Giants fans have had the same soundtrack for basically their whole lives, and that's about to change. Mike Krukow announced he's retiring from the broadcast booth after this season, ending 36 years alongside Duane Kuiper as one of the most beloved duos in baseball.
San Francisco Giants announcer Mike Krukow will retire after this season, ending a 36-year career in which he and he best friend and former teammate, Duane Kuiper, formed one of the best broadcasting duos in baseball. For generations of Giants fans, Kruk is their voice of summer.
Krukow and Kuiper's bond didn't start in a broadcast booth at all. Krukow came to San Francisco in a trade from the Phillies before the 1983 season, and he and Kuiper hit it off as teammates, entertaining the dugout with their banter before anyone ever handed them a mic. That informal chemistry eventually moved upstairs to the broadcast booth in the early 1990s, and from there it became appointment listening for generations of Giants fans.
Over those 36 years, Kruk and Kuip called it all: Barry Bonds' record-breaking home run, Matt Cain's perfect game, and 3 World Series titles in 2010, 2012 and 2014. For a lot of Giants fans, their voices are just as tied to those championship runs as the players who won them.
The retirement isn't really about wanting to walk away from the game. Krukow, 74, has been dealing with inclusion-body myositis, a degenerative muscle disease he first disclosed back in 2014, for 20 years now. It's forced him into a motorized wheelchair and made travel a real challenge, to the point where the Giants and NBC Sports Bay Area set him up to call some road games remotely from San Francisco just so he could keep going.
That he's stuck it out this long says everything about how much the job, and the partnership with Kuiper, means to him. The team is planning to celebrate Krukow at Oracle Park on Sept. 27 as the season wraps, and it's shaping up to be one of those tributes that has absolutely nothing to do with the standings and everything to do with what a voice can mean to a fanbase for 3-plus decades.