Mike Krukow, One Of Baseball’s Greatest Hangs, Is Ready To Go

The San Francisco Giants don’t get to announce anything fun these days, but it would be too cheap even by the prevailing clearance-sale standards to lump the latest bit of ill news relating to the team in with all the others, so we won’t. Mike Krukow, the former Giants pitcher, longtime radio analyst, and general Pez dispenser of joy at the ballpark, is retiring at the end of the year. While that unquestionably sucks, it sucks in the best kind of way, because Krukow did the best job he could and for as long as he could do it. Because his best was exemplary, he goes out honestly and without any regret that he could have somehow been better; it sucks for everyone else, but not for him.

Krukow is 74, and has been working for the past 15-plus years with the degenerative muscle condition inclusion-body myositis, which has neutralized his ability to get from place to place. He has done all the games from his home in Reno over the past several years to minimize as best as can be managed the strain of the disease, but his ability to extract good feelings from the ballpark in good times, bad times, and these particular times has remained top-shelf work despite his distance from the games themselves. His longtime partner and friend, Duane Kuiper—36 years on the job, and now we’re counting—had his own health scare last winter but remains on the mic, at least for the moment. As he explained to The Athletic’s Andrew Baggarly, in his standard disarming way, “Maybe I’m happy he’s leaving. Did you ever think of that? It’s like the A’s and Giants with the A’s leaving. Now I’ve got the whole town to myself!”

The natural response to that is “Too soon, you hyena.” But because Krukow would have cheerily signed off on the bit, so must we all. You learned, if you ever heard the two do a game together, that they played off each other with the ease that only comes from two people who could spend six months together over the course of three-and-a-half decades without finding reasons to strangle each other. Few ballplayers could do it for even 10, and ex-ballplayers are virtually never asked to do so; Kuiper and Krukow played together on the Giants for three years, beginning in 1983, and talked to each other in public for decades. The pair did it so masterfully because they somehow made kismet their personal fidget spinners, with a synchronous hum that defined their work and their town. One could barely tell that Krukow was three-and-a-half hours away from Kuiper or their other partners, Jon Miller and Dave Flemming.