Joe Buck

This marked the first time since 1960 that a member of the Buck family was not part of the team's broadcasting crew.

Joseph Francis Buck (born April 25, 1969) is an American sportscaster for ESPN.

He began his broadcasting career in 1989 while he was an undergraduate at Indiana University Bloomington.

Buck called play-by-play for the then-Louisville Redbirds, a minor league affiliate of the Cardinals, and was a reporter for ESPN's coverage of the Triple-A All-Star Game in 1989.

It was a rarity for a nationally televised regular season game not to be aired on cable since the end of the Monday/Thursday Night Baseball era on ABC in 1989.

In 1991, he did reporting for St Louis' CBS affiliate KMOV.

Also, in 1991 Buck began broadcasting for the Cardinals on local television and KMOX Radio, filling in while his father was working on CBS telecasts.

McDonough had replaced Jack Buck as CBS's lead baseball play-by-play man after he was fired in late 1991.

This was the same phrase with which Jack Buck had famously called Kirby Puckett's home run off Braves pitcher Charlie Leibrandt, which ended Game 6 of the 1991 World Series.

In the 1992–93 season, he was the play-by-play voice for University of Missouri basketball broadcasts.

Buck continued to call Cardinals games after being hired by Fox Sports, initially with his father on KMOX and later on FSN Midwest television.

That year, he became the youngest man to do a national broadcast (for all nine innings and games, as a network employee as opposed to simply being a representative of one of the participating teams) for a World Series, surpassing Sean McDonough, who called the 1992 World Series for CBS at the age of 30.

The son of sportscaster Jack Buck, he worked for Fox Sports from its 1994 inception through 2022, including roles as lead play-by-play announcer for the network's National Football League and Major League Baseball coverage.

In 1994, Buck was hired by Fox, and at the age of 25 became the youngest man ever to announce a regular slate of National Football League (NFL) games on network television.

He served as a television play-by-play announcer for the World Series over a 25-year span from 1996 to 2021 (with the exceptions of 1997 and 1999, in which Bob Costas called those particular World Series for NBC).

In 2022, Buck moved to ESPN from Fox Sports.

He is the lead play-by-play announcer for Monday Night Football.

Buck was born in St. Petersburg, Florida (where the St. Louis Cardinals, for whom his father broadcast, then conducted their spring training) and raised in the St. Louis area, where he attended St. Louis Country Day School.

In 1996, he was named Fox's lead play-by-play voice for Major League Baseball, teaming with Tim McCarver, who had previously worked with his father on CBS.

Besides working with Tim McCarver for 18 seasons (1996–2013), Buck also worked with former MLB player and current MLB Network/Fox Sports analyst Harold Reynolds and baseball insider Tom Verducci for 2 seasons (2014–2015).

From 1996 to 2021, Buck called 23 World Series and 21 All-Star Games for Fox, the most of any play-by-play announcer on network television.

As the lead play-by-play announcer for MLB on Fox, Buck called games between the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox that were broadcast on Fox and FS1.

On September 8, 1998, Buck called Mark McGwire's 62nd home run that broke Roger Maris' single-season record.

The game was nationally televised live in prime time on Fox.

During Fox's broadcast of the 2002 World Series, Buck paid implicit tribute to his father, who had died a few months earlier (he had read the eulogy at his father's funeral) by calling the final out of Game 6 (which tied the series at 3–3, and thus ensured there would be a Game 7 broadcast the next night) with the phrase, "We'll see you tomorrow night."

He called many notable moments in the rivalry, including Aaron Boone's walk off home run in Game 7 of the 2003 ALCS, saying "The Boston Red Sox...were five outs away in the eighth inning, leading by three, as Boone hits it to deep left. That might send the Yankees to the World Series. Boone the hero of Game 7!"

Soon after arriving at Fox, Buck became the play-by-play man on the network's #4 NFL broadcast team, with Tim Green as his color commentator.

Since then, Joe has continued to use this phrase at appropriate times, including Game 4 of the 2004 ALCS, in which the Boston Red Sox famously rallied off New York Yankees closer Mariano Rivera in the 9th inning to avoid elimination.

As his network duties increased, however, his local workload shrank, and before the 2008 season, it was announced that he would no longer be calling Cardinals telecasts for FSN Midwest.

He also used the phrase at the end of Game 6 of the 2011 World Series when the Cardinals' David Freese hit a walk-off home run in the 11th inning against the Rangers to send the series to a seventh game (it was 20 years and a day since Kirby Puckett's home run).

The similarity of both the call and the game situation resulted in mentions on national news broadcasts.

Another notable Red Sox game in the ALCS was in, Game 2 against the Detroit Tigers at Fenway Park.

The Red Sox were trailing 5–1 in the bottom of the eighth inning, with the bases loaded with David Ortiz at-bat.

Ortiz hit a game-tying grand slam off Tigers' closer Joaquín Benoit.

His call: "Hard hit into right, back at the wall," and then he calls, "TIE GAME!"

as the ball flies over Torii Hunter, who flipped over the outfield wall.

Later with Fox, Buck called a limited selection of regular-season games each year (typically featuring big-market teams such as the Yankees, Red Sox, Dodgers, and/or Cubs), as well as the All-Star Game, one of the League Championship Series, and the World Series.

When David Ortiz's walk-off home run finally won it for the Red Sox in the 12th inning, Buck uttered, "We'll see you later tonight," alluding to the fact that the game had extended into the early morning.

About a month or two after the 2015 World Series, Reynolds and Verducci were demoted to the #2 team and John Smoltz moved up from the #2 team (with Matt Vasgersian) to take Reynolds and Verducci's places.

From 2016 to 2021, he was paired with color analyst John Smoltz and field reporter Ken Rosenthal.