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.