this now. And when I finally said, excuse me, Vin, my name is And at that point I did not remember what my name was, found it somewhere, blurted it out, said something, possibly in English, and Vince Scully beamed, I'm glad you said hello. I thought I had done something to offend you. He said, Also, I have a question I've been meaning to ask you about baseball research. So forgive me for not introducing myself to you. So I don't think I've passed out, but I sure understood why Michael was, as he put it, shaking like a leaf. Vin shortly thereafter appeared in the Dodger dugout. I brought the two of them together. We all chatted for ten minutes we got a picture. I got out of the way and they got a picture. We talked about Fordham, where they went to school, and where I was born, and then Vin excused himself to go do an interview, and Michael Kay said, God, I'm still shaking like a leaf. That's how we all felt about him, those of us who with incomplete accuracy would say we were in the same business as Vin Scully, we were, in fact part of to turn the phrase he always used about others who had fans and supporters, the Vin Scully Marching and Chowder Society, Because yeah, he was the greatest broadcast master I've ever met. But more importantly, he was the nicest man in the world, and also delightfully profane when he got to trust you. And like anybody else, he could be fiercely and sometimes bitterly territorial about his broadcasts, and he had problems with certain players, and at least twice in the nineteen sixties he almost left the Dodgers to go home and broadcast for the Yankees, and he had doubts that he had made all the right career decisions. And unless you knew him pretty well, you would never have known any of that. And no complaint or cuss or uncertainty ever made its way into the public domain. And even when I had known him thirty years and had the privilege of having our visits start with a hug and end with dinner, I would still think the same thing I thought every time I ever saw him coming towards me, Well, here comes God. And there was not one moment that he acted like he was anything more than maybe a pretty good, fairly popular baseball announcer. He spent the years, all the years between his twenty second birthday and his eighty ninth birthday, as the play by play announcer of the Brooklyn and then the Los Angeles Dodgers. The day he started on the job was so long ago. It was barely three years since the Dodgers Jackie Robinson had broken the color line. In baseball. There were just sixteen Major League Baseball teams, and the ones Furthest. West and Furthest. South were in Saint Louis, Missouri. Before the Second World War, one of those Saint Louis teams had planned to move to Los Angeles, but the year then started nineteen fifty, baseball in Los Angeles still seemed like the most impractical of pipe dreams. Within eight years, it would be Vince Scully's job to introduce Major League Baseball to the nation's second largest metropolitan area, and in large part also to prevent the Dodgers who just moved in from moving out. They almost did. There was a referendum vote on whether or not to give them the land for their new stadium in Los Angeles, and it was really close, and it was Vince Scully's sincere and smiling salesmanship that helped Yes to win narrowly. And then there are the many recordings still extant of games in that new Field Dodger Stadium from the nineteen sixties and nineteen seventies. And if the recording you hear is of the visiting teams announcers, you will hear, for the length of the game something that sounds like a very distant, very melodic public address system. It was thousands of transistor radios held by fans to their ears, and all of them tuned to Vin Scully. It was not a Dodger game unless you were listening to Vin Scully, even if you were at the Dodger game. And that did not end in the nineteen seventies. Between two thousand and eight and two and fourteen, while visiting LA, I went to a bunch of games at Dodger Stadium with a big Dodger fan named Jason Bateman. I would bring my scorebook, He would bring his earpiece so he could listen to Vin Scully streaming. We talked during the commercial breaks. On the occasion of Vin's retirement in two sixteen, I wrote a long piece for GQ magazine about the importance of not viewing him as a saint. I told as many of the inside stories I could of the delightful day he compared a player's haircut to that of Charles Manson, the mass murderer, of his wonderful swearing about a Dodger player, and the reporter who broke up the player's marriage, of his inability to stomach the people at Fox TV who tried to make his broadcast, as he said, look just like Pittsburgh's, and their decision to remove his friend Keith from the National Baseball broadcasts. I can't tell all the stories here, but the article is online and the stories are pretty good, because well, it was Vin Scully, the Charles Manson clip. I still have that on my phone. I last saw Vin late in his last season twenty sixteen, the year he retired. We took a picture, and as happy as I am to see him in that picture, he looks happier to see me. And while some of that basic, deep abiding goodness in this man was not forced, not fake, not embellished, but maybe a little managed, that part was one hundred percent twenty four to seven real, honest Vin Scully. He was happy to see you, friend, co worker, player, fan, usually a fan about to pass out, which I saw nearly happen when I introduced a friend of mine to him in nineteen ninety one. Grown man, Well, it's nice to meet you, Andy. Andy collapsed backwards towards a wall in the ballpark and somehow managed to stay upright and conscious. Vinn Scully stayed in touch with me by email. I'm so proud of that. My last exchange with him was in twenty twenty, as the life of his beloved wife, Sandy ebbed away. Every time, every time I sent him birthday wishes or I just checked in, or when he wrote me, it was as if I had done him some kind of honor. One email all caps I have preserved them all reads high Keith. I'm at that age when I think of someone, I try to make contact with him. Happy Easter, blessings, Vin, blessings Finn. That was him, But a wonderful habit to adopt a friend comes to mind. You reach out. Imagine my thrill to see an email from his Dodgers team address, which I guess I can now reveal was simply read. There is one story I wrote about for GQ that I love to tell about Vin Scully above all the others, and I feel like I should tell it here. In August nineteen ninety one, I was watching from my TV station in LA. It was a hot night, the Dodgers were in Cincinnati, and Vince Scully mistakenly announced on the air that Gil Hodges was at bat for the Dodgers, when in fact it was Mike Sosha. Gil Hodges had retired in nineteen sixty three, he had died in nineteen seventy two, just went into the Baseball Hall of Fame. The LA newspapers then began to wonder if Vince Scully had lost it nineteen ninety one. He retired in twenty sixteen. Anyway, on the next night's broadcast. Vin appeared on camera game and explained what happened. This is roughly how I remember it. There is no tape. I think I'm doing him justice, he said, more or less. I had been thinking of the late Gil Hodges. If you don't know, Gil Hodges was a great dodger for a baseman, and my great friend, and a great man who was taken from us far too soon. And like Mike Sosha, Gil wore number fourteen, and it was awfully hot in that booth, and for some reason, instead of saying two and oh to Sosha, I said two and oh to Hodges. But I think the weather and the uniform number were not the only reasons I confused