Bob Costas says Frick Award voters want Mike Krukow and Duane Kuiper inducted together, but Hall won’t allow it

Bob Costas came to the Giants’ booth on Wednesday to say goodbye to Mike Krukow, and he used the occasion to deliver a closing argument to the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Costas spent two innings on the Giants’ broadcast of Wednesday’s matchup with the Twins to salute Krukow in his final week behind the mic, and he used the visit to take the Baseball Hall of Fame to task for refusing to let Krukow and Duane Kuiper appear on the Ford C. Frick Award ballot as a single entry, per SFGate’s Gabe Fernandez and Alex Simon.

Costas had already pleaded the pair’s case on Bay Area radio, according to the San Francisco-based outlet, but Wednesday’s appearance carried it straight into the living rooms of the fans who have tuned in to “Kruk and Kuip” for nearly four decades, and it arrived during perhaps the most emotionally charged week the Giants’ broadcast has ever weathered.

Krukow announced on Aug. 6 that this season would be his last, bringing down the curtain on a Giants booth career that began in 1990 and turned full-time in 1994. The seven-time Emmy winner first crossed paths with Kuiper as a teammate on the 1983 Giants, and the friendship they forged in that clubhouse blossomed into one of the most cherished partnerships in local broadcasting, one that has topped Awful Announcing’s MLB local broadcast rankings four times.

But Krukow, 74, has spent years battling inclusion-body myositis, a degenerative muscle disease he disclosed publicly in 2014, and Kuiper later revealed that the daily journey to the ballpark had grown not only exhausting but dangerous for his partner. Krukow called breaking the news to Kuiper the most painful moment of his life.

“It’s the worst thing I’ve ever had to do is walk away from him. In my life,” Krukow told KNBR in August.

Kuiper, 76, made clear he has no plans to retire alongside his partner and intends to keep calling Giants games next season. But on Sunday, he revealed he had been diagnosed with throat cancer and had begun treatment at Stanford Medicine, noting it was unrelated to the illness that forced him to undergo chemotherapy in 2021. He said he’d miss Monday’s and Wednesday’s broadcasts but planned to return to celebrate Krukow’s final games.

Now, with Kuiper away for treatment on Wednesday, Dave Flemming was handling play-by-play when Costas arrived.

Midway through the third inning, Costas made his case, insisting the Hall has been too rigid about its process and predicting the duo would eventually be enshrined as a joint entry, per SFGate. Costas, who won the Frick Award in 2018, has a vote himself, as do fellow winners such as Al Michaels, Jon Miller and Joe Buck, with several broadcasting historians rounding out the committee. According to Costas, those voters are in near-total agreement.

“The group, almost unanimously, wants that to happen,” Costas said. “But the Hall, for some reason, hasn’t allowed it to happen yet.”

It’s unclear whether the Hall will reconsider its stance, and the voting calendar guarantees the debate won’t be settled anytime soon. The Frick Award rotates its pool of eligible broadcasters from year to year, and the next cycle is reserved for those whose careers ended before the Wild Card era began in 1994. That leaves 2028 as the earliest Krukow and Kuiper could be elected, together or apart, by which point Krukow will have been out of the booth for more than a year.