By now, every baseball fan in the world has heard the news.  Joe Morgan will no longer be ruining Sunday Night Baseball on ESPN.  They’re going to let Bobby Valentine do that instead.

While it is truly great news that ESPN has finally, after 21 inexplicable years, banished Morgan from the airwaves, the news of his non-renewal has to be tempered by the thought of where Joe will end up.

Sunday night games are easy to ignore.  Unless the Cubs were playing in it, or it was opening night, there wasn’t really much reason to tune in.  But what if Joe ends up doing playoff games at TBS?  Not that we have to worry about the Cubs playing in any for the forseeable future, but still.  Or, perish this thought:

What if Joe ends up at Fox with the already insufferable duo of Joe Buck and Tim McCarver?

What if the soundtrack to the next five or ten World Series is that of Tim and Joe droning on about some outdated baseball strategy, regaling us with tales of things that didn’t actually happen while they were playing, and the other Joe cracking lame jokes and wishing out loud that he were holding hands with Troy Aikman at a football game?

A little secret that isn’t so secret.  Network executives are not necessarily sports fans.  They just pay the rights fees and drool when (if, these days) the ad revenue more than makes up for it.  They pay little attention to who is announcing their games.  That’s how Tim McCarver can call 30 straight World Series and be terrible at it.  Tim’s genial. He’s nice to the suits.  He sings Tony Bennett covers.  He just keeps getting jobs.

And it’s worrisome that Joe will do the same thing.  Because on the surface he seems like he should be really good at his job.

He was a Hall of Fame player, largely acknowledged to have been a very smart player.  Bill James did some ludicrous study a few years back and said that Joe was the “smartest player, baseball wise” in history.  He’s fairly articulate.  He owns several suits.  Why wouldn’t  you let that guy commentate on your baseball games?

Because we know from two decades of listening to him that in truth, Joe doesn’t want to know anything he doesn’t already know.  There is no intellectual curiosity there.  If stealing bases and bunting was good enough for the Reds of the ’70s then by God, it’s good enough for every team, from here to eternity.

We know that Joe never let facts get in the way of his stories.  He told his famous tale of how when he was playing “everybody” called the Wrigley field outfield basket “Banks Boulevard” because that’s where Ernie hit “all of his home runs.”  This despite the fact that the basket wasn’t installed until Ernie’s final season, one in which he hit seven homers at Wrigley Field.

He made up stories about games he played in, and when people of the Interwebs would call him on it, he didn’t care.  He didn’t use the Interwebs, so NOBODY used the Interwebs.

I worked with Joe for a year way back in 1996 at a long-since-defunct sports site in Seattke.  I didn’t live there, and neither did Joe.  It was the ’90s, you didn’t have to live where you worked.  Soon we’d all have flying cars and eat our meals in pill form!  What I remember about Joe is that he didn’t actually write the columns he was paid to “write.”

Bill Russell (the Hall of Fame Celtic, not the shorter, whiter, Dodgers shortstop) used to write out his columns in long hand and dictate to somebody on the desk.

Joe used to have a short phone conversation where he’d consider a few topics and then have somebody else write it for him.

Bill was a pretty awesome guy.  Joe was pretty much not.

It came as no surprise to me that when the Michael Lewis “Moneyball” book came out that Joe would be confused by it.  But he wasn’t confused by anything that was in it.  He refused to read it.  He did not refuse to bash it.  He also refused to believe that Billy Beane didn’t write it.  That is Joe in a nutshell.  Close minded and for some unknown reason, bitter.

Cubs fans have long held a grudge against Morgan.  Joe didn’t like it when people would compare Ryne Sandberg to him.  And why would people compare Joe to Ryne?  Just because in the history of baseball, the players most statistically comparable to Joe are 1. Lou Whitaker, 2. Roberto Alomar and 3. Ryne Sandberg?  Crazy talk, I know.

It was never more obvious than the day Sandberg was inducted into the Hall of Fame.  Joe has been a fixture at the event since his induction in 1990, and why not?  It’s a pretty awesome event every year.  We know Joe always went to the ceremony because it was the one Sunday night during the season when we didn’t have to listen to him ruin the game.

But the year Sandberg went in, Joe didn’t go.  He didn’t work that night, but he also didn’t go to the ceremony.  Class.

Objectively, Morgan was a better player than Sandberg.  But not by so much that he should be insulted by the comparison.

Baseball fans in general are worse off when Joe does games because, quite simply, Joe doesn’t prepare.  One year we started noting how every time they showed Joe in the booth during games that he was sitting in front of a blank desk.  He never had any papers on it.  No notes, nothing.  Just him and his mic.  Later in that season at a game at Wrigley they showed Joe and there he was with a scorebook in front of him!  And it was completely blank.  You can’t make this stuff up.

So the good news is that Joe is gone from Sunday nights.  But we can’t truly declare victory until the other shoe drops.  Because I fear, that he’s going to land somewhere that will actually make our baseball watching experience worse than it already was.

Damn you Joe Morgan.  Damn you to Hell.