09.27.07
Pearlman : Ron Darling Wasn’t Always This Smooth
Page 2′s Jeff Pearlman lavishes considerable praise on SNY’s Gary Cohen, Ron Darling (above) and Keith Hernandez, calling the trio, “major league baseball’s top three-man broadcast team.” Though not without reminding us that Darling’s teeth-cutting as a TV analyst was rough going.
Just watch the old tapes. Throughout the 2005 season, Darling worked for Washington’s Mid-Atlantic Sports Network, for which he called 150 Nationals games with the wooden indecisiveness of Jon-Erik Hexum portraying Phineas Bogg.
Hexum, for those under the age of 50, was the model-slash-actor who perished after mistakenly shooting himself in the head during the filming of CBS’ “Cover Up” (in which he played, appropriately enough, a model-slash-secret agent).
Darling was so bad, he made Steve Blass seem like Vin Scully, Ernie Harwell, and Jack Brickhouse all rolled into one person.