Among 2004 Red Sox remembrances, a salute to Joe Buck being such an excellent part of the soundtrack
“Red Sox fans have longed to hear it. The Boston Red Sox are world champions.”
As we bask in all the welcome reminiscences and nostalgia of the pending milestone anniversary of the 2004 Red Sox world championship, a reminder from the broadcasting side of the greatest baseball redemption story ever told.
Joe Buck delivered that October almost as often as Big Papi did.
Twenty years later, Buck’s calls as the play-by-play voice of Fox’s broadcasts of the American League Championship Series comeback against the Yankees and sweep of the Cardinals in the World Series remain the perfect narration of a plot twist Red Sox fans had waited generations to experience.
Buck’s calls endure. And that is calls, plural. At least two — at least — probably come to mind without a prompt.
Let’s begin with the end, and his most important call — the final out of the World Series, of course, when the Cardinals’ Edgar Renteria hit a one-hopper back to Sox closer Keith Foulke.
“Back to Foulke. Red Sox fans have longed to hear it. The Boston Red Sox are world champions.”
Red Sox fans have longed to hear it. It was the perfect sentiment in the moment of catharsis, and it remains perfect two decades later.
So how did Buck know what to say?
“I’ve been thinking about this, and I actually don’t know where the hell it came from,” he said with a laugh during a recent conversation. “But I can tell you I didn’t think about it prior to that moment.”
Buck explained that he learned a lesson during Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa’s pursuit of the single-season home run record in 1998 of not pigeonholing himself into a certain turn of phrase. Or, for that matter, a soliloquy on All That This Epic Moment Means.
“If you go with something that you thought of in the morning rather than in real time, it can be a trap,” he said. “You can’t plan something that shouldn’t be planned, because it’s not going to be true to the situation.
“So when Foulke gets that one-hopper from Renteria, I’m just glad that I was willing to trust myself to come up with something that made sense in the moment. You can get too wrapped up in trying to summarize 86 years of frustration and heartbreak on one simple comebacker to the mound.
“I don’t want to act like I have all the answers, but what I try to do is get the right words out, whatever they are, say what happened as quickly as you can, and then get out of the way and let our cameras and our director capture what is happening on the field.”
Twenty years ago, Fox baseball broadcasts, under the direction of Bill Webb, emphasized tight shots and emotion — zooming in on Pedro Martinez’s intimidating stare, or lingering on a nervous fan who appeared to be carrying the weight of 86 years on their shoulders. (There were a lot of those.)
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Knowing that pictures didn’t need his words to help tell the story, Buck fell silent for nearly 45 seconds after the final out. He let the moment breathe.
“The cameras are going to get that natural reaction of these grown men acting like little boys, having just accomplished something that hadn’t been accomplished in eight-plus decades,” said Buck. “What am I going to say that’s going to be better than that?
“Now, I think all of us who do what I do live in fear of dead air. Because there is this, the little insecure voice in your head that says ‘The viewers think you don’t know what you should say here.’ But nobody really thinks like that. Besides, there’s no dead air anymore anyway because the microphones are so good.”
In a sense, Buck’s call of the final out was also a tribute to objectivity, given his familial ties to the Cardinals organization. His father, Jack, was the beloved voice of the franchise for nearly 50 years, and Joe himself called Cardinals games from 1991-2007.
And yet the World Series final-out call may not have even been his most memorable from that postseason, in part because of a subtle way he paid homage to his dad.
In Game 4, when David Ortiz’s 12th-inning walk-off homer kept the Red Sox alive and ended a 5 hour, 2 minute game well beyond midnight, Buck said, “Ortiz into deep right field, back is Sheffield, we’ll see you later tonight.”
The last five words were a nod to Jack Buck’s famous call of Kirby Puckett’s walk-off home run in Game 6 of the 1991 World Series, which he punctuated with, “and we’ll see you tomorrow night!”
“I actually made a similar call in the 2002 World Series between the Angels and Giants, the year my dad died,” said Buck. “It was one of the national calls that he was known for. And then two years later, there you are in ‘04, and it was just kind of a play on that because the game was so [expletive] long.”
Buck hasn’t called a national baseball game since joining ESPN, along with his longtime NFL broadcast partner Troy Aikman, as the network’s “Monday Night Football” team in March 2022.
“When people go, ‘Oh, do you miss doing baseball?’ I miss Yankees-Red Sox, I’ll tell you that,” he said.
Then he noted one more call from that postseason that supports his explanation for how he approached those crucial end-of-game calls. When Ortiz won Game 5 with a 14th-inning RBI single, Buck called it as such:
“Ortiz fights it off, center field. [Johnny] Damon running to the plate, and he can keep on running to New York. Game 6 tomorrow night.”
Said Buck: “I think that one kind of proves again that it can’t be something you thought of that morning. Damon running home is an example of what fits the situation rather than what you might have dreamed up ahead of time.
“In baseball, you just don’t know what’s going to happen. You can’t plan for it. The Red Sox that October were proof of that over and over and over again.”
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