An artist at work ...

Everyone loves to see an artist doing his thing on the canvas of his choice.

Like a Bird picking off a vagrant pass and throwing a blind pass to a teammate cutting for the hoop.

Or a Tiger snaking a golf ball into a little hole 45-feet in the gloaming.

Or a Dominican Republic shortstop going into the hole, sliding foot-first and spearing, rising, and throwing the ball in one motion!

Artistry can also come right off the top of one's head. The way Joe Morgan analyzes baseball on TV. You can almost hear his brain going click, click, click as it dissects the complicated melange of blots on the huge green canvas in front of him.

We exaggerate? No. Morgan does it all the time. He sees everything and then delivers it to his audience in a calm, even voice with no embellishments.

He tells it just the way it is. Now put him in there with the best play-by-play announcer in baseball, Jon Miller, and you have heaven.

Allow us to illustrate. National League Divisional Series, Chicago vs Atlanta, bottom of the seventh inning, men on first and third, one out, Cubs trailing by two runs. The batter sends a fly ball out to medium centerfield and the front runner tags up and takes off as the ball is caught and then fired to the plate.

Meanwhile, the back runner also tags up and lights out for the next base (second) as the ball is caught.

The relay man cuts off the throw and fires to second to nail the back runner (by a mile).

Announcer: "He's an easy out, but he was trying to get into scoring position. It was risky, but maybe worth the try."

Morgan: "It was not a good play."

Announcer: "How do you look at it?"

Morgan: "It was not smart because he never had a chance. The defense knew they had no chance of getting the front runner and were focusing on the back runner. He was a sitting duck.

"Second, the runner wasn't thinking ahead--making sure the team's best hitter (Sammy Sosa) would get a chance to hit in the ninth inning. The out at second now puts that at risk. It could cost them. (It did.)

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

"Third, one more thing: Why not make the relief pitcher work a little more, by pitching to an extra hitter? You never know. It might take a little off his fastball.

"Finally, that extra hit is going to mess up the bottom of the batting order for Chicago."

The insightful analysis awed us. The calm, even voice ticking off all the possibilities as if they had been under study and memorized. That is Joe Morgan.

No jokes. No small talk. No bing, bang, boom. Just the facts and all the options.

We have it on good authority that a bunch of guys Up There named John McGraw, Joe McCarthy, Paul Richards, Connie Mack, and Leo Durocher (the think tank Up There) have voted Joe Morgan as their Heavenly Announcer.