'It was the best job': Buck returns to Cooperstown as Frick Award winner after creating his own legacy

COOPERSTOWN, N.Y. -- Baseball is a legacy sport, both on and off the field. Your grandfather watched Gus Bell, your dad watched Buddy Bell, you watched David Bell. When you learn the name of that hot prospect who just got called up, that name will not leave your brain for the rest of your life; you know them forever. It is a game to be passed on from one generation to another.

Joe Buck knows this better than anyone. His father, of course, was the great Jack Buck, one of the most legendary broadcasters in American sports history, and the winner of the 1987 National Baseball Hall of Fame’s Ford C. Frick Award, a man who is so beloved in St. Louis that there is a statue of him outside Busch Stadium which plays his most famous calls on repeat, presumably for all of eternity.

His dad’s memory, and his legacy, were steeped in every word Joe Buck spoke on Saturday in Cooperstown, especially when articulating what it meant to him to receive the same award, 39 years later.

“Certainly, as an 18-year-old sitting there in the audience, I was not thinking along those lines,” Buck said. “I was just proud of my dad, and I saw the pride he had in getting this award. He was kind of an egoless guy. For anybody in the room that ever met him, I think they would agree with that.

“And he was somebody that never really puffed his chest out very much, but that was different that weekend, and I saw a different side of him, and I saw somebody that was a Depression-era kid, and a World War II vet, and a Purple Heart recipient, and a GI Bill guy going to college at Ohio State, and somebody who made his way to Cooperstown. And I've been the luckiest guy in the world.”

Joe, as he recounts in his very funny memoir Lucky Bastard, always understood that being Jack’s son would make certain that his name was known by generations of baseball fans before he was even out of high school. So he was ready.

How ready? Joe grew up alongside his father on the road, taping mock broadcasts in empty stadiums and then having his father critique them, which led to a moment, in 1987, on Joe’s 18th birthday, when Jack, calling a game at Shea Stadium, walked out of the booth in the fifth inning and left it to Joe to call it.

“It was the worst inning of play-by-play in the history of broadcast,” Joe later told St. Louis magazine. “Thankfully, it was a 1-2-3 inning, and nothing happened.” When it was over, an engineer told him, “It lacked description.”

He would get better -- and fast. After Saturday’s awards presentation, Jack Buck and Joe Buck are now officially the first father-son duo ever to win the Ford C. Frick Award. At 57 -- just four years younger than his dad was during his famous “Go crazy, folks!” call of Ozzie Smith’s walk-off homer in the 1985 National League Championship Series -- Joe’s the second-youngest broadcaster ever to receive the award … after Vin Scully, who won it at 54, in 1982.

Speaking in front of an audience at the Glimmerglass Festival Theater that included dozens of Hall of Famers -- among them, two of Buck’s broadcast partners, former pitcher John Smoltz and NFL Hall of Famer Troy Aikman -- Buck was funny and self-deprecating, having long understood that although he forged his own path as one of the game’s premier broadcasters, his family name played a role in him getting that initial opportunity at such a young age.

“It was my own little personal game of Monopoly as I got to pass go and leapfrog over many people who were broadcasting in the Minor Leagues who were far more qualified to call big league baseball than I was at that stage in my life,” Buck said. “Believe me, I felt the guilt back then. I heard the criticism. Weirdly enough, I still feel the guilt, and I still hear the criticism to this day.”

Joe attended Indiana University Bloomington but left early to come back home to live with his parents and attempt to make it in broadcasting, starting out with the Triple-A Louisville Redbirds. Two years later, he was calling games alongside his father with the Cardinals.

Cardinals fans at the time were initially skeptical: Who was this kid? Didn’t he just get the job from his dad? Is he really only 21?

It didn’t take long for Cardinals fans to warm up to him. One funny moment from early in his career that won many fans over: He was calling a game featuring then-Cardinals second baseman Geronimo Pena, and Mike Shannon -- both his and his father’s longtime radio partner -- made a joke about Pena’s first name being “Geronimo.” Joe chuckled. “I think it’s awesome,” he said, dryly. “What a cool name, ‘Geronimo.’ I mean, come on. My name is freaking ‘Joe.’”

He had a wry, instantly relatable sense of humor that echoed his father perfectly; Joe seemed, from the beginning, entirely comfortable in his own skin. He became a part of the Cardinals fan family instantly. Though he kind of always was.

Joe was a broadcaster for the Cardinals from 1991 to 2007, but it was obvious, from the beginning, that with his inherent talent, Cardinals fans were going to have to share him. Just three years in, FOX hired him to call NFL games, and then, two years later, they bought rights to baseball and hired him to be their top play-by-play announcer for the World Series, working with Tim McCarver, who had previously been an analyst alongside Joe’s dad. He became the youngest play-by-play World Series announcer (27) since Scully in 1953. After his first game of the 1996 World Series, Joe called his dad to ask him how he did. Jack deadpanned, "When's the game on?"

“While my dad was predominantly the eyes and ears of Cardinals fans, I became that for FOX Sports,” Buck said. “I was given that responsibility, and it was heavy at times, but it was the best job and the most fun you can have in this business. Broadcasting the World Series, the MLB All-Star Game, there is nothing better than that.”

Buck called 24 World Series on television in his career, the most ever. (Scully holds the record for radio and television, with 28.) It was during the 2011 World Series, back in St. Louis, when he made his most famous baseball call. After David Freese homered to win Game 6 of that World Series, Joe honored his father’s call in the 1991 World Series with an exquisitely timed “We will see you tomorrow night.”

“I tried to not only use the same words, but the same intonation and cadence as my dad had,” Buck admitted. “I knew if my dad were alive … he would’ve been in tears. So, it was a kind of tip of my cap to him.”

Joe has broadcast 21 All-Star Games. He set a record (with McCarver) for most All-Star Games as a broadcast duo with 15 Midsummer Classics. Now with ESPN, he has not been a regular baseball broadcaster since 2021, though he made cameo appearances alongside fellow legacy announcer Chip Caray in 2024 -- on a Cardinals broadcast, back home. And now he enters the Hall of Fame, beloved by all baseball fans, but especially in St. Louis, where they watched him grow up.

“This is the highest award, the most memorable award, the most prestigious award that anyone in my profession could receive,” Buck said of the Frick Award. “And I’m so honored to get it.”