Joe Buck is calling the Mets-Dodgers game on ESPN this Wednesday, April 15. As far as he’s concerned, that’s probably it for the season.
Appearing on Sports Media with Richard Deitsch, Buck — who during the same episode said he wants to spend the rest of his professional career at the Worldwide Leader — addressed whether postseason baseball was ever on the table for him at the network he’s been at since 2022. While he’s made it inherently clear that that chapter of his career is closed, the opportunities haven’t exactly gone away.
“As you and I sit here right now on April 10, I don’t even know who’s got the postseason anymore,” Buck said. “I assume ESPN’s got a game, maybe they don’t… Well, there you go — NBC has the Wild Card, so I’m not going to be doing that. That was on the table last year, if it was something that I wanted to do. When ESPN had their games in the early round, it just was at a bad time. We were doing a Broncos game, and I would’ve had to do the old stuff — leave in the middle of the night, go do a Tuesday night game after Monday Night Football. And believe me, I’m the luckiest guy in the world; I wrote a book about that, that I got to do any of it. But I just feel like that’s a chapter of my life that really it’s an itch that doesn’t need to be scratched anymore. I’ve done all that stuff.”
The postseason opportunity Buck is referring to existed when ESPN still had its old $550 million annual deal with MLB, which included Sunday Night Baseball, the Wild Card round, the Home Run Derby, and Opening Night. ESPN and MLB mutually opted out of that deal in February 2025 after commissioner Rob Manfred sent teams a memo calling ESPN a “shrinking platform” and citing decreased coverage of the sport. ESPN carried its full existing package through the 2025 season while the two sides negotiated a new arrangement. Under the new three-year deal, ESPN pays the same $550 million annually but gets a dramatically different package, which now includes 30 exclusive weeknight games, local broadcast rights for six league-controlled teams, and control of MLB.tv within its direct-to-consumer app. The Wild Card games and Sunday Night Baseball went to NBC as part of its return to baseball after a 26-year absence.
The postseason Buck once could have called is now at a network he doesn’t work for.
Buck’s relationship with baseball since leaving Fox for ESPN’s Monday Night Football booth in 2022 has been a slow, deliberate re-engagement. He left behind 24 World Series and a career’s worth of October baseball, told anyone who asked that he didn’t have the itch anymore, and declined ESPN’s request to call a game in 2022. Last spring, ESPN senior VP of production Mark Gross — who works closely with Buck on Monday Night Football — reached out about Opening Day at Yankee Stadium. Buck hesitated, then said yes. He called the Yankees-Brewers game in March 2025 and told The Athletic afterward that he felt like he hadn’t left.
This year, Gross came back with the same ask. Buck is calling Mets-Dodgers for Jackie Robinson Day and will be joined by Ron Darling and Orel Hershiser. By his own account, Buck has said he finds it easier to prepare for early-season games, that launching off the beginning of a season is more natural for someone who hasn’t been embedded in the sport daily for years. A Dodgers-Mets game in April, in other words, is the right assignment. A Tuesday night Wild Card game after a Monday Night Football broadcast was not.
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.