There Was Much Rejoicing

by A.J. Coltrane

From ESPN:

Jon Miller and Joe Morgan’s 21-year run on ESPN’s “Sunday Night Baseball” is over.

Morgan’s contract is expiring and he will not be renewed. Miller’s contract is also expiring though he may remain at ESPN working the “Sunday Night Baseball” series and postseason baseball for ESPN Radio…

I liked Miller, and fortunately he’s landing on his feet.  Joe Morgan, however, was a champion of things like “clutch” and “RBI man” and “productive outs”  — basically the antithesis of the Bill James school of thinking.

Now I can watch Sunday Night Baseball without muting the TV.

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Late edit:  Joe Posnanski has an excellent piece on the subject:  The Two Joe Morgans, exerpt below:

…Joe would go to bizarre lengths to avoid saying that teams with high on-base percentages often score a lot of runs and that pitchers who command their pitches and don’t give up home runs often pitch well. With Joe, after a while, it always came down to intangibles. Which is OK, I guess. But the tangible can matter, too. Also, he hated Moneyball and never seemed to figure out that it wasn’t Billy Beane who wrote the darned thing…