them. Mike reminds me a lot of my friend Gil, and like Gil, I think he may be a fine major league manager someday. Anyway, I just wanted to apologize for the mistake. Beautiful there. Then the game reappeared on the camera and Vin paused, speaking off camera, and he said something that still takes my breath away. I wish I could bring Gil Hodges back that easily. I am agnostic about an afterlife, but I will confess I frequently hope with all my heart that there is one and this is one of those days, so Vin can be reunited with family members whom tragedy took too early from him, and all those players like Gil Hodges. I'm Jackie Robinson who saw in him what we who watched or listened or had the privilege to really know him also could say, here is this deeply decent, brilliantly talented man, and the last person to claim either of those descriptions for himself, here is my friend Vin Scully. So blessings Bevin. I wish I could bring you back that easily. It's hard enough that a baseball season has begun for the first time since nineteen forty nine without Vince Scully either announcing games or still here to enjoy them with us and to remind us what there is within the games to enjoy. But then on February sixteenth of this year, the pain doubled. Tim McCarver, very probably the best former player ever to become a baseball announcer, died as well. Like Vince Scully, he had been a friend of mine for decades, and like Vin, he once resuscitated my flagging affections for the game itself in memory of Tim McCarver. When I was twenty four years old and working as a sports correspondent for CNN in New York, I reluctantly admitted to myself that my affection for baseball was failing. I had seen my childhood team, the Yankees, rise from the Ashes to win two World Series, and I was in the stands in Boston as they completed the greatest midseason come back in the game's history. But the Yankees perpetual churn had exhausted me, and five seasons of having to go to baseball games as a professional rather than just wanting to go to them as a fan had left me board. And one night after work in April or May of nineteen eighty three, I was sitting in my little apartment in New York, finding nothing to watch, even on the cable system offering the world's widest assortment of channels, fifty of them, and I somehow landed back on the New York station, Channel nine, whereas the hapless New York Mets were cavorting on my screen. Two men, we're laughing uncontrollably. I mean, I came in from channel eight or channel ten, and the first thing I saw was the ballgame at Chase Stadium, and the first thing I heard was these two guys laughing. No words, no explanation, no self control, just laughing. Well that was different. I had never in my life been a fan of the New York Mets. I grew up Yankee, and even as that had begun to wane, I was not going to become a Mets fan. I didn't hate them. At age ten, I was overjoyed when my dad was able to get us two tickets to a Mets nineteen sixty nine World Series game. And I had seen the Mets on TV hundreds of times before, but never to watch them. And yet there I was, having voluntarily stayed in rapped attention to a Mets telecast for twenty or thirty seconds now as these two guys laughed their heads off. Eventually they settled down, and Ralph Kinner, in his twenty second season as a Mets announcer, said something to Tim McCarver in like his twenty second day as a Mets announcer, about how neither of them should ever try to say that again. Just then the inning ended, McCarver said, the Mets are retired in the third and management may very well retire Ralph and me during the commercial, We'll be right back or not. Well, now I had to watch by the next inning. By the time Tim McCarver, whom the Mets had hired away from the Philadelphia Phillies the previous winter, had explained the name that he and Ralph Kinner so butchered that they dissolved into laughter. I was a Tim McCarver fan. The Mets were awful that year, promising but still the second worst team in baseball. They had not finished last or next to last in seven years, and laughing during their broadcast for any reason was better than paying attention to their games. And yet it quickly dawned on me that I was not only laughing along with McCarver and Kinner, but also I was paying attention to the game. It was as if I were sitting with these two guys in the stands somewhere, and we were enjoying what we could of the nineteen eighty three Mets, with McCarver in particular pointing out something subtle on the field that I would have otherwise missed, and in a much larger sense, McCarver kiner and the viewer. We were sitting there enjoying the fact of baseball. The individual game always mattered to Tim McCarver. But where it fit into the jigsaw puzzle of that season's games, or into the vaster jigsaw puzzle of all the games he'd ever seen, all the games there had ever been, that was far more important. Well before the week was out, I was a met and because of Tim McCarver and my dying, baseball fandom had been resuscitated. Because of Tim McCarver. As of nineteen eighty three, very few baseball broadcasts, in fact, very few sportscasts were interesting to watch as television programs. Tony Kubeck had done the Baseball Game of the Week and was crisp and informative, and he enjoyed himself, and he taught me and other kids and adults what to look for. But Vin Scully had only returned to the national baseball stage that same year nineteen eighty three, and Bob Costas had only become the backup on NBC's Game of the Week the year before. Baseball television was, if not a desert, a really arid place. Tim McCarver was never arid. He was happy to criticize any player or any manager at any time for strategical or logistical malfeason. But he was also happy to underline whenever he was wrong and they were right. You can't shade the defense that way and throw him a fastball in that situation, he'll put it over the fence. If seconds after that the batter hit not a home run but a soft liner to the shortstop whose location McCarver had just criticized. Tim's self flagellation would be short and exact, or maybe you can I'll try to stop managing from up here now. Usually, of course, he was exactly right. About fifteen years ago, he kind of fell out of favor with some fans and some critics because the freshness of his approach as of nineteen eighty three, tell the viewer not just what happened, but what's going to happen next, and what's going to happen after that, and what's going to happen after that. That had been imitated by every baseball analyst, and indeed by every TV sports analyst, and by a lot of sportscasters in studios and a lot of the imitators were younger and smoother, with a less pronounced accent, and as is inevitable, with time, they had become faster. Lost in that is that they all were and are Tim McCarver imitators. McCarver rose quickly in Baseball TV. He went right from the Philadelphia Phillies active roster and he was a great catcher to announcing for the Phillies and occasionally for NBC in nineteen eighty, then to the Mets in nineteen eighty three, as I mentioned, and ABC Sports in nineteen eighty four, and his first of twenty three World Series in nineteen eighty five. When CBS got baseball in nineteen ninety they hired him. I was at the CBS station in Los Angeles and got to interview him. I predicted that the underdog Cincinnati Reds would win the World Series in nineteen ninety and maybe even sweep, and McCarver said, I think that way too. I was afraid to say it. I thought I was the only one. When CBS lost baseball in nineteen ninety four, ABC reh hired him. When Fox