Will Glen Kuiper be returning to Major League Baseball as part of the San Francisco Giants broadcast team in 2024? It appears not, at least for now.
On Tuesday, both the Giants and Kuiper made statements saying that he will not be part of the broadcast team for the upcoming 2024 season.
“Glen is not part of either the 2024 Giants broadcast team or the Spring Training broadcast team,” Giants vice president of media operations Matt Chisholm said in an email, per Alex Simon, SF Gate. “Yesterday, both he and Duane stopped by the booth and went on the audio cast.”
Kuiper issued a similar statement.
“I am not part of the Giants broadcast team in 2024 for the regular season or Spring Training,” he said.
Chisholm (per Simon) later said that “Glen, Duane, F.P. [Santangelo] and others will be guests with Joe Ritzo on our audiocasts during Spring Training.”
Kuiper was a guest during Monday’s spring training game between the Giants and Los Angeles Angels, talking with Joe Ritzo as well as his brother (and longtime Giants announcer), Duane Kuiper. On Tuesday, Kuiper (Glen) was on Papa and Lund, a show on KNBR, the Giants’ flagship radio station.
Lund (per Simson) said that Kuiper would be “doing a lot of the Giants games with our friend Joe Ritzo on the stream all spring.”
Kuiper also made comments indicating that he’d be working with the team, saying that it was “a wonderful, wonderful feeling to be doing some stuff for the Giants and for KNBR.”
“It feels sort of like going back home, I guess a little bit,” Kuiper said. “And it helps when your brothers are there, but you know so many people over here. I’ve always been a Giants fan, I’ve always watched them and was excited they won the three World Series, and I hope there’s more. It’s good to be here and it kind of feels like it’s good to be back.”
All of that led to the speculation that he may be part of the broadcast team in 2024.
Kuiper was the longtime television play-by-play man for the Oakland Athletics. He was fired early in the 2023 season when, before a game against the Kansas City Royals, Kuiper intended to say that he went to the Negro League Museum earlier in the day, but used the n-word instead.
Kuiper has natural ties to the Giants. Beyond being rooted in the Bay Area with the A’s, his two brothers both work on the broadcast team. The aforementioned Duane is an announcer while Jeff, is the producer for the Giants games on NBC Bay Area.
The Giants broadcast crew was voted as MLB’s best announce crew in Awful Announcing’s 2023 rankings, winning the award for the fourth time in six tries and has never finished outside of the top two. So, Adding Kuiper would be a controversial move for a broadcast team that doesn’t exactly need help.
[SFGate.com, Photo Credit: NBC Sports California]
