There’s never a dull moment when John Kruk is calling a Philadelphia Phillies game.
Between his 10-year MLB career and subsequent near 30-year career in sports media, Kruk has no shortage of stories to keep fans entertained and engaged.
Tuesday night’s game against the Milwaukee Brewers was no different, as Kruk shared a tale of being woken up by a giraffe one morning at Disney’s Animal Kingdom Lodge.
Here’s John Kruk telling a story about waking up one morning at Animal Kingdom and seeing a giraffe at the window (h/t @treblaw) pic.twitter.com/aoxCshz52t
— CJ Fogler account may or may not be notable (@cjzero) June 5, 2024
The incident took place while Kruk was still with ESPN, making it a brand-new story for Phillies play-by-play man Tom McCarthy.
“We used to do stuff with ESPN down at Disney and they’d put us up at the Animal Kingdom Lodge. So the first day, I wake up, open up the shade, there’s a dang giraffe looking through my window,” Kruk explained as McCarthy wondered if Kruk gave the giraffe some eucalyptus leaves to eat.
“I didn’t feed it, we don’t have those in West Virginia so I didn’t know what to feed it. It scared the heck out of me. Those things have big heads,” Kruk added.
McCarthy followed up with the question on everyone’s mind: Did Kruk take a picture of the giraffe outside his hotel room?
Unfortunately, he did not. “I didn’t know how to do it at that time, Tom. But, if you wake up in the morning in a fog and you look out and there’s a giraffe looking at you, it’s like ‘wait a second.'”
The Phillies came away with a 2-1 win and will look for the sweep of Milwaukee on Wednesday before heading to London for a weekend series against the New York Mets, where Kruk is unlikely to see another giraffe.
