Evan Longoria and Brandon Crawford collided in the top of the ninth inning on Saturday, and the Giants’ IL team got a lot stronger:
It has been an injury-plagued two months for the Giants, who have lost player after player to injury and somehow not slowed down at all. There has to come a point when this catches up with them on the field, you would think. Maybe it’ll be this injury, or maybe Brandon Belt will come back on Tuesday and hit well and the lineup will maintain its surprisingly excellent production.
Or maybe the team will face another injury. Maybe it’ll be one that really hurts. Maybe it’ll be to one of the most irreplacable guys in the organization. Maybe every game will be worse now because of some new medical problem.
Yep.
Every one of the Giants’ regular announcers is great — every one, dammit — and when I started this sentence I wasn’t going to elaborate but now I want to elaborate. Jon Miller is the born raconteur, who elevates every moment, whether it’s 2-on, 2-out in a 1-run ninth inning, or a 14-3 game where he spends three innings talking about boats, somehow roping FDR into the mix. Mike Krukow is the star personality, who reminisces about his playing days without getting into any Smoltian “the kids nowadays are garbage” stuff, while also being hilarious and also also explaining just why that 2-2 curveball a few inches low that followed a high fastball was such a good idea, even if the batter didn’t swing. Dave Flemming is the smoothest and most accessible of the group — there’s a reason why ESPN has him broadcast as many games in as many sports as he can fit into his schedule — but he’s never dry, always just as willing to play off Jon as to go in his own direction, and he absolutely nails every big moment that comes along, be they game-winning doubles in May or World Series wins.
And then there’s Kuip.
Duane Kuiper started broadcasting Giants games in 1986, and with the exception of 1993, a gap year that he took in Colorado, he’s been doing it ever since. Before that, he had been a second baseman (with very occasional time at first) during an 11-year playing career, but we’re not here to talk about that so I’ll just embed the clip of his only major league home run and move on.
As a play-by-play man, Kuip is everything you could want. He calls an excellent game, bringing you into the mood of the game without making it seem like he’s doing anything at all. He sets up Krukow with ease, allowing him the space and opportunity to analyze the game so that fans at home learn how and why things happen on the field. He has a dry, curmudgeonly sense of humor, but a winking one without nastiness. He brings his own experience and insight to the game, while still letting it be about the players on the field.
Duane Kuiper, in short, makes every game better.
I’ve been watching Kuip call Giants games for 25 years now, and to me (and generations of Giants fans) he is the voice of Giants baseball on TV. He is inseperable from the experience of watching games; Kruk and Kuip switching on a dime from bantering to baseballing back to bantering, rewarding but not demanding close attention, letting the summer drift by as the team wins and loses and decides its fate.
It was never going to last forever, of course. Krukow’s muscle disease means that he’s been doing fewer and fewer games every year, and it’s not like anyone in the group is getting any younger (Flemming could keep going for several decades, and I hope he does, though the siren call of national broadcasts might lure him away from San Francisco at some point). But Kuiper’s disease-that-requires-chemotherapy was a surprise. It was a reminder too, to not take a second for granted with these guys. Every one of them is a treasure, and while hopefully we’ll get a lot more time with each of them, it’s not guaranteed. Disease and fragility can strike at any point. Every second we get with Duane Kuiper is a good second.
We’ll close with a tribute from Steve Stone, the man who Kuip hit his home run off of.
Get well soon, Kuip.