Background and career
Joseph Francis Buck (born April 25, 1969) is an American sportscaster & actor who serves as the lead play-by-play announcer for Monday Night Football on ESPN and ABC. He also hosts ESPN Jeopardy! on Disney+, Hulu and ESPN. Buck previously worked for Fox Sports from its 1994 inception through 2022, serving as the lead play-by-play announcer for Fox's National Football League and Major League Baseball coverage. Buck has called the Super Bowl six times, and the World Series 23 times. He is known for his distinctively smooth and focused style of play-calling, and is a member of the Sports Broadcasting Hall of Fame, as is his father, Jack Buck. He has been honored with the 2020 Pete Rozelle Radio-Television Award from the Pro Football Hall of Fame and the 2026 Ford C. Frick Award from the National Baseball Hall of Fame. He is considered one of the most recognizable sportscasters in history.
Buck was born in St. Petersburg, Florida and raised in the St. Louis area, where he attended St. Louis Country Day School. He began his broadcasting career in 1989 while he was an undergraduate at Indiana University Bloomington.
Buck called play-by-play for the then-Louisville Redbirds, a minor league affiliate of the Cardinals, and was a reporter for ESPN's coverage of the Triple-A All-Star Game in 1989. In 1991, he did reporting for St Louis' CBS affiliate KMOV. Also, in 1991 Buck began broadcasting for the Cardinals on local television and KMOX Radio, filling in while his father was working on CBS telecasts. In the 1992–93 season, he was the play-by-play voice for University of Missouri basketball broadcasts. Buck continued to call Cardinals games after being hired by Fox Sports, initially with his father on KMOX and later on FSN Midwest television. As his network duties increased, however, his local workload shrank, and before the 2008 season, it was announced that he would no longer be calling Cardinals telecasts for FSN Midwest. This marked the first time since 1960 that a member of the Buck family was not part of the team's broadcasting crew.
In 1994, Buck was hired by Fox, and at the age of 25 became the youngest man ever to announce a regular slate of National Football League (NFL) games on network television. Soon after arriving at Fox, Buck became the play-by-play man on Fox's #4 NFL broadcast team, with Tim Green as his color commentator. After four years, he stopped doing NFL games to concentrate on his baseball duties full-time. During the 2001 season, Buck occasionally filled in for Curt Menefee as Fox's number-six play-by-play man. Buck became Fox's top play-by-play man in 2002, replacing Pat Summerall. For many seasons, he was teamed with Troy Aikman as color commentator and Erin Andrews as the sideline reporter. (Buck also worked with Cris Collinsworth from 2002 to 2004, before the latter's move to Showtime, NFL Network, and NBC.) Buck is only the third announcer to handle a television network's lead MLB and NFL coverage in the same year (following NBC's Curt Gowdy and ABC's Al Michaels). By 2002, his Fox duties forced him to cut his local Cardinals schedule to 25 games. (Eventually, Buck left the Cardinals altogether to join Fox Sports "full-time" in 2008.) Notable games he called included Super Bowl XLII, Miracle at the New Meadowlands, Super Bowl LI, the Minneapolis Miracle, and the final Green Bay Packers home game in Milwaukee at County Stadium. During the 2006 season, Buck briefly hosted Fox's pre-game show Fox NFL Sunday, with him and Curt Menefee jointly replacing James Brown. To accommodate his involvement, the show began to broadcast on-site from the location of Fox's top game of the week. In 2007, Buck stepped down as host to focus on his play-by-play duties, and Fox NFL Sunday reverted to primarily being broadcast from Fox Sports' studios in Los Angeles. In 2014, Buck was named as the new host of NFL Films Presents, to coincide with the program's move from ESPN2 to Fox Sports 1.
