The
Buddy System: Long-lasting friendship between Krukow, Kuiper
comes across the airwaves
"Every
day we come to work, we're going to laugh -- hard."
By Daniel Brown, San Jose Mercury News, Monday, June 2,
2003
It happens all the time. Whenever Duane Kuiper has the temerity
to walk around San Francisco without his Giants broadcasting
partner, fans stop him cold.
"The
first thing they say is, 'Where's Kruk?' '' he said. "People
think we're attached, that we're Siamese twins, that we
cannot go one place without the other.''
Kuiper
sometimes explains to astonished onlookers that Mike Krukow
prefers to spend time with his wife and five children.
Then
comes an awkward pause.
"Then
they'll say, 'Oh really? We thought you guys were married,'
'' Kuiper said.
The
confusion is understandable. After 20 years of comic bliss,
on the field and in the booth, Krukow and Kuiper have the
kind of sweet chemistry that ought to be the envy of actual
married couples.
In
baseball, as in love, diamonds are forever.
"How
many people get to work with their best friend?'' is how
Krukow put it. "We know that every day we come to work,
we're going to laugh -- hard.''
Kruk
and Kuip -- nobody calls them Mike and Duane -- might be
the most popular Giants this side of Barry Bonds. Two decades
after they first cracked each other up in a spring training
game, Krukow and Kuiper have yet to tire of the other's
company.
The
duo reached a ridiculous level of popularity this season
when the team's official souvenir store began selling their
replica jerseys, 18 years after Kuiper's last hit and 14
years after Krukow's last pitch. Sales quickly topped 1,000,
prompting officials to order more.
The
Kruk-Kuip bobblehead doll, which spouts the broadcasters'
catch phrases at the press of a button, helped raise $2,000
at a charity auction. Electronic Arts picked the duo to
serve as the voices of its hot-selling MVP Baseball 2003
video game.
Female
fans show up at Pacific Bell Park toting signs that read
"Duane's Dames.'' Others wear T-shirts bearing Krukow's
catch phrases, such as the strikeout salute, "Grab
some pine, Meat.''
"The
great thing is the interaction between them,'' said retired
broadcaster Hank Greenwald, who helped tutor the duo in
their early days. "Here are two guys who were friends
and teammates long before they stepped into the booth, and
that comes across on the air. From the start, there has
been a natural rapport.''
Travel
partners
Unlike
at home, there is virtually no chance of bumping into Kuiper
without Krukow while the Giants are in another city. "He's
my road wife,'' Kuiper joked. On a typical trip, they eat
breakfast together, take walks, work out, do lunch and sit
side by side on the team bus.
As
if that isn't enough, Duane and his wife, Michelle, occasionally
spend a weekend in Carmel with Mike and Jennifer Krukow
during the off-season.
Life,
it seems, is one long broadcast and their world one big
booth. Just spend a few days with them on the road. They
are off and rolling by breakfast, with the wisecracks sizzling
like bacon in grease.
Reporter:
"Duane, what's the dumbest thing Krukow has said on
the air?''
Kuiper:
"That's right, Kuip.''
This
day, last month in Phoenix, starts like the others on the
road: with a couple of rounds of java at Starbucks and a
large stack of newspapers. They read the sports pages aloud
at times, with Krukow unearthing things that Kuiper might
get a kick out of and vice versa. Each box score represents
something of an archaeological dig. "Rough debut for
that Padres rookie,'' Krukow said, pointing out an unsightly
pitching line. "Dmitri Young struck out three times
again.''
"We
like to point out things we wouldn't want our names associated
with,'' Kuiper explains.
It
is 8:30 a.m. when Krukow begins plowing through the crossword
puzzle. He's wearing a Giants hat and a purple T-shirt that
says, "Friends don't let friends drink white zinfandel.''
Kuiper and Krukow are across from the team hotel, the Ritz-Carlton,
so they chat with the Giants players and coaches who straggle
in for their morning buzz.
"People
say, 'When do you start preparing for a broadcast?' '' Kuiper
said. "Well, we're doing it right now. We've already
read everything in the paper. And whatever I might have
missed, he sees.''
Like
any classic couple, they have a cute story about how they
came together. On a rainy spring training day, March 24,
1983, just as Krukow was getting ready to throw his first
pitch to a fearsome Milwaukee Brewers lineup, Kuiper called
timeout from second base and came to the mound for a visit.
The
pitcher was mystified. Nobody ever halted play before the
first pitch of the game. Krukow, who had come over in an
unpopular trade that sent Joe Morgan to the Philadelphia
Phillies, figured Kuiper wanted to go over signs. "Instead,
he walks up and says, 'Whatever you do, don't let them hit
it to me,' '' Krukow recalled. "Then he patted me on
the back, turned around and walked back to his position.''
The
pitcher laughed. He recognized a good wisecrack when he
heard one. Or so he thought. Kuiper, near the end of a career
that included plenty of knee trouble, was struggling to
get loose.
"It
turns out he was serious,'' Krukow said, howling at the
memory of groundballs zipping past his second baseman. "He
would take one step, dive and miss it by 50 feet. I had
a rough outing. But I had a place in my heart for this guy
already.''
The
elements of that day in Arizona -- a laugh and a 9-0 loss
-- set the tone for their three seasons together. From 1983
to '85, the years Krukow and Kuiper were on the roster together,
the Giants went 207-279 and racked up the most defeats over
a three-year stretch in franchise history. Still, each credits
those years for ultimately making them better broadcasters.
If nothing else, they had to search through the muck for
ways of keeping the game fresh and fun. They began unleashing
the kind of offbeat humor that would become their hallmark
in the booth.
