Famous San Francisco Giants broadcasting duo has called their last game. Mike Krukow is stepping down after 37 years in the broadcast booth.
As we head into the baseball postseason, with an interesting slate of wild card series set to begin on Tuesday, it’s a good time to take a minute to say goodbye to one of baseball’s most iconic announcing teams.
Mike Krukow and Duane Kuiper called Giants games together for 36 seasons. Kruk went public with his inclusion body myositis diagnosis in 2014, stopped traveling east of Denver by 2017, and eventually came off the road entirely — calling road games from a studio in San Francisco via “splitcast” while Kuip worked on-site.
Sure, they were homers — famously getting emotional during a Giants losing skid last year was just one of many examples of that — but in Bay Area sports they were without a doubt an institution.
He was more than happy to toe the partisan San Francisco line when necessary, that included Covid, and lambasting players who refuted Pride Night.
They were fiercely defended by Giants fans, and when I would deride a friend about the commentary duo, he would get borderline apoplectic.
Whenever an established announcer leaves the game, we irreplaceably lose a piece of the era of baseball they were a part of.
I still mourn the loss of Boston Red Sox color man Jerry Remy, and the retirement of forty-two-year radio veteran Joe Castiglione. Neither the NESN nor the WEEI broadcasts are the same since their departure.
The Vin Scullys and the Bob Ueckers of the world come around once in a lifetime, there will be others to follow, and we may grow to love them as well, but they’ll always have the shadow of those that came before them to live up to.