Joe Buck is back in the baseball booth — and it didn’t take long for doors to start swinging.
The voice of ESPN’s Monday Night Football will return to the national Major League Baseball stage for the first time since 2021. According to The Athletic’s Andrew Marchand, Buck will be on the call for ESPN’s Opening Day broadcast of the New York Yankees-Milwaukee Brewers on Thursday, March 27.
This news arrives just days after St. Louis Cardinals president Bill DeWitt III playfully suggested that Buck should “come back to reality” and call games for his hometown team.
If only for one game, Buck has returned on ESPN’s dime.
“I feel like the right way to do it is to act like I’ve been doing it for the past four years, even though I haven’t,” Buck told Marchand.
The Yankees and Los Angeles Dodgers will anchor doubleheader coverage of Major League Baseball’s Opening Day in 2025. An afternoon tilt between the Yankees and Milwaukee Brewers will kick off the league’s national television schedule at 3 p.m. ET. Then, at 7 p.m. ET, the Dodgers will take on the Detroit Tigers.
Both are ESPN-exclusive games, which had Michael Kay “red hot.” For 37 years, the Yankees’ play-by-play voice has either written or announced Opening Day, but the network won’t be turning to him for its coverage.
That job belongs to Joe Buck.
Technically, this isn’t his first baseball broadcast since leaving Fox. Last season, Buck jumped into the booth for a Cardinals game alongside Chip Caray, a momentous occasion that marked the first time in 55 years that a Buck and a Caray shared the mic — dating back to the legendary duo of Joe’s father, Jack, and Chip’s grandfather, Harry.
But this opportunity may be a rare one. Major League Baseball can opt out of its current ESPN deal after the 2025 season, so there’s no guarantee Buck will get another chance to call a game at the national level.
If this is his only shot, it makes sense he’d take it, even if baseball isn’t part of Buck’s ESPN contract.
Mark Gross, a senior VP of production at the network, has recently taken over baseball coverage. Gross, who has a strong relationship with Buck from their work on Monday Night Football, as per Marchand, reached out with a pitch: Would Buck call Opening Day?
Buck was hesitant. ESPN had gingerly asked him to do baseball in 2022, but it didn’t materialize.
He’s openly admitted he doesn’t follow the sport as closely as he once did. But when Gross mentioned that the game would be at Yankee Stadium, Buck was all in.
“Why wouldn’t I,” Buck told The Athletic. “I know what I’ve said in the past about this stuff, but I’m not really good at saying no, and I think I inherited that from my dad. Because Mark asked me, and I really love the guy and think the world of him, I said, ‘Yes.’”
Gross even let Buck pick his broadcast partners.
He chose Joe Girardi for the Yankees’ perspective and Bill Schroeder for the Brewers, setting up a fresh, yet familiar, booth for baseball’s grand opening.
Joe Buck will be back in baseball — for one night, at least.
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.