Bad
baseball, good humor
"Ah,
jeez, it was like managing a funny farm,'' Frank Robinson
said with a playful cringe in explaining how he handled
Kruk and Kuip. The Montreal Expos manager guided the Giants
in 1981-84. "They were kooky, goofy people. It was
like, 'What are they going to do next?' ''
When
asked for his recollections of Krukow and Kuiper, former
teammate Bob Brenly put it this way: "Have you talked
to their parole officers?'' Brenly, now the Arizona Diamondbacks'
manager, said both were quick with a zinger from the bench
-- at least on four out of five days. "On days Krukow
pitched, you couldn't even talk to him. Nothing was funny
about anything on those days.''
Besides
providing comedy material, playing on lousy teams had a
more practical effect. Kuiper and Krukow learned to stay
riveted to every pitch, reasoning that the only chance they
had of beating a more talented team was to be smarter. They
soaked in the nuances -- the positioning of cutoff men,
the proper way to back up a base -- that now make for enlightening
broadcasts.
"If
you did what they did, you were going to play the game right.
They were a positive influence on all the young players,''
said former teammate Mark Davis, who won the Cy Young Award
for the San Diego Padres in 1989. "I really looked
up to them. I'll put it this way: I've collected two uniforms
in my career. One is from Nolan Ryan and the other from
Kruk.''
Kuiper
began easing into broadcasting in 1983, when he took over
Morgan's postgame show on KNBR radio. He realized he was
nearing a full-time career change when a heckler let him
have it during his final season.
"I
was standing in the on-deck circle in 1985 when some leather-lunged
guy in the stands screams, 'Kuiper! Go to the booth -- NOW!'
'' he said. "I remember thinking, 'I'm going to accept
this as a compliment.' A year later, I was in the booth.''
Corey
Busch, then the team's executive vice president, helped
orchestrate Kuiper's second career by pairing him with Morgan
when GiantsVision made its debut in 1986. When Morgan bolted
for ESPN after the 1990 season, and with cable interest
in the Giants on the rise, Busch persuaded Krukow, who had
been Morgan's occasional fill-in, to take broadcasting more
seriously. By '91, Krukow was doing about 40 games a year,
and his chemistry with Kuiper carried over on the air.
"First
and foremost, those guys knew the game, which is what we
were trying to build our broadcasts around in those days,''
Busch recalled. "We wanted them to be entertaining,
too, but it was more important to be enlightening. We wanted
things explained not just at the macro level but with all
the nuances.''
Kuiper's
transition from player to play-by-play man came effortlessly.
Krukow, however, struggled early. His enthusiasm for making
a point ran roughshod over the action, and he often yapped
right through a pitch. "It was like trying to break
a horse,'' Greenwald recalled with a laugh. "He was
always ready to charge ahead with what he was going to say
and not always putting a lot of thought into it.''
Krukow
also tended to baffle listeners. He used the lexicon of
the locker room without much consideration for whether the
layman would understand what he meant by a "hanging
banger'' or a "one-hop seed.'' Krukow's partners urged
him to tone it down, but -- hundreds of broadcasts later
-- fans seem to have met Krukow halfway. The pitcher's wildly
inventive descriptions are now part of his charm.
At
his best, Krukow can sound like a cross between Mr. Baseball
and Dr. Seuss. Consider how he described it when Jesse Foppert
made a mistake and threw an 0-2 pitch down the middle to
the Diamondbacks' Dave Dellucci: "Foppert got pretty
froggy with that fastball. He put one right in Dellucci's
sweet hole.''
A
diving stop by the Giants first baseman is rendered as,
"J.T. Snow goes down to his belly to snuggle up to
a line drive.''
An
inside pitch that breaks a bat is a "shark bite.''
A
long practice home run by Bonds is a "a big potato.''
The
victim of a dugout prank is "a raving yahoolio.''
And,
of course, there is "Meat.'' It is the moniker Krukow
slaps on any Giants opponent who does something weak or
stupid. Krukow heard that term within his first minute in
a major league clubhouse, in 1976. The lanky rookie walked
in the door, and George Mitterwald, the Chicago Cubs' veteran
catcher, alerted his teammates to the arrival of fresh meat.
"When
I first started doing broadcasting, I was talking in a vernacular
where nobody knew what the hell I was talking about,'' Krukow
said. "But it made sense to me. That's the way we talked
about baseball on the bench and in the clubhouse.''
'He
hits it high . . .'
Kuiper,
meanwhile, has carved his niche with a rousing home run
call. He started doing it on television broadcasts in the
early 1990s, when Matt Williams was bashing majestic shots
around Candlestick Park. The call comes as a dramatic trilogy
-- "He hits it high! He hits it deep! He hits it out
of here!'' -- and viewers embraced it from the start. Kuiper
fell in love with the call, too, and began using it on the
radio. At least until Bob Agnew, his boss at KNBR, phoned
him after a broadcast in Denver.
"In
his typical warm-and-fuzzy style, Bob says, 'By the way,
I understand that Bonds hit it high and hit it deep and
hit it out of there. But would you mind telling me where
the home run went? Did it go to right or left or center?'
'' Kuiper recalled. "I was ticked, but he was right.
You have to be more descriptive.''
No
broadcast featuring Kruk and Kuip is complete without a
tongue-in-cheek riff on the fans in the crowd. A crooked
hat or a dropped foul ball might keep the duo occupied for
several innings, especially if the score is lopsided. On
other days, they might fixate on a kid eating cotton candy
or a senior ball dude misplaying a shot in foul territory.
"They're
unbelievable,'' said Jim Lynch, who directs Giants television
broadcasts and keeps an eye out for shots that might provide
comedic fodder. "There are some shows that I think
are driven by production people, but our show is announcer-driven.
We really listen to them and try to complement what they're
talking about.''
