Rusty Weiss
Veteran play-by-play announcer Joe Buck has revealed that he turned down an opportunity from ESPN to call MLB postseason games last fall.
The longtime broadcaster, who joined the network in 2022 primarily as the voice of Monday Night Football, disclosed the decision during a recent appearance on the Sports Media with Richard Deitsch podcast.
ESPN, which had previously held a major rights package including playoff baseball before opting out to renegotiate a lighter slate of regular-season games, approached Buck for early-round postseason duties.
However, the scheduling proved incompatible with his NFL commitments.
“As you and I sit here right now on April 10, I don’t even know who’s got the postseason anymore,” Buck said. “I assume ESPN’s got a game, maybe they don’t… Well, there you go — NBC has the Wild Card, so I’m not going to be doing that.”
“That was on the table last year, if it was something that I wanted to do,” he added. “When ESPN had their games in the early round, it just was at a bad time.”
Joe Buck reveals he turned down calling MLB postseason games for ESPN https://t.co/0Ldz8NT5Lg
— Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing) April 13, 2026
Joe Buck Says He Turned Down ESPN’s Offer to Call MLB Postseason Games
The 56-year-old, who has called a record 24 World Series during his career, said he no longer feels the need to pursue that chapter of his broadcasting career.
“And believe me, I’m the luckiest guy in the world; I wrote a book about that, that I got to do any of it,” Buck added. “But I just feel like that’s a chapter of my life that really, it’s an itch that doesn’t need to be scratched anymore. I’ve done all that stuff.”
Fans had a mixed reaction to the news on social media.
“Wish he had this same mindset for football,” one fan wrote, presumably indicating he hoped Joe would turn that gig down as well.
“Thank god,” another said. “The man is insufferable.”
Still, others view Buck’s contributions to MLB as irreplaceable.
“That actually hurts my soul. I understand where Joe’s coming from, but still,” one person lamented.
Another responded to the news: “Shame. He was starting to be well-liked in baseball by the fans.”
For years, Joe Buck has been the voice behind some of the most memorable moments in sports, from World Series games to Super Bowls.
However, this high-profile position also made him a target for criticism, which intensified with the advent of social media. Countless memes each year popped up about fans buying expensive playoff tickets just so they could avoid hearing Buck’s voice.
And while he found the whole shtick rather annoying, he also took it to heart. Though he suggests others in his field ignore the comments on social media, Joe admits he didn’t always heed his own advice. Mainly because he was the leading man during the rise of internet trolls.
“Forever, I was the only guy doing national baseball during the social media era, and I’ve taken my lumps. And it wore me out,” Buck said in an interview on the Michael Kay Show. “I could sit here and go, ‘Oh, that stuff didn’t bother me.’ It bothered me.”
“If you’re a human being who cares about what other people think and do, and you try to be a good person and you try to do a good job, and then you read how much you suck or ‘You’re lucky you had a famous dad’ and ‘You hate my team’ and all that other stuff,” he lamented.
Kylie Kelce, on her husband Jason Kelce’s late-night flop, They Call It Late Night, discussed the reasons behind Philadelphia fans’ dislike for Joe Buck.
“I was raised in a house where I was taught to dislike Joe Buck,” she said.
“I was taught that by my father,” Kylie continued. “I very much recognized the pattern in which it always seemed as though [Buck] was cheering for the other team.”
When the former Eagles center asked if she had any specific examples of Buck being biased, she replied, “Of course not.”
Buck is the son of legendary sportscaster Jack Buck.