got Baseball in nineteen ninety six, they hired him away and all that time, he was also doing full seasons in New York with the Mets, and when the Mets hesitated to bring him back, the Yankees grabbed him in nineteen ninety nine, and he was their lead announcer play by play man and a good one for three seasons. I had met Tim McCarver when he was going from player to announcer. At the nineteen eighty World Series. I was startled to see him on the field at Veteran Stadium in Philadelphia carrying the latest volume of Martin Gilbert's series of biographies of Winston Churchill. I introduced myself and I said I had just finished that book and hoped he enjoyed it as much as I had. He asked me how I thought it compared to Churchill's dozens of volumes of his own autobiography. Well, I said, there are fewer of them. McCarver laughed loudly. Good, this is heavy enough on the plane, he said, And when in nineteen eighty three I became a McCarver fan and got to tell him so, he immediately asked me if there were things he could improve on. Well, I gave him some technical voice tips and told him not to worry too much about them, that he was really pretty good at it as it was. And I said, I suppose this had begun when he was with the nineteen sixty five Saint Louis Cardinals. They had thirty five players on the team that year, twenty five of them making the roster for most of the season. Eventually, of those thirty five, McCarver became a broadcaster, and his teammates Bill White and Lou Brock became broadcasters, and Kurt Flood and Mike Shannon and Bob Yucker and Bob Gibson and Nelson Briles, and they would all become baseball announcers. And then their teammate Dick Grot would become a basketball announcer, and their teammate Bob Perkey would become a local sportscaster in Pittsburgh. That's ten out of thirty five. McCarver said on the team bus, it was a life and death struggle to be heard. I got to work again with Tim McCarver on a regular basis at Fox in nineteen ninety nine and two thousand. I was the host of Fox's pregame show for the Game of the Week, that Tim did with Joe Buck every Saturday, and also the pregame show host of our coverage of the playoffs in the World Series. Midseason, I would appear in their broadcasts from the studio doing highlights of other games, and then in October I would literally be in one of the team dugouts. I am proud to say that in the former role, I once managed to reduce Tim McCarver to silence. On June seventeenth, two thousand, Tim and Joe Buck were doing the Game of the Week from Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, and I was, as usual in the LA Studio doing the highlights for them, watching all the games simultaneously on an array of television's stacked one atop the other. In the fourth inning at Yankee Stadium, the Yankee second baseman Chuck Nablock, whose defensive play had been deteriorating for more than a year, charged a softly hit ground ball and tried to throw it back behind him to first base. He not only did not come close to first base, but the throw in fact, bounced off the top of the Yankees dugout and hit a fan in the stands Now, I knew Yankee Stadium. Intimately, I had more or less grown up there, and I knew if the ball had not hit somebody in the season ticket seats that my family had had there since nineteen seventy six, it had come close. Probably hit my mother, I said to the stage crew. Everybody laughed, and then the Yankees broadcast cut to a shot of the afflicted fan holding her head and being attended to buy stadium staff. It was my mother. Nobody laughed. So moments later, after I'd gotten her on the phone, when Buck and McCarver threw to me for a Fox game break, I narrated that exact highlight, and I said that Chuck now blocks throwing problems, had now gotten personal, that he had now hit my mother. We showed her her glasses are broken, Joe and Tim, and she's going home. But I've just spoken to her. She's okay, Joe, Tim. There was silence, I mean a lot of silence. Finally Tim McCarver said, what huh is that I'm speechless? Is that one of Keith's jokes, Keith, are you still there? Was that? Really? Your mother? I'm here, Tim, My goodness? She what did the odds? Tim She's been going to Yankee games since nineteen thirty four, and nothing bad has ever happened to her before today. I'd say the odds are pretty good, but did she She's fine. She'll be back in that same seat tomorrow. She's a gamer, won't she ask me to tell you she likes you better now that you're worth the Yankees and not the Mets. After that, I never saw Tim McCarver without him asking how my mother was. In fact, he called me after his game ended that day to make sure. After my mother passed away, Tim would say he had been thinking of her. Nobody I know who knew Tim McCarver personally could recall a difficult experience with him. He was a sweet man who enjoyed himself, enjoyed baseball, enjoyed broadcasting, enjoyed talking, enjoyed listening, enjoyed meeting you, enjoyed singing. He put out a jazz album, and he saved my love for baseball when it nearly died, literally forty years ago. And one last thing. Tim McCarver said something once on a baseball broadcast that is, to my mind, the greatest piece of predictive analysis I have ever heard in any sport, possibly in any realm, in television, politics, news, the weather, but definitely sports. And it wasn't just that he pointed out what everybody else in the stadium had seemingly missed, including a manager who had just led his team to three consecutive World Series championships. It was when he said it. This was in the bottom of the ninth inning of the seventh game of the World Series, in literally the last seconds of the most emotional two months of the most emotional baseball season ever. This was on November fourth, two thousand and one. As in a horror film or a disaster movie, there was just enough time for one person, and one person alone, to see that the monster was not dead, or that the damn would not hold. And in this case, that person was Tim McCarver. And this audio from the Fox broadcast of that World Series game. It's not slick. It doesn't sound scripted. There are no catch phrases. It isn't hip, it isn't full of metrics. It merely predicts the exact outcome to the inch of the play that would decide and end the entire baseball season. Seconds afterwards, the chance of a lifetime from Luis gons College two two, bottom of the ninth Game seven of the World Series. Bases loaded in field in one out, strike water. The one problem is Rivera throws inside the left handers. The left handers get a lot of book and bad hits in the shallow outfield, the shallow part of the outfield. That's the danger in bringing the infield in with a guy like Rivera on the mountain center center trailed the Diamondbacks put old champions Louie Gonzalez's hit landed exactly where Tim McCarver had said the Yankees should have had their infielders playing but didn't. When I saw Tim the next season, I said this to him, and I said this about him to every TV writer who asked that. That was the Bill Mazarowski World Series winning home run of all baseball analysis ever. And so in the last twenty years, whenever it was my privilege to see Tim McCarver at a ballpark, he would always say two things to me, as if he were saying them to me for the first time. He would say, thank you, Keith for what you said about two thousand and one, and Keith, I was just thinking of your dear mother, Thank you for listening. Here are the credits. Most of the music was arranged, produced, and performed by Brian Ray and John Philip Channel, who are the Countdown musical directors. All orchestration