Mike Krukow’s final season in the Giants booth won’t double as Duane Kuiper’s.
According to The Athletic, Kuiper, 76, said he has no intention to go out in tandem, even as Krukow steps away from broadcasting at season’s end. Kuiper has weathered his own health challenges in recent years, but he wants to keep calling Giants games next season regardless of who’s sitting next to him.
“It’ll be different,” Kuiper told Andrew Baggarly. “I’ve done games on the road without Mike, but we’ve had this relationship for so long now. We could without a doubt win ‘The Newlywed Game.'”
“You know when something is really good, and you’re happy and having fun, and you don’t want it to end? Like a good meal or a vacation or a movie? Well, that’s what it was for us. We just never wanted it to end. And when you’re together for 36 years, every year you know at some point it’s going to end. You want to prepare for it, and you … you just can’t.”
The specter of Krukow’s health has hung over the booth for the better part of 12 years. He revealed his diagnosis with inclusion body myositis, a degenerative muscle disease, back in 2014, and has spent the seasons since steadily scaling back his workload as the condition progressed.
Kuiper isn’t new to navigating a Giants season without his longtime partner sitting beside him. He filled in on the call during stretches of Krukow’s declining availability in past years, and has managed his own extended absences, including a lengthy stint away from the booth in 2021 while undergoing chemotherapy for an undisclosed condition.
Both men, viewed together as the standard-bearers of regional baseball broadcasting, have found their way back to the booth before. But this time, only one of them plans to.
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.