In 1996, he was named Fox's lead play-by-play voice for Major League Baseball, teaming with Tim McCarver, who had previously worked with his father on CBS. That year, he became the youngest man to do a national broadcast (for all nine innings and games, as a network employee as opposed to simply being a representative of one of the participating teams) for a World Series, surpassing Sean McDonough, who called the 1992 World Series for CBS at the age of 30. McDonough had replaced Jack Buck as CBS's lead baseball play-by-play man after he was fired in late 1991. Later with Fox, Buck called a limited selection of regular-season games each year (typically featuring big-market teams such as the Yankees, Red Sox, Dodgers, Cardinals in which he called games for, and/or Cubs), as well as the All-Star Game, one of the League Championship Series, and the World Series. From 2016 to 2021, he was paired with color analyst John Smoltz and field reporter Ken Rosenthal. Besides working with Tim McCarver for 18 seasons (1996–2013), Buck also worked with former MLB player and current MLB Network/Fox Sports analyst Harold Reynolds and baseball insider Tom Verducci for 2 seasons (2014–2015). About a month or two after the 2015 World Series, Reynolds and Verducci were demoted to the #2 team and John Smoltz moved up from the #2 team (with Matt Vasgersian) to take Reynolds and Verducci's places. Between 1996 and 2021, Buck called 24 World Series and 22 All-Star Games for Fox, the most of any play-by-play announcer on network television. As the lead play-by-play announcer for MLB on Fox, Buck called games between the Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees that were broadcast on Fox and FS1. He called many notable moments in the rivalry, including Aaron Boone's walk off home run in Game 7 of the 2003 ALCS, saying "The Boston Red Sox...were five outs away in the eighth inning, leading by three, as Boone hits it to deep left. That might send the Yankees to the World Series. Boone the hero of Game 7!" and the Red Sox historic comeback the following year, calling "This would be the fifth pennant for the Red Sox...since that 1918 season, here it is, ground ball to second, Reese, the Boston Red Sox...have won the pennant." Buck's voice is heard in recorded conversations between Linda Tripp and Monica Lewinsky calling Game 5 of the Yankees-Indians ALDS in 1997, which were released at the height of the scandal involving Lewinsky and President Bill Clinton. On September 8, 1998, Buck called Mark McGwire's 62nd home run that broke Roger Maris' single-season record. The game was nationally televised live in prime time on Fox. It was a rarity for a nationally televised regular season game not to be aired on cable since the end of the Monday/Thursday Night Baseball era on ABC in 1989. During Fox's broadcast of the 2002 World Series, Buck paid tribute to his father, who had died a few months earlier, by calling the final out of Game 6 with the phrase, "We'll see you tomorrow night." This was the same phrase with which Jack Buck had famously called Kirby Puckett's home run off Braves pitcher Charlie Leibrandt, which ended Game 6 of the 1991 World Series. Since then, Buck has continued to use this phrase, including Game 4 of the 2004 ALCS when David Ortiz's walk-off home run finally won it for the Red Sox in the 12th inning, Buck altered the phrase to, "We'll see you later tonight," as the game had extended into the early morning of the next day. Most famously, he also used the phrase at the end of Game 6 of the 2011 World Series when the Cardinals' David Freese hit a walk-off home run in the 11th inning against the Rangers to send the series to a seventh game. Buck's repeated use of the phrase caused controversy with some commentators opining that it had been turned into a cliché, at the expense of the original iconic moment associated with the Minnesota Twins. Buck also paid tribute to his late father during the 2006 World Series by calling the final out of Game 5 with the phrase "St. Louis has a World Series winner", which echoed his father's line "And that's a winner, that's a winner, a World Series winner for the Cardinals!" at the end of the 1982 World Series. Another notable Red Sox game in the ALCS was in 2013, Game 2 against the Detroit Tigers at Fenway Park. The Red Sox were trailing 5–1 in the bottom of the eighth inning, with the bases loaded with David Ortiz at-bat. Ortiz hit a game-tying grand slam off Tigers' closer Joaquín Benoit. His call: "Hard hit into right, back at the wall," and then he calls, "TIE GAME!" as the ball flies over Torii Hunter, who flipped over the outfield wall. Buck also called the final out of three World Series in which the Red Sox, White Sox, and Cubs ended the longest championship droughts in 2004, 2005, and 2016, respectively. His calls were:
"Back to Foulke. Red Sox fans have longed to hear it. The Boston Red Sox are world champions." "Tying run at second, two out, Palmeiro, over the head of Jenks, Uribe charges, throws, OUT! And the White Sox have won the World Series! Juan Uribe with a play, charging it, throwing it, and the White Sox celebrate, their first title in eighty-eight years!" "Here's the 0-1. This is gonna be a tough play, Bryant, the Cubs...WIN THE WORLD SERIES! Bryant makes the play! It's over, and the Cubs have finally won it all! 8-7 in 10!"
