Lucky Bastard: My Life, My Dad, and the Things I'm Not Allowed to Say on TV

by Joe Buck

Seeing the players every day, joking before and after games, made me realize that people in sports do not view the games the same way that fans do. When I was little, I woke up in a good mood if the Cardinals won the night before and was depressed if they lost. But to players, baseball was a job. They did their best, but they understood that sometimes they would have a bad day at the office. They could even laugh about it. I remember the great Cardinals closer Lee Smith giving up a game-winning home run one day. On the plane ride that night, he gathered some teammates together and said, “I threw a slider . . . one side of the ball said ‘hit me,’ and the other one said ‘hard!’” They laughed. If they could handle a loss, why would I lose sleep over it? So at a fairly young age, I realized that while I loved sports, I was not the same kind of fan that my friends were. I wasn’t emotionally invested in teams winning or losing—I just enjoyed being around them.

I was fascinated by what he did because he loved it. I think if your parent does something that he or she loves, as a kid you’re automatically drawn to it because you see how happy it makes them.

He would criticize me for only one thing: getting on the umpires. If I said, “That’s a terrible call—that’s not a strike,” he’d look at me like, “Shut up.” He taught me that umpires are professionals just like major leaguers. They work as hard at their craft. They deserve the same respect. And you know who else deserves that respect? Minor leaguers. When my dad dropped me off in Louisville to broadcast Triple-A, he said, “You know, you spent your entire life watching Major League Baseball. Now you’re going to the minor leagues. These guys are kids. Remember how hard the game is. Unless you believe you could have made that play ten times out of ten, don’t act like you could do it.” It was such great advice. Some announcers rip players—Harry Caray did it a lot. He would openly say, “How in the heck can you miss that fly ball?” I’ve tried to avoid that. But it was the only big advice my dad gave me.

Television is an act. Radio is about being yourself. On the radio, you just start painting a picture, for lack of a less pretentious term. In TV the picture is already painted, and you just add the happy little trees.*

I tell anybody getting into the TV business: The camera really does the play-by-play. You just accentuate it.

So radio allows for more creativity, but in a way, TV is more complicated. You can get away with more on radio. You can miss something by a second and nobody will know. On TV, you had better be on it. In radio, the announcers run the show. In TV, there are producers and a lot more moving parts.

I believe it was Walt Whitman, or perhaps Grantland Rice, who wrote, “A baseball season is really fucking long.”

Baseball is not math class. It’s supposed to be fun.

At the time, most players had to room together. The collective bargaining agreement did not mandate that each player got his own room. If they wanted their own room, they had to pay the difference. I was a member of the media as the Cardinals announcer, so I got my own room. (Imagine that: the media getting better perks than the players.)

Baseball has a different pace than football. When I arrive at a football game, all my prep work is done. I have four 11-by-17 pieces of cardboard full of info done by Saturday night at the latest. (I keep those boards in front of me throughout the game. They basically turn the game into an open-book test—all the info is there. I just have to find it.) By Sunday, if I could be assured of getting there five minutes before I went on TV, I could do that and be fine. In baseball, I don’t know the lineup or the defense until I arrive that day, usually about four hours before the game, because there are so many games and those things change day by day.

Whitey Herzog had a theory that makes a lot of sense: Steroids got into baseball when all the multipurpose stadiums were built. The football Cardinals were working out with the baseball Cardinals. The Raiders were working out with the A’s, the Steelers with the Pirates, the Reds with the Bengals. They were sharing weight rooms. The facilities weren’t what they are now. The football guys would show up, and the baseball guys would look at them and say, “Wow, how did you get so big?” Steroids were all over the NFL then. So it’s logical that it would go from one sport to the other.

when your body is breaking down, and you know you are near the end of your life, it’s good to have daily reminders that your existence is meaningful to other people.

I discovered the excruciating difference between being alive and being able to live.

A few days later, the Red Sox swept the Cardinals for their first World Series title since 1918. I was the voice on TV capturing the moment—and to Cardinals fans, I was “celebrating” their team’s loss. In the eyes of a lot of Cardinals fans, I was betraying them and my family name. They don’t understand: Rooting for the Cardinals or ANY team is not my job. I make the call to the best of my ability when it happens in front of me. I don’t and can’t care who wins. The fans do, however, and I’m glad they do.

