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

by Joe Buck

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.