and keyboards by John Philip Channel, guitarist based on drums by Brian Ray, produced by Tko Brothers. Other Beethoven selections have been arranged and performed by the group No Horns Allowed. The sports music is the Olderman theme from ESPN two, written by Mitch Warren Davis courtesy of ESPN. Musical comments by Nancy Fauss, the best baseball stadium organist ever. Everything else is pretty much my fault. Let's countdown for this the eight hundred and twentieth day since Donald Trump's first attempted coup against the democratically elected government of the United States. Keep arresting him while we still can. The next scheduled countdown is tomorrow, and until then on Keith Olberman Good Morning, good afternoon, goodnight, and good luck. Count Down with Keith Olerman is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. Call Trump's lawyers, Judge Mershon, do it now, do it right now, and tell them to put their client's fat ass on a plane and get it back to New York within six hours, or you will jail their client and them for contempt of court. At roughly two forty five Eastern yesterday, you told the defendant and the prosecutor please refrain from making statements that are likely to incite violence or civil unrest. Do not use rhetoric that could jeopardize the rule of law. At roughly eight forty five Eastern time yesterday, the defendant incited violence and jeopardize the rule of law. And he attacked the district to turn. Then he attacked the district attorney's wife, and he attacked you, Judge Marchon, and he attacked your family, And on behalf of the rule of law, and on behalf of civil peace in the United States of America, and on behalf of yourself and the DA and the inviolability of the courts, dragged defendant Donald Trump back into your court today and hold him in contempt and then put him into a cell. At Riker's Island. This is where we are right now. I have a Trump hating judge with a Trump hating wife and family whose daughter worked for Kamala Harris and now receives money from the Biden Harris campaign, and a lot of it. The criminal is the district attorney because he illegally leaked massive amounts of grand jury in fromotion for which he should be prosecuted, or at a minimum, he should resign. And Alvin Bragg's wife can firm to report that claimed her husband has Trump nailed on felonies. She has since locked down her Twitter account. What more does the defendant have to do, Judge mer Chan, He already threatened death and destruction. He already reposted an article with a photo of him wielding a baseball bat next to a photo of the head of the district attorney. And yesterday, as you were warning him, but also as you were bending over backwards to protect his First Amendment rights, as you were saying those things to him, his idiot sons, Junior and Fredo were doxing your own daughter on every social media site they could find. And if you don't put them under a gag order, what exactly does the rule of law mean in this country. What exactly is the point of having laws in this country? What exactly, your honor, is the point of having judges and district attorneys and cops if their words mean nothing, and a psychotic, narcissistic, piece of shit criminal like Donald Trump can leave your courtroom and gun on his private jet and go to his private club and pick up right where he left off. Not merely endangering you and your wife and your daughter, and the DA and his wife and everybody connected with law enforcement in New York and Washington in America, but endangering, as you yourself phrased it, the rule of law, by as you yourself also phrased it, making statements that are likely to incite violence or civil unrest. What more does Trump have to do pull out a gun on Fifth Avenue and shoot you, or say something like that again, or inspire one of his brainwashed, gun fetishizing, hate filled fascist mob to attack your daughter. Trump is in contempt, of course right now. Jail him. He is in fact in contempt of America. He is always and will forever be in contempt of America. America means nothing to him. Your words mean nothing to him. The law means nothing to him. He will understand only punishment. Punish him, Judge Mershon, as you were warning him, as you were calmly, responsibly, even handedly warning the defendant and the district attorney to avoid dangerous rhetoric the defendant's sons, we're putting out your daughter's photo so she can be threatened and attacked and added to the list of the hundreds and hundreds of upstanding and honest Americans who have become the targets of the mob because it's violent, depraved, despotic leader has made them the targets of the mob at the very hour, your honor, And then they hid behind the argument that no, they weren't doing that. They had simply posted an interesting article about your daughter from a British newspaper, and it wasn't their fault that the article had her picture on the link. And anybody who says they posted her photo is lying. And the descendant of nazis literally one of the hacks defending Donald Trump Junior doxing your daughter, Judge by calling the reporter who called Junior out a quote actual descendant of Nazi war criminals and heir to a Nazi fortune unquote. That's where we are in this country right now, Judge Marshahn, hours after you bent over backwards to protect Donald Trump, the defendant, the vile creature who has already stochastically threatened your daughter twice since you warned him to tamp down the rhetoric, put a gag order on Donald Trump Junior, your honor, put a gag order on Eric Trump, your honor, put a gag order on them, and put their madman father in jail. Because your gesture of fairness and balance and integrity did nothing but to embolden these mentally defective bullies, and the results were immediate. And they do not just endanger you and your daughter and your family and Alvin Bragg and his family, they endanger America. Please refrain from making statements that are likely to incite violence or civil unrest. Six hours after you made those statements. And by the way, your honor, those statements were made not in the controlled environment of a courtroom, nor even in the one dimensional world of social media. They were made live on national television in this country. Because we have laws about exactly where on the wave frequency Channel thirteen somewhere can put out its signal, but there is not a damned thing, not one damn thing that can even begin to influence the billionaires who have just bought the nation's original all news cable channel for the sole purpose of neutralizing its reality and corrupting it into another right wing propaganda machine. CNN, Your honor, CNN carried the entire goddamned Trump speech without warning, without editorial judgment, and Trump used them. Trump used the idiots who now own and run the fascists who have balked CNN to amplify the attack on you, and on your daughter, and on Alvin Bragg, and on his wife and on America. Because having learned nothing from twenty sixteen or twenty twenty, CNN televised the entire hate filled, narcissistic, paranoid speech by the defendant live, not just the start through the first reference to Bragg, and then showing clips of anything relevant, but saying we cannot show this live. God knows what he will say or what he will tell his idiot followers to do, but the whole thing was shown live, the entire catalog of Trump repeatedly and unsuccessfully trying to hammer in the last nail in self crucifixion after self crucifixion, literally going back as far as but her emails, but focusing on his newest targets you and Alvin Bragg. It was unconscionable, unjournalistic, unforgivable, and, as I have suggested here four months, your Honor, part of the quest by the new ownership of that channel to show itself to the fascists, to tell them that if the fascists regain power in this country, they should let CNN live and keep making money. And also part of the quest by CNN's desperately failing in over his head drowning president, a man named Chris Lickt, to show himself to that new ownership and to beg that they not fire him and end forever his career of remarkably consistent mediocrity, manipulation and maschination, a man who could not tell the moral difference between a fascist and an old fashioned And it's only too goddamned bad, your Honor, that you can't issue a warning to Chris Lickt that if a television channel his or anybody else's amplifies the hate speech of the defendant, as he violates the orders of the court, your court, that the network can be held liable that it's president and owners can be held liable for the threat, the ever mounting threat against the judges and the district attorneys, and the families and the friends, and the cops and anybody else who tries to thwart Donald Trump, or tries to get Donald Trump to behave like a human, or just tries to get Trump to not light this country ablaze. This cannot continue, Judge, marchn This man will destroy this country, and he will not have to do as much as try to rise from his chair to do so. It will be done for him by proxies and servants and worshippers and the scum whom he has enabled to hate and pursue and attack. They will have destroyed America before any of us can do a goddamn thing about it. But you, judge, you can do something about it now, maybe enough to stop it now. You told Trump what not to do, and he immediately did it again, as he always does it, again and again and again, on national television, in front of crowds, in front of mobs, in front of the simple minded, in front of those who dream of killing other humans because they would think it was fun. Bring Trump back into your courtroom and scream at him for thirty minutes, and then have the guards drag him to a cell for twenty four hours, or forty eight hours, or the rest of his goddamned life for all I care, because that is the only thing he will ever understand, and the only thing that the slime that follow him and emulate him and seek to be the same as he is. That is the only thing they will ever understand. And if there had been a shadow of a doubt that this was true, it was erased. Last night. Your instructions went in one ear and out the other in less than six hours. Save this country, Judge Mershon. Donald Trump's contempt for you and for the rule of law is more than just the technical violation of a warning you gave him in court yesterday. It is the essence of his being. And Donald Trump's being is sick and evil and uncontrollable, and left unpunished, it will destroy everyone and everything that is good about this country we call home. Happily, I can report a victory in the American fight against American fascism. In the election yesterday to decide control of the Wisconsin State Supreme Court. Janet Protassuwich defeated Dan Kelly, giving the Liberals a four to three margin there for the first time since two thousand and eight. That not only protects choice in Wisconsin, but it would preclude the extremely aggressive antidemocracy forces in that state from using the state Supreme Court to alter or erase the presidential choice of Wisconsin's voters next year. Four three Liberals. Now you may know, I did two episodes yesterday, the regular Countdown podcast and a special update in the afternoon after the arraignment of Trump, and I think we can both agree jump get me started on that again. I need a psychological break from all that, at least for a little while. Normally that's the new baseball season at this time, if you're nearly a week into it, it struck me that something's missing, something's wrong in baseball. It is as if I am at a great game and the seats on either side of me are empty. It dawned on me last night, finally, why I feel that way? Those seats are metaphorically empty. Two of the greatest poets and conveyors of the game are gone. Permit me to spend the rest of this edition of Countdown remembering again our irreplaceable losses of Tim McCarver and Vince Scully. That's next, This is countdown. It was the night I was writing the third episode of this series of podcasts August second of last year, and just as I prepared to record the show, the sad news came in. My friend had died. My friend, Vince Scully, saying those four words had been one of the great privileges of my life for about thirty five years. There is sports in this podcast. I was a sportscaster. I worked for ESPN four different times. But this was and is primarily to be a news and politics podcast, and I had no hesitation that no matter how much I wanted this to be news and politics, I knew how the episode for August third, twenty twenty two should begin in memory of Vince Scully. On April fourth, nineteen ninety nine, the New York Yankees played an exhibition game against the Los Angeles Dodgers at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, and my friend, the Yankees play by play announcer, Michael Kay, was shaking like a leaf. He spoke softly to me, almost in a whisper. Michael does not speak softly. I need you to do me a favor. I'm nervous just asking. I'm embarrassed just asking. Can you He sighed heavily and ran a hand through his hair. Can you introduce me to Vince Scully. Michael Kay was starting his eighth season that day as a Major League Baseball play by play announcer. He had that in common with Vin Scully. They did the same job. He also went to the same college as Vin Scully, Fordham University. He had no reason to be nervous about meeting Vin Scully, except that's Vin Scully. I told Mike there was no reason to be nervous, though I knew he would be, But I also told him sincerely, there really was no reason to be embarrassed. I first moved to Los Angeles in August nineteen eighty five, and I went right to the top of the guys doing sports on the local TV newscasts there back when that meant something. Soon I was also on the all news radio station during drivetime, which in LA has literally drivetime. Vince Gully was technically a colleague of mine, and that did not matter a lick Through the rest of the nineteen eighty five baseball season, I could not summon the courage to go and introduce myself to Vince Scully. Through the rest of the nineteen eighty sixth season, I could not summon the courage to introduce myself to and through the rest of the nineteen eighty seven season, through almost all the nineteen eighty eight season, and then late in that year I switched jobs got a big pay raise. I was nearly thirty, and I said I have to do this now. And when I finally said, excuse me, Vin, my name is And at that point I did not remember what my name was, found it somewhere, blurted it out, said something, possibly in English, and Vince Scully beamed, I'm glad you said hello. I thought I had done something to offend you. He said, Also, I have a question I've been meaning to ask you about baseball research. So forgive me for not introducing myself to you. So I don't think I've passed out, but I sure understood why Michael was, as he put it, shaking like a leaf. Vin shortly thereafter appeared in the Dodger dugout. I brought the two of them together. We all chatted for ten minutes we got a picture. I got out of the way and they got a picture. We talked about Fordham, where they went to school, and where I was born, and then Vin excused himself to go do an interview, and Michael Kay said, God, I'm still shaking like a leaf. That's how we all felt about him, those of us who with incomplete accuracy would say we were in the same business as Vin Scully, we were, in fact part of to turn the phrase he always used about others who had fans and supporters, the Vin Scully Marching and Chowder Society, Because yeah, he was the greatest broadcast master I've ever met. But more importantly, he was the nicest man in the world, and also delightfully profane when he got to trust you. And like anybody else, he could be fiercely and sometimes bitterly territorial about his broadcasts, and he had problems with certain players, and at least twice in the nineteen sixties he almost left the Dodgers to go home and broadcast for the Yankees, and he had doubts that he had made all the right career decisions. And unless you knew him pretty well, you would never have known any of that. And no complaint or cuss or uncertainty ever made its way into the public domain. And even when I had known him thirty years and had the privilege of having our visits start with a hug and end with dinner, I would still think the same thing I thought every time I ever saw him coming towards me, Well, here comes God. And there was not one moment that he acted like he was anything more than maybe a pretty good, fairly popular baseball announcer. He spent the years, all the years between his twenty second birthday and his eighty ninth birthday, as the play by play announcer of the Brooklyn and then the Los Angeles Dodgers. The day he started on the job was so long ago. It was barely three years since the Dodgers Jackie Robinson had broken the color line. In baseball. There were just sixteen Major League Baseball teams, and the ones Furthest. West and Furthest. South were in Saint Louis, Missouri. Before the Second World War, one of those Saint Louis teams had planned to move to Los Angeles, but the year then started nineteen fifty, baseball in Los Angeles still seemed like the most impractical of pipe dreams. Within eight years, it would be Vince Scully's job to introduce Major League Baseball to the nation's second largest metropolitan area, and in large part also to prevent the Dodgers who just moved in from moving out. They almost did. There was a referendum vote on whether or not to give them the land for their new stadium in Los Angeles, and it was really close, and it was Vince Scully's sincere and smiling salesmanship that helped Yes to win narrowly. And then there are the many recordings still extant of games in that new Field Dodger Stadium from the nineteen sixties and nineteen seventies. And if the recording you hear is of the visiting teams announcers, you will hear, for the length of the game something that sounds like a very distant, very melodic public address system. It was thousands of transistor radios held by fans to their ears, and all of them tuned to Vin Scully. It was not a Dodger game unless you were listening to Vin Scully, even if you were at the Dodger game. And that did not end in the nineteen seventies. Between two thousand and eight and two and fourteen, while visiting LA, I went to a bunch of games at Dodger Stadium with a big Dodger fan named Jason Bateman. I would bring my scorebook, He would bring his earpiece so he could listen to Vin Scully streaming. We talked during the commercial breaks. On the occasion of Vin's retirement in two sixteen, I wrote a long piece for GQ magazine about the importance of not viewing him as a saint. I told as many of the inside stories I could of the delightful day he compared a player's haircut to that of Charles Manson, the mass murderer, of his wonderful swearing about a Dodger player, and the reporter who broke up the player's marriage, of his inability to stomach the people at Fox TV who tried to make his broadcast, as he said, look just like Pittsburgh's, and their decision to remove his friend Keith from the National Baseball broadcasts. I can't tell all the stories here, but the article is online and the stories are pretty good, because well, it was Vin Scully, the Charles Manson clip. I still have that on my phone. I last saw Vin late in his last season twenty sixteen, the year he retired. We took a picture, and as happy as I am to see him in that picture, he looks happier to see me. And while some of that basic, deep abiding goodness in this man was not forced, not fake, not embellished, but maybe a little managed, that part was one hundred percent twenty four to seven real, honest Vin Scully. He was happy to see you, friend, co worker, player, fan, usually a fan about to pass out, which I saw nearly happen when I introduced a friend of mine to him in nineteen ninety one. Grown man, Well, it's nice to meet you, Andy. Andy collapsed backwards towards a wall in the ballpark and somehow managed to stay upright and conscious. Vinn Scully stayed in touch with me by email. I'm so proud of that. My last exchange with him was in twenty twenty, as the life of his beloved wife, Sandy ebbed away. Every time, every time I sent him birthday wishes or I just checked in, or when he wrote me, it was as if I had done him some kind of honor. One email all caps I have preserved them all reads high Keith. I'm at that age when I think of someone, I try to make contact with him. Happy Easter, blessings, Vin, blessings Finn. That was him, But a wonderful habit to adopt a friend comes to mind. You reach out. Imagine my thrill to see an email from his Dodgers team address, which I guess I can now reveal was simply read. There is one story I wrote about for GQ that I love to tell about Vin Scully above all the others, and I feel like I should tell it here. In August nineteen ninety one, I was watching from my TV station in LA. It was a hot night, the Dodgers were in Cincinnati, and Vince Scully mistakenly announced on the air that Gil Hodges was at bat for the Dodgers, when in fact it was Mike Sosha. Gil Hodges had retired in nineteen sixty three, he had died in nineteen seventy two, just went into the Baseball Hall of Fame. The LA newspapers then began to wonder if Vince Scully had lost it nineteen ninety one. He retired in twenty sixteen. Anyway, on the next night's broadcast. Vin appeared on camera game and explained what happened. This is roughly how I remember it. There is no tape. I think I'm doing him justice, he said, more or less. I had been thinking of the late Gil Hodges. If you don't know, Gil Hodges was a great dodger for a baseman, and my great friend, and a great man who was taken from us far too soon. And like Mike Sosha, Gil wore number fourteen, and it was awfully hot in that booth, and for some reason, instead of saying two and oh to Sosha, I said two and oh to Hodges. But I think the weather and the uniform number were not the only reasons I confused them. Mike reminds me a lot of my friend Gil, and like Gil, I think he may be a fine major league manager someday. Anyway, I just wanted to apologize for the mistake. Beautiful there. Then the game reappeared on the camera and Vin paused, speaking off camera, and he said something that still takes my breath away. I wish I could bring Gil Hodges back that easily. I am agnostic about an afterlife, but I will confess I frequently hope with all my heart that there is one and this is one of those days, so Vin can be reunited with family members whom tragedy took too early from him, and all those players like Gil Hodges. I'm Jackie Robinson who saw in him what we who watched or listened or had the privilege to really know him also could say, here is this deeply decent, brilliantly talented man, and the last person to claim either of those descriptions for himself, here is my friend Vin Scully. So blessings Bevin. I wish I could bring you back that easily. It's hard enough that a baseball season has begun for the first time since nineteen forty nine without Vince Scully either announcing games or still here to enjoy them with us and to remind us what there is within the games to enjoy. But then on February sixteenth of this year, the pain doubled. Tim McCarver, very probably the best former player ever to become a baseball announcer, died as well. Like Vince Scully, he had been a friend of mine for decades, and like Vin, he once resuscitated my flagging affections for the game itself in memory of Tim McCarver. When I was twenty four years old and working as a sports correspondent for CNN in New York, I reluctantly admitted to myself that my affection for baseball was failing. I had seen my childhood team, the Yankees, rise from the Ashes to win two World Series, and I was in the stands in Boston as they completed the greatest midseason come back in the game's history. But the Yankees perpetual churn had exhausted me, and five seasons of having to go to baseball games as a professional rather than just wanting to go to them as a fan had left me board. And one night after work in April or May of nineteen eighty three, I was sitting in my little apartment in New York, finding nothing to watch, even on the cable system offering the world's widest assortment of channels, fifty of them, and I somehow landed back on the New York station, Channel nine, whereas the hapless New York Mets were cavorting on my screen. Two men, we're laughing uncontrollably. I mean, I came in from channel eight or channel ten, and the first thing I saw was the ballgame at Chase Stadium, and the first thing I heard was these two guys laughing. No words, no explanation, no self control, just laughing. Well that was different. I had never in my life been a fan of the New York Mets. I grew up Yankee, and even as that had begun to wane, I was not going to become a Mets fan. I didn't hate them. At age ten, I was overjoyed when my dad was able to get us two tickets to a Mets nineteen sixty nine World Series game. And I had seen the Mets on TV hundreds of times before, but never to watch them. And yet there I was, having voluntarily stayed in rapped attention to a Mets telecast for twenty or thirty seconds now as these two guys laughed their heads off. Eventually they settled down, and Ralph Kinner, in his twenty second season as a Mets announcer, said something to Tim McCarver in like his twenty second day as a Mets announcer, about how neither of them should ever try to say that again. Just then the inning ended, McCarver said, the Mets are retired in the third and management may very well retire Ralph and me during the commercial, We'll be right back or not. Well, now I had to watch by the next inning. By the time Tim McCarver, whom the Mets had hired away from the Philadelphia Phillies the previous winter, had explained the name that he and Ralph Kinner so butchered that they dissolved into laughter. I was a Tim McCarver fan. The Mets were awful that year, promising but still the second worst team in baseball. They had not finished last or next to last in seven years, and laughing during their broadcast for any reason was better than paying attention to their games. And yet it quickly dawned on me that I was not only laughing along with McCarver and Kinner, but also I was paying attention to the game. It was as if I were sitting with these two guys in the stands somewhere, and we were enjoying what we could of the nineteen eighty three Mets, with McCarver in particular pointing out something subtle on the field that I would have otherwise missed, and in a much larger sense, McCarver kiner and the viewer. We were sitting there enjoying the fact of baseball. The individual game always mattered to Tim McCarver. But where it fit into the jigsaw puzzle of that season's games, or into the vaster jigsaw puzzle of all the games he'd ever seen, all the games there had ever been, that was far more important. Well before the week was out, I was a met and because of Tim McCarver and my dying, baseball fandom had been resuscitated. Because of Tim McCarver. As of nineteen eighty three, very few baseball broadcasts, in fact, very few sportscasts were interesting to watch as television programs. Tony Kubeck had done the Baseball Game of the Week and was crisp and informative, and he enjoyed himself, and he taught me and other kids and adults what to look for. But Vin Scully had only returned to the national baseball stage that same year nineteen eighty three, and Bob Costas had only become the backup on NBC's Game of the Week the year before. Baseball television was, if not a desert, a really arid place. Tim McCarver was never arid. He was happy to criticize any player or any manager at any time for strategical or logistical malfeason. But he was also happy to underline whenever he was wrong and they were right. You can't shade the defense that way and throw him a fastball in that situation, he'll put it over the fence. If seconds after that the batter hit not a home run but a soft liner to the shortstop whose location McCarver had just criticized. Tim's self flagellation would be short and exact, or maybe you can I'll try to stop managing from up here now. Usually, of course, he was exactly right. About fifteen years ago, he kind of fell out of favor with some fans and some critics because the freshness of his approach as of nineteen eighty three, tell the viewer not just what happened, but what's going to happen next, and what's going to happen after that, and what's going to happen after that. That had been imitated by every baseball analyst, and indeed by every TV sports analyst, and by a lot of sportscasters in studios and a lot of the imitators were younger and smoother, with a less pronounced accent, and as is inevitable, with time, they had become faster. Lost in that is that they all were and are Tim McCarver imitators. McCarver rose quickly in Baseball TV. He went right from the Philadelphia Phillies active roster and he was a great catcher to announcing for the Phillies and occasionally for NBC in nineteen eighty, then to the Mets in nineteen eighty three, as I mentioned, and ABC Sports in nineteen eighty four, and his first of twenty three World Series in nineteen eighty five. When CBS got baseball in nineteen ninety they hired him. I was at the CBS station in Los Angeles and got to interview him. I predicted that the underdog Cincinnati Reds would win the World Series in nineteen ninety and maybe even sweep, and McCarver said, I think that way too. I was afraid to say it. I thought I was the only one. When CBS lost baseball in nineteen ninety four, ABC reh hired him. When Fox got Baseball in nineteen ninety six, they hired him away and all that time, he was also doing full seasons in New York with the Mets, and when the Mets hesitated to bring him back, the Yankees grabbed him in nineteen ninety nine, and he was their lead announcer play by play man and a good one for three seasons. I had met Tim McCarver when he was going from player to announcer. At the nineteen eighty World Series. I was startled to see him on the field at Veteran Stadium in Philadelphia carrying the latest volume of Martin Gilbert's series of biographies of Winston Churchill. I introduced myself and I said I had just finished that book and hoped he enjoyed it as much as I had. He asked me how I thought it compared to Churchill's dozens of volumes of his own autobiography. Well, I said, there are fewer of them. McCarver laughed loudly. Good, this is heavy enough on the plane, he said, And when in nineteen eighty three I became a McCarver fan and got to tell him so, he immediately asked me if there were things he could improve on. Well, I gave him some technical voice tips and told him not to worry too much about them, that he was really pretty good at it as it was. And I said, I suppose this had begun when he was with the nineteen sixty five Saint Louis Cardinals. They had thirty five players on the team that year, twenty five of them making the roster for most of the season. Eventually, of those thirty five, McCarver became a broadcaster, and his teammates Bill White and Lou Brock became broadcasters, and Kurt Flood and Mike Shannon and Bob Yucker and Bob Gibson and Nelson Briles, and they would all become baseball announcers. And then their teammate Dick Grot would become a basketball announcer, and their teammate Bob Perkey would become a local sportscaster in Pittsburgh. That's ten out of thirty five. McCarver said on the team bus, it was a life and death struggle to be heard. I got to work again with Tim McCarver on a regular basis at Fox in nineteen ninety nine and two thousand. I was the host of Fox's pregame show for the Game of the Week, that Tim did with Joe Buck every Saturday, and also the pregame show host of our coverage of the playoffs in the World Series. Midseason, I would appear in their broadcasts from the studio doing highlights of other games, and then in October I would literally be in one of the team dugouts. I am proud to say that in the former role, I once managed to reduce Tim McCarver to silence. On June seventeenth, two thousand, Tim and Joe Buck were doing the Game of the Week from Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, and I was, as usual in the LA Studio doing the highlights for them, watching all the games simultaneously on an array of television's stacked one atop the other. In the fourth inning at Yankee Stadium, the Yankee second baseman Chuck Nablock, whose defensive play had been deteriorating for more than a year, charged a softly hit ground ball and tried to throw it back behind him to first base. He not only did not come close to first base, but the throw in fact, bounced off the top of the Yankees dugout and hit a fan in the stands Now, I knew Yankee Stadium. Intimately, I had more or less grown up there, and I knew if the ball had not hit somebody in the season ticket seats that my family had had there since nineteen seventy six, it had come close. Probably hit my mother, I said to the stage crew. Everybody laughed, and then the Yankees broadcast cut to a shot of the afflicted fan holding her head and being attended to buy stadium staff. It was my mother. Nobody laughed. So moments later, after I'd gotten her on the phone, when Buck and McCarver threw to me for a Fox game break, I narrated that exact highlight, and I said that Chuck now blocks throwing problems, had now gotten personal, that he had now hit my mother. We showed her her glasses are broken, Joe and Tim, and she's going home. But I've just spoken to her. She's okay, Joe, Tim. There was silence, I mean a lot of silence. Finally Tim McCarver said, what huh is that I'm speechless? Is that one of Keith's jokes, Keith, are you still there? Was that? Really? Your mother? I'm here, Tim, My goodness? She what did the odds? Tim She's been going to Yankee games since nineteen thirty four, and nothing bad has ever happened to her before today. I'd say the odds are pretty good, but did she She's fine. She'll be back in that same seat tomorrow. She's a gamer, won't she ask me to tell you she likes you better now that you're worth the Yankees and not the Mets. After that, I never saw Tim McCarver without him asking how my mother was. In fact, he called me after his game ended that day to make sure. After my mother passed away, Tim would say he had been thinking of her. Nobody I know who knew Tim McCarver personally could recall a difficult experience with him. He was a sweet man who enjoyed himself, enjoyed baseball, enjoyed broadcasting, enjoyed talking, enjoyed listening, enjoyed meeting you, enjoyed singing. He put out a jazz album, and he saved my love for baseball when it nearly died, literally forty years ago. And one last thing. Tim McCarver said something once on a baseball broadcast that is, to my mind, the greatest piece of predictive analysis I have ever heard in any sport, possibly in any realm, in television, politics, news, the weather, but definitely sports. And it wasn't just that he pointed out what everybody else in the stadium had seemingly missed, including a manager who had just led his team to three consecutive World Series championships. It was when he said it. This was in the bottom of the ninth inning of the seventh game of the World Series, in literally the last seconds of the most emotional two months of the most emotional baseball season ever. This was on November fourth, two thousand and one. As in a horror film or a disaster movie, there was just enough time for one person, and one person alone, to see that the monster was not dead, or that the damn would not hold. And in this case, that person was Tim McCarver. And this audio from the Fox broadcast of that World Series game. It's not slick. It doesn't sound scripted. There are no catch phrases. It isn't hip, it isn't full of metrics. It merely predicts the exact outcome to the inch of the play that would decide and end the entire baseball season. Seconds afterwards, the chance of a lifetime from Luis gons College two two, bottom of the ninth Game seven of the World Series. Bases loaded in field in one out, strike water. The one problem is Rivera throws inside the left handers. The left handers get a lot of book and bad hits in the shallow outfield, the shallow part of the outfield. That's the danger in bringing the infield in with a guy like Rivera on the mountain center center trailed the Diamondbacks put old champions Louie Gonzalez's hit landed exactly where Tim McCarver had said the Yankees should have had their infielders playing but didn't. When I saw Tim the next season, I said this to him, and I said this about him to every TV writer who asked that. That was the Bill Mazarowski World Series winning home run of all baseball analysis ever. And so in the last twenty years, whenever it was my privilege to see Tim McCarver at a ballpark, he would always say two things to me, as if he were saying them to me for the first time. He would say, thank you, Keith for what you said about two thousand and one, and Keith, I was just thinking of your dear mother, Thank you for listening. Here are the credits. Most of the music was arranged, produced, and performed by Brian Ray and John Philip Channel, who are the Countdown musical directors. All orchestration and keyboards by John Philip Channel, guitarist based on drums by Brian Ray, produced by Tko Brothers. Other Beethoven selections have been arranged and performed by the group No Horns Allowed. The sports music is the Olderman theme from ESPN two, written by Mitch Warren Davis courtesy of ESPN. Musical comments by Nancy Fauss, the best baseball stadium organist ever. Everything else is pretty much my fault. Let's countdown for this the eight hundred and twentieth day since Donald Trump's first attempted coup against the democratically elected government of the United States. Keep arresting him while we still can. The next scheduled countdown is tomorrow, and until then on Keith Olberman Good Morning, good afternoon, goodnight, and good luck. Count Down with Keith Olerman is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.