Veteran play-by-play announcer Joe Buck has revealed that he turned down the opportunity to call MLB postseason games from ESPN last fall.
Longtime broadcaster, who joined the network in 2022 primarily as the voice of The decision was revealed during a recent appearance at Sports Media with Richard Dietsch podcast.
ESPN, which previously had a major rights package including playoff baseball before renegotiating a lighter slate of regular season games, approached Buck for season-opening duties.
However, the scheduling proved incompatible with his NFL commitments.
“As you and I sit here right now on April 10, I don’t even know who got to the postseason,” Buck said. “I assume ESPN has a game, maybe they don’t… Well, there you go – NBC has the wild card, so I’m not going to do that.”
He added, “It was on the discussion table last year if it was something I wanted to do.” “When ESPN played its games early on, it was poorly timed.”
Joe Buck reveals he’s stopped calling MLB postseason games for ESPN https://t.co/0Ldz8NT5Lg
– Awful Announcement (@awfulaannouncement) 13 April 2026
Joe Buck says he turned down ESPN’s offer to call MLB postseason games
The 56-year-old, who has won a record 24 World Series during his career, said he no longer feels the need to pursue that chapter of his broadcasting career.
Buck added, “And believe me, I’m the luckiest man in the world; I wrote a book about it, that I got to do any of it.” “But I feel like it’s really a chapter in my life, it’s an itch that doesn’t need to be scratched anymore. I’ve done all that.”
There was a mixed reaction from fans on this news on social media.
“I wish he had the same mentality for football,” one fan wrote, possibly hinting that he hopes that changes. He Bend down too.
“Thank God,” said another. “The man is unbearable.”
Still, others consider Buck’s contributions to MLB irreplaceable.
“This really hurts my soul. I understand where Joe is coming from, but still,” one person lamented.
Another reacted to the news: “Shame. He was loved by the fans in baseball.”
Over the years, Joe Buck has been the voice behind some of sports’ most memorable moments, from World Series games to Super Bowls.
However, this high-profile position also made him the target of criticism, which intensified with the advent of social media. Countless memes emerge every year about fans buying expensive playoff tickets so they can avoid hearing the Bucks.
And while she found the whole affair annoying, she also took it to heart. Although he suggests ignoring comments on social media to other people in his field, Joe admits he hasn’t always heeded his own advice. Mainly because he was a leading figure during the rise of internet trolls.
“Always, I was the only guy playing national baseball during the social media era, and I got my socks off. And it exhausted me,” Buck said in an interview. michael’s show. “I can sit here and say, ‘Oh, that thing didn’t bother me.’ It upset me.”
“If you’re a human being who cares about what other people think and do, and you try to be a good person and you try to do a good job, and then you read how worthless you are or ‘You’re lucky you had a famous dad’ and ‘You hate my team’ and all that other stuff,” he lamented.
Kylie Kelce, on her husband Jason Kelce’s late night flop, they call it late nightDiscussed the reasons behind Philadelphia fans’ dislike of Joe Buck.
“I was raised in a household where I was taught to dislike Joe Buck,” he said.
“My dad taught me this,” Kylie continued. “I recognized very well the pattern in which it always seemed [Buck] Was cheering for the other team.”
When the former Eagles center asked if he had any specific examples of the Bucks being biased, he replied, “Absolutely not.”
Buck is the son of famous sportscaster Jack Buck.
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