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Joe Buck Keeps Quiet

The Yankees are in town, which means all manner of madness, not the least of which was Fox showing Friday's game at Fenway nationally. The network coverage bumped Jerry Remy for the night in favor of Joe Buck and Tim McCarver, who covered the ALCS last fall and were eager to pick up where they had left off, trumpeting both the history of the rivalry and the mystique of the knuckleball. The production was not a golden moment for Fox Sports. Despite a cool new camera trick that tracked the frame-by-frame movement of particular pitches, things took a turn for the worse when the mechanics of the knuckler were explained by an animated monstrosity named "Scooter", who appeared to be the Fox Sports answer to the Microsoft Office Assistant.

However, Buck and McCarver do one thing that I like a lot, which is that they occasionally won't say anything at all. I first noticed them doing this last fall, when the booth would fall eerily silent after a big play, and the roar of the crowd was all you heard. With a strong crowd to back them up it's a neat trick, and one that flies so directly in the face of generations of shrieking, hollering sports announcing that I wondered if the producer had merely shut off their mikes.

Friday night, with two out in the 8th inning, Manny Ramirez botched a routine fly ball and Scott Williamson walked the bases loaded. As a mild panic took hold on the city, Alan Embree entered the game and punched out Hideki Matsui on (if memory serves me) three pitches. The crowd went nuts. Buck and McCarver were silent. It was a nice moment.