Tim McCarver, a Hall of Famer baseball broadcaster and Major League catcher, died Thursday at 81.

The All-Star, who won two World Series titles with the St. Louis Cardinals, died of heart failure, according to MLB.com.

The death was announced by baseball’s Hall of Fame, which said he died Thursday morning in Memphis, Tennessee, where he was with his family.

McCarver, who was a two-time All-Star, appeared in major league games during four different decades.

He caught the likes of Bob Gibson in the 1960s and Steve Carlton in the ‘60s and a Philadelphia Phillies teammate in the 1970s.

McCarver, who retired from the game in 1980, made the transition to television after retiring and had an 18-year partnership on Fox with play-by-play man Joe Buck.

“I think there is a natural bridge from being a catcher to talking about the view of the game and the view of the other players,” McCarver told the Hall in 2012, the year he and Buck were given the Ford C. Frick Award for excellence in broadcasting, per The Associated Press. “It is translating that for the viewers. One of the hard things about television is staying contemporary and keeping it simple for the viewers.”

During a 21-year career, when he also played briefly for the Montreal Expos and Boston Red Sox, McCarver batted .271 overall and only twice struck out more than 40 times in a single season. In the postseason, he averaged .273 and had his best outing in the 1964 series, when the Cards defeated the New York Yankees in seven games. McCarver finished 11-for-23, with five walks, and his 3-run homer at Yankee Stadium in the 10th inning of Game 5 gave his team a 5-2 victory.

Younger baseball fans first knew him from his work in the broadcast booth, whether local games for the New York Mets and New York Yankees, as Jack Buck’s partner on CBS or with son Joe Buck for Fox from 1996-2013. McCarver won six Emmys and became enough of a brand name to be a punchline on “Family Guy”; write a handful of books, make cameos in “Naked Gun,” “Love Hurts” and other movies and even record an album, “Tim McCarver Sings Songs from the Great American Songbook.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.