There Is One Phillies Contract Worse Than Ryan Howard’s

The world has searched high and low, overturned every rock imaginable, checked in every closet, and finally, a Phillies contract worse than Ryan Howard’s has finally been located.

Phillies television play-by-play man Tom McCarthy was re-signed to a five year contract in the offseason, making him the lead broadcast voice of the Phils through the year 2017.

Coincidentally, both he and Howard become free agents after the 2017 season.

You just can’t make this stuff up, folks.

McCarthy, the man who refuses to allow a single second of a Phillies game go by without yelling at the viewers or awkwardly laughing at some incomprehensible sentence that came out of Sarge’s mouth, will be screaming “How about that!” at us for the foreseeable future.

The contract status of McCarthy was not well publicized until recently, when the good folks at Philsbaseball.com did an interview with ‘ol Tom and asked him about it.

"I never even realized my contract had been public notice or that people had wondered. I even got an email from someone asking if I was coming back this year and I said, “Yeah, why?” They said they heard my contract was up and I said, “It was?” But yes, I signed a new contract last winter for a five year extension. It starts this year, so I’m here for at least another five years after this."

Another… five… years… after… this.

Listen, I’m sure there are people who like Tom McCarthy’s work, and I’m sure he’s a super nice guy. I don’t like ripping announcers and he obviously is a talented guy, given that he also calls NFL football games for Dial Global radio and does other voiceover work as well.

But for those who don’t like being yelled at for three or four hours at a time by a pukey announcer voice asking mind-numbingly basic questions to Wheels and Sarge, the McCarthy show can get old pretty darn quick.

Listen, no one is comparing McCarthy to the late Harry Kalas. No one should do that, it wouldn’t be fair.

But it is fair to compare McCarthy, as well as the entire TV broadcast crew, to the radio crew of Scott Franzke and Larry Andersen, who do a far superior job in presenting the game to the listener/viewer.

There’s a reason everyone wants to hear Franzke’s call of big Phillies moments and not McCarthy’s. Franzke delivers the game with the appropriate amount of enthusiasm when something big happens, but also lets the game speak for itself when necessary, not feeling the need to fill every single millisecond of silence with mindless babble about nothing.

McCarthy, who works with the moving pictures, should realize he can allow what’s happening on the screen to do some of the talking for him and realize he’s not getting paid by the world.

There was also this incident last year in which McCarthy (and his broadcast partner for the day, Mitch Williams) took a lot of heat from Giants fans for their biased broadcast of a nationally televised Giants-Phillies game last year. It’s pretty blatant.

Uh, so there’s that.

The good news is, 2017 is just around the corner.

Maybe McCarthy will improve over the next five years and make watching Phils telecasts a little more enjoyable. Maybe he’ll realize that sometimes, less is more. Maybe he’ll realize he doesn’t have to treat every viewer like they’re watching their first-ever baseball game.

Maybe Tom McCarthy will get better.

And, if he doesn’t, a five-year ear-bleed isn’t so bad, right?