Dear Mike Krukow,
You’re a music guy. You love it, you listen to it, you play it. So why don’t I start this Jock Blog Open Letter to Mike Krukow by quoting the Beatles. Let Paul and John sum up what we’ve all witnessed in the countdown to your final broadcast with the Giants this weekend:
And in the end/the love you take/is equal to the love you make.
Buddy, you’ve spread a lot of love in your time as a Giant. Like, more than you’ll ever know. For millions of us. On a deeply personal level.
Now you get to take some.
Here are times you spread the love of the game and life, from my view:
— July 3, 1986: The Humm Baby Giants are the kids we gotta like. The season after the 100-loss year is surprising us all. You guys are playing with Roger Craig-infused panache and fight, and that rookie first baseman Will Clark ain’t bad. At this point, you — good ol’ No. 39 — are a decade into your career and you are our veteran right-hander, the guy the Giants traded Joe Morgan for in 1983, only to be part of three consecutive bad Giants teams. But not 1986. In 1986, the organic belief was so strong,that when I convinced my high school girlfriend to go on a cool date to Candlestick Park for the “Fireworks Night” game before the 4th of July. The demand was so high — 47,167 of us! — the only tickets we could get were in the upper reserved in deep center field at Candlestick. If you know, you know. You only sat upper reserved center field at Candlestick on the rarest of occasions. Didn’t matter. I was fired up. And there you were in your snow-white Giants home gamer, under the lights, down on that mound, a mere speck, with that familiar athletic delivery, making that baseball dip and dart, competing your ass off against the team you always hated as much as the Dodgers — the frickin’ St. Louis Cardinals. The crowd got louder and louder as you posted inning after inning, until your complete game rocked the house, set off the fireworks and emblazoned itself on my mind — to this day! Giants 1, Cardinals 0. A four-hitter. CG shut piece. Mike, you refused to lose. Every time. We felt it in the farthest reaches of the ‘Stick. We roared. Thank you for that memory. And nice pitching, meat.
— Sometime around 1994: You and Duane Kuiper were beginning to assert yourselves as our new broadcast duo. “Smoothie”, as you called him, featured shockingly good play by play talent for an ex-ballplayer: pace, pipes, punctuating the right moments. And you? You, Mike Krukow, were offering such on-the-spot insight, it felt like we were in the dugout with you. We’d never heard color analysis that raw and real. You were blowing me and my friends away. We were in our 20s. Still single. Still watching games on TV in bachelor pad apartments in The City, drinking beers and dreaming of a World Series one day — maybe? You and Kuip were signing off a broadcast one day in the early 1990s when Smoothie said to you: “Nine-game road trip coming up, Mike. You ready?” And you said: “Well, I only have six pairs of underwear, partner. So you know what that means.” And Kuip said: “No, what?” And you said: “That means I pack six — and go commando the rest of the way.” We howled. No broadcaster said stuff like that. No broadcaster made us laugh like that. We said: “Have you heard Mike Krukow? He’s incredible.” We were hooked, on the comedy and the energy and knowledge. The ride was just beginning.
November 3, 2010, San Francisco City Hall: Euphoria swept us all. KNBR had a float on Market Street. I don’t know if a million people were there, but we’re saying there were a million people. I can still see so many on lamp posts, in tree branches, on building fire escapes. No one wanted this feeling to end. I’ll never forget the signs of tribute to lost relatives, to grandparents and parents who loved Giants baseball and had passed on. The signs made sure their deceased loved ones were, in fact, there that day. And then we got to City Hall and you grabbed the mic and you made everyone dissolve into goose flesh and tears. I don’t know if you wrote it, or prepared it, or just winged it, but your metaphor of passing on the book of Giants baseball, the good book of Giants baseball, framed the moment. You made us feel so ever present, cheering wildly. But you also artfully catapulted us into our past. We all thought of the person who handed us the book of Giants baseball, or taught us the good book of Giants baseball. Maybe that person was next to us. Or maybe that person was looking down on us. But you were the one that made sure we remembered it, and felt it. Deeply. In our souls.
Mike Krukow, you are the Giants.
Mike Krukow, you are San Francisco.
And Mike Krukow, you are forever our world champion.
Yours in the love of the game,
Murph