I think: staying together for the sake of the kids. It’s an offshoot of the first mistake: ignoring your relationship with your spouse so you can focus on your kids. You are still saying, even subconsciously, “The marriage isn’t important. The kids are.” Trudy had twelve more years of school at that point, but I was thinking, “We’ll stay married that whole time. For her. I’m going to slug it out!” Like “Ah, heck, that’s only a decade of my life, plus a couple of years—what’s the big deal?” I really think, even after they get married, husband and wife must continue to “date.” They have to keep courting each other and find some time to be together, just the two of them. In my opinion, that is key to survival. I wanted to keep our marriage going and raise the girls together in a household that looked perfect from the outside. It’s what pleasers do. If something bad happens, I assume it’s my fault. And that’s a problem, because you try to make everybody else happy, and the last person you think about is yourself. But if you’re not making yourself happy, you can’t make other people happy. That’s why therapists talk about the speech that flight attendants give: If the cabin loses pressure, you put your mask on first before you assist your child. You need to be right to help them be right.

This is great advice for me becoming a teacher or substitue teacher.

when people say I suck, I hear two voices: theirs, and the little one in my head that’s saying, “You’re not good enough.” It’s hard to shut those voices out. Criticism just fans the flame of whatever self-doubt any normal person would have.

Your critics may be right sometimes, but you still need to tune them out and do the job.

Social media kind of brings out the bully in everybody. People write stuff on Twitter that they would never say in person, or even in an e-mail.

It’s hard to find that balance. I understand that if you’re constantly searching for all of the public’s approval, you’re never going to get it. If you’re looking for other people’s validation, you’re just going to be constantly searching and never be happy.

this is me. This is who I am. You asked me to do this. If it’s not good enough, it’s not good enough. But I’m not going to be fake.”

At some point, the nepotism charge doesn’t fly. These aren’t desk jobs, where you can be the Vice President of Doing Nothing, and everybody else in the office cleans up your mess, but nobody will fire you because your father owns the company. I’m the one who has to do the game. Kate has to act on-screen. Either you can do it or you can’t.

Nobody really wants to hear this, of course. In the big picture of my career, and my life, this is all a very small price to pay. I get that. But it can still mess with my head. I think the lesson is that, no matter how lucky you are (and I am certainly lucky), you’re still going to have challenges and tough days.

“Americans love a good success story. They’re just not sure what to do with the success story that comes out of a success story.”

You can’t build a show based on what it’s not. That just doesn’t work. You need a vision.

I asked Chad about calling out his quarterbacks, and he told me to give an example. I didn’t have one. Oops! I had never done a live interview show before, and I learned a lesson there: If you challenge the interviewee on anything, you better be able to back it up.

Sometimes I would turn to Steve Horn in the booth before games, or even as we were in a commercial break, and say, in my raspy voice, “I can’t do this.” And he would say, “You’re fine. You have a big instrument. If parts of it aren’t working, you have enough to get by. And you’re more than just your voice.”

The Rangers led the series 3–2, and they led the Cardinals 7–4 in the eighth inning. The Cardinals scored once in the eighth and twice in the ninth to tie it, 7–7. The Rangers took a 9–7 lead in the tenth, but the Cardinals scored twice in the bottom of the tenth. It was wild. Then, in the bottom of the eleventh, the Cardinals’ David Freese hit a game-winning home run to force Game 7, and I knew what to say: “We’ll see you tomorrow night!” I tried to say it with the exact inflection my dad had two decades earlier. Serious baseball fans knew it was a reference to my father’s famous call of Kirby Puckett’s home run to force Game 7 in 1991. I had actually said, “We’ll see you tomorrow night!” once before, in 2002, a few months after he died, when the Giants blew Game 6 of the World Series against the Angels. But this was different. It fit just perfectly because it was in St. Louis, David Freese was a St. Louis kid, and it was Game 6 of a World Series that forced Game 7. It was twenty years later, almost to the night.

I didn’t plan to say it. It was kind of bouncing around back there in the back of my head. I was reading the outfielder. I saw the outfielder’s shoulders slump, and as he turned, it just came out. I don’t know how. It’s not as if I was planning on a St. Louis kid hitting a home run to force Game 7. But that call turned into one of the most popular of my career. For me, it meant I was back.

It’s a lot more fun when you stop worrying about how people will react.

After all those years of trying to make everybody else happy, especially my girls, I realized how much they want me to be happy. And when you realize that, you realize that it’s OK to try to make yourself happy. It isn’t selfish.

I didn’t tell anybody I was getting tattoos. Nobody would have believed me anyway. I was embarrassed to show my kids. Natalie was in high school, and she said, “What the hell? What are you doing? Are you, like, having a breakdown? A midlife crisis?” She was looking at Michelle, who has two tattoos, and Michelle said, “I had nothing to do with this. I’m just learning about this today, when you are.” My mom was stunned, too. And you know what? That’s one of the reasons I got them: I’m in my forties, and I don’t need anybody’s approval. If they think I’m being foolish, so what? They will get over it.