Given a Red Sox victory, tonight’s Game Six of the World Series will be the last for Tim McCarver, the veteran Fox commentator; if they lose to the Cardinals, he’ll be back tomorrow for the finale. Just turned seventy-two, he’s retiring in full form and will be grievously missed. He’s not tottering away—he’s passionately into winemaking, for one thing—and he has looked splendid in the current closeups, next to his partner Joe Buck, with his hair at last permitted to show its natural and distinguished gray-white. McCarver and Buck are, for me and countless others, the primo pair in sports broadcasting, with their only possible rivals being Buck and Troy Aikman covering the N.F.L. for Fox on Sundays. With McCarver there, the pairing often feels more like a trio, because Tim’s intense, intelligent, deeply informed, excitable, verbose, folksy, intellectual, opinionated, and morally fervid participation in the events on the field inexorably takes hold of you, the listener, and pushes you into the adjoining seat, where you can almost feel McCarver’s jostling elbow and feel on your arm and elbow the heat of his eagerness for what’s coming next. True, there may come little stretches of time when you really want to have Tim shaddup and sit back, but then, almost with the next pitch, comes the paired sneaky wish to catch him out in something overstretched or teen-age sentient—this week, with his “As leaves change in New England, so does the score”—and later, of course, just up the line, there’s the awaited reverse: something defining and delighting, as when Boston reliever Craig Breslow’s throw to third base went wild into left field, in Game Two, allowing two Cardinal base runners to sprint home. “We talk from April to October,” Tim said, “about how many games are lost by pitchers’ throws to bases. A lot.”

I go back a good distance with Tim, starting with his twenty-one years as a catcher with five different teams, first with the Cardinals, and I can still see him, young and flushed and awestruck, after the end of the first game of the 1968 World Series, where he’d caught Bob Gibson’s record-breaking seventeen strikeouts against the Tigers. He turned broadcaster in 1981, and worked everywhere—including the Mets and the Yankees and the Phillies, and over all four networks—before pairing up with Joe Buck, in 1996. He’s alienated some managers and players along the way, thanks to his congenital truth-telling, and has taken heat for it, as well as praise. Here, as elsewhere, he has been the exception, the strong flavor, in a profession too often marked by blandness and cliché. You pick this up right away in his tone, which is more interested than sports-lit.

I wrote a Profile of McCarver here in 1999, and we became friends in the process, which forecloses me as a neutral observer, but his accomplishments are clear. None of his great calls, presaging something startling about to transpire on the base paths or around the outer pastures of the game in progress, have been more hair-raising or remain more widely recalled and cited than what he said in the final moments of the seventh game of the 2001 World Series. It’s the Call of Calls. Mariano Rivera, working against the Arizona Diamondbacks, with the bases loaded and the infielders drawn in, needed just two outs to seal another Yankees World Championship, and McCarver, watching the left–hand-batting Luis Gonzalez about to step into the batter’s box, said, “Rivera throws inside to left-handers, and left-handers get a lot of broken-bat hits to left, into the shallow parts of the outfield.”

Rivera pitched inside, Gonzalez swung, breaking his bat, and knocked the ball past the drawn-in Yankee infielders and into short left field, for the game and the Series and the champagne.

All we need tonight to celebrate Tim is what baseball provides so often: something different but exactly the same—another great baseball moment, with the right man on hand to bring it to us with clarity and understanding, perhaps even before it happens.

Photograph by Heather Ainsworth/AP.