Buck-Caray combo returns to Cardinals broadcast booth next week: Media Views (2024)

Holy cow! That’s a winner!

Caray and Buck will be broadcasting the Cardinals, just like in the team’s glory decade of the 1960s. But this time, it will be the family lineage on display, as Harry Caray’s grandson Chip will welcome Jack Buck’s son Joe into the Bally Sports Midwest booth on May 24, a week from Friday, for one night. Chip is BSM’s lead Cards broadcaster, and Buck got his sportscasting start by broadcasting the Birds in 1991 before going on to immense national success.

“I think it will be a blast,” Buck said.

Added Caray: “Any time you have a chance to spend time with a guy like Joe, it’s great; our families are so intertwined in the history of the Cardinals.”

Buck has hinted at his interest in making a cameo on a Cardinals broadcast for the past couple of years and said team President Bill DeWitt III was instrumental in making the connection with Bally Sports Midwest officials. Buck had continued to call Cards games for BSM predecessor Fox Sports Midwest/Fox Sports Net while his network career was exploding, but his local schedule had dwindled to only a handful of contests by 2007. So he stopped the moonlighting.

“It felt silly to do 10 games or so just to say I’m doing it,” he said. “But the more that time went by and Bill brought it up, then I got a call from (BSM executive producer) Larry Mago, so why not? I was missing calling games locally more than nationally.”

His appearance will be during a lull in the BSM schedule. The Cards are off the day before of the Buck-Caray game, then their next two contests are to be shown exclusively by national networks. So Bally Sports Midwest game analysts Brad Thompson and Jim Edmonds (who work on a rotating basis) thus have a four-day weekend.

That sets up the family affair.

“We’re real excited,” BSM general manager Jack Donovan said, adding that Harry and Jack still are regarded two of “the best play-by-play announcers of all time. ... The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”

Buck and Caray will be working without a former player in the booth, just as their family predecessors did when they were together in the Cardinals’ three World Series seasons in the ’60s — albeit on radio, not TV. And just like in the old days, Caray will be the lead singer.

“My idea of doing this is that I’m more like the guest,” Buck said. “I’m just sitting in with the band for the night.”

Donovan said the plan is for them to take turns doing play-by-play, but the timing and other mechanics have not yet been determined.

Both announcers say the primary focus will be on the field, not the broadcast booth, although there will be no reporter working that night.

“The game comes first,” Caray said. “This will not be about Chip or Joe. But I’m sure we’ll be talking about his father and my grandfather.”

Caray is looking forward to another aspect of the evening.

“It will be interesting to get Joe’s perspective on the Cardinals,” he said. “The Buck family had some of the biggest calls in Cardinals broadcasting history, Jack’s ‘go crazy folks’ (on Ozzie Smith’s improbable game-winning homer in the 1985 National League Championship Series) and Joe’s ‘see you tomorrow night’ (on David Freese’s home run to end the dramatic sixth game of the 2011 World Series).”

Caray, like Buck, was with the Fox network early in his career, but they never called a game together. Both had humorous responses when asked about being paired now.

“He went on to superstardom; I’m just calling local baseball,” Caray quipped.

“We’ll fumble our way through,” Buck joked.

The lineage

It has been 55 years since Harry Caray and Jack Buck last formed one of the most legendary local baseball broadcast teams in history, broken up when Caray was fired after the 1969 season following a 15-year partnership across two stints that began in 1954.

But it worked out tremendously for both.

Caray eventually attained immense regional and national success broadcasting the Chicago Cubs, especially on television in the 1980s, and his departure vaulted Buck to the No. 1 role in the Cardinals’ radio booth.

It was in the ’70s Buck when ascended to the top spot, the latter stage of a long era in which few games were televised and the voices that boomed out from AM radios often became de facto family members to rabid fans. Buck certainly did, blossoming in the role as he became one of the most beloved (maybe the most beloved) St. Louisan for decades.

Caray and Buck, who both died more than two decades ago, ended up in the broadcasters portion of baseball’s Hall of Fame.

Passing the torch

Their legacies have lived on through the years as the family business has been passed down the line.

Caray’s son Skip, who got his start in St. Louis, achieved much acclaim in Atlanta and like his dad became nationally known for calling MLB games on a cable superstation. Skip did the Braves for TBS, Harry the Cubs for WGN.

Skip’s son Chip jumped into the business decades ago, too, and as a tip of the hat to his lineage has called the Cubs and Braves and now is in his second season as the Cardinals’ lead television announcer.

Likewise, Buck’s son Joe followed his dad’s lead. His career began zooming to the highest tier of national sportscasting while he still was calling the Cardinals before eventually relinquishing that post. He was the longtime lead MLB and NFL announcer for Fox Sports, calling 24 World Series and six Super Bowls, and now is headed toward his third season as the play-by-play voice of “Monday Night Football” on ESPN and ABC.

But Buck hasn’t called a baseball game since the Braves beat the Astros 7-0 in Game 6 of the 2021 World Series to win the championship, leaving Fox before the next season began for the ESPN job and said he has had a few chances to call baseball for that network.

“The timing wasn’t right,” he said.

That timing is good now for this opportunity with Caray.

The twin boys he has with his wife, fellow ESPN sportscaster Michelle Beisner-Buck, were too young when he left Fox to understand what their father was doing on the air. But they now are 6, playing baseball and will get a feel for dad’s old vocation.

He plans to have them and his wife on the field before the game, then have them come to the broadcast booth “for an inning or two until they go home and the boys go to bed,” he said. “It should be fun and exciting” for the family.

He also still has loyalty to the organization that gave him his first big league job.

“I wouldn’t be where I am today without the Cardinals giving me my chance way back then,” he said.

But Buck, never one to be highfalutin about his position, has a realistic outlook about the telecast.

“I think it will be a lot of fun for me,” he said, although some Cardinals fans “won’t give a (expletive) about me being on.”

But many others certainly will be drawn to modern nostalgia, which sets up as a highlight telecast in what despite a recent uptick so far has been another bleak Cardinals season.