New Baseball Hall of Fame honoree Joe Buck will call another Major League Baseball game this coming season.
Appearing on the “SI Media” podcast, Buck told host Jimmy Traina that the current plan is for him to work ESPN’s first Major League Baseball game next season, Mets-Dodgers on April 15. It would be his second MLB assignment since joining ESPN in 2022, after he called this past season’s Brewers-Yankees Opening Day game.
The assignment is not exactly set in stone, with Buck saying that he and ESPN are “trying to piece it all together.”
When asked whether he might work additional MLB games during the season, Buck told Traina that it is easier for him to work games at the start of the season rather than later in the year, which would require him to keep up with the day-to-day storylines. “I’m not prepared to do that without putting myself in solitary confinement for a month and trying to catch up with everything that’s gone on.”
“As it stands now,” Buck said, the Mets-Dodgers game is his only assignment. That is the first of 30 exclusive, mostly weeknight MLB windows on ESPN next season as part of its new MLB rights deal.
Buck was the lead Major League Baseball voice for Fox Sports for the first 26 seasons the network carried the league (1996-2021), covering 24 World Series in total and 22-straight starting in 2000. The only person who has ever broadcast as many World Series on television is his former partner Tim McCarver.
Like his famed father Jack, the longtime Cardinals voice who called World Series on television and radio, Buck also worked Cardinals games locally in St. Louis.
But once Buck became the lead NFL voice on FOX in 2002, it became increasingly obvious that football was his primary commitment. And when his longtime NFL partner and close friend Troy Aikman left Fox for ESPN in 2022, Buck joined him — ending his time on baseball.
Since, Buck has dipped a toe into baseball every now and again. In addition to his Opening Day assignment for ESPN last season, he worked a 2024 Cardinals-Cubs game on local television alongside Cardinals voice Chip Caray, also the son (and grandson) of famed baseball voices.
The new assignment will his first since being named the recipient of the Baseball Hall of Fame Ford C. Frick Award. “It’s a huge honor, something I did not expect I would get anytime soon, and I’m just beyond, beyond humbled,” he told Sports Media Watch last week.
