The 2011 Baseball Winter Meetings will take place next week in Dallas. Along with all the GM wheeling and dealing, eager young folks looking for a job, and agents trying to get their clients a contract, the Hall of Fame will announce who the Veteran’s Committee elected to the Hall, and the winner of the 2012 Ford C. Frick Award for excellence in broadcasting.

In a year draped with Cardinal Red, two former Cardinals are on the Frick ballot – Tim McCarver and Mike Shannon.

McCarver has been broadcasting games so long it is sometimes easy to forget he played at the Major League level. Tim broke in with the Cardinals in 1959 as a 17-year-old. He became the regular catcher in 1963 and led the league in triples (13) in 1966, the last NL catcher to do so (Carlton Fisk led the AL in 1972). McCarver finished second in the 1967 MVP voting in 1967 to teammate Orlando Cepeda. After that, he was one of the players dealt in the Curt Flood trade on October 7, 1969, that ultimately caused the elimination of the reserve clause in major league baseball. In his later career he was known as the personal caddy for Steve Carlton.

McCarver retired from baseball and the Phillies in 1980 and immediately stepped into the Philadelphia broadcast booth, where he remained through the 1982 season. In 1983 he began a 16 year tenure with the New York Mets. New York, along with Atlanta and Chicago, developed the first ‘superstations’ broadcasting content throughout the country on cable, which brought Mets, Braves, and Cubs baseball into homes nationwide. McCarver first developed his national following through his broadcasting, alongside Ralph Kiner and Steve Zabriskie, on WWOR. McCarver started covering baseball for national affiliates in 1984, and has worked for ABC, CBS, The Baseball Network, and Fox whom he currently broadcasts for. From 2000-2002 he won 3 Emmys for ‘Outstanding Sports Event Analyst’.

Mike Shannon was a teammate of McCarver’s on the El Birdos teams of the 1960s. Shannon, a St Louis native, broke into the majors in 1962 and played his entire career in St Louis. A third baseman, he had some huge hits in the World Series for the 1964 World Champs. He retired after the 1970 season due to nephritis, and joined the Cardinals front office the following season, matriculating to the broadcast booth for the 1972 season. He has been seated there ever since.

Shannon shared the broadcast booth with Jack Buck for 30 years, and has become a local broadcast legend in his own right. From his signature ‘Get Up Baby!’ call anticipating a home run, to numerous ‘Shannonisms’ (which multiple websites list in homage), summer baseball in St Louis just doesn’t sound right without the deep baritone of Mike Shannon.

Both men are deserving of the award, however neither man is likely to win. McCarver’s candidacy is the more robust, but his analysis, while prescient when describing what the catcher is doing, has become dated. He is lampooned frequently, most famously by the now-defunct blog ‘Fire Joe Morgan’. Shannon has never shouldered the national broadcasting workload men like McCarver, Jack Buck, Vin Scully, and others have undertaken, and his years laboring under Buck’s considerable shadow have limited recognition of his work to the local St Louis area.

The 2012 Ford C. Frick winner will be announced on December 7.

Mike Metzger is a contributing writer for I-70 Baseball. He blogs about the San Diego Padres. Follow him on Twitter @metzgermg.

It has been a running theme for 2011, that’s for sure.

One more game. One more time. Backs against the wall. Here come the Cardinals.

After a thrilling night in Busch Stadium that seen the underdog Cardinals once again show the Phillies that they were not afraid of one of the “four aces”, game five will go back to Philadelphia and see two former teammates and current aces of their respective staffs square off for National League supremacy.

The Cardinals may have benefited from the appearance of the local Busch Stadium wildlife during game four, with antics being provided by a squirrel who has now made consecutive appearances in the LDS. More likely, the team benefited from the young man the fans call Batman, David Freese, who established himself in the lineup in game four.

A local boy who grew up in the St. Louis area, Freese became the first St. Louis native to hit a post season home run since the man that was announced as a finalist for the Ford C. Frick Award early that day, Mike Shannon. Freese’s two-run, sixth inning homer capped off a night that had already seen him drive in two runs with a double just two innings before. The four runs would be enough, though it was Lance Berkman’s RBI double that plated the Cardinals’ first run in the first inning. That play featured one of the most bizarre looking outfield plays in a long time with Shane Victorino falling down as he went to throw the ball back in from deep right center field. Victorino fell at the track and the ball rolled harmlessly away further towards the fence. Berkman moved to third on the error before being stranded.

Game five may not see the same amount of scoring, however.

Roy Halladay. That name strikes fear in Major League Baseball players across the country. The man can be dominant to the point of perfection. His previous start in this series showcased his talent in the form of the most retired batters consecutively in a post season game since Don Larsen through a World Series complete game. Not only did he decimate the Cardinals lineup after they put up a strong first inning, but he did it during a night start in game one, so the guys couldn’t even complain that it was the shadows that kept them from performing.

Drop by Baseball Digest and take a look at my article there concerning the epic pitching matchup that is brewing in the NLDS. Click here to read that article.

Chris Carpenter. A bulldog pitcher that reminds this writer of Orel Hershiser in his prime, he takes the mound and commands the field like very few pitchers of this generation. Coming off one of his worst starts to a season in 2011, he got strong down the stretch and was rewarded with a two year extension to his contract during the month of September (surprisingly enough, he was able to negotiate and sign that deal without any distraction to the team). This season was a down year for the Cardinal ace, but he prepares to show the rest of the league why with 11 wins he is still considered this team’s ace. He pitched on three days rest for the first time in his career in his only start in this series and it was not pretty. He comes back for game five with full rest.

With the win in game four, the Cardinals continue their prowess of winning games on “get away” days, or days that the team will board a flight after the game. Game five will give them the opportunity to continue on the new tradition of “Happy Flight” should they be able to solve Roy Halladay and put themselves back into the League Championship Series.

I wonder if there are squirrels in Citizen’s Bank Ballpark?

Bill Ivie is the editor here at I-70 Baseball as well as the Assignment Editor for BaseballDigest.com.
He is the host of I-70 Radio, hosted every week on BlogTalkRadio.com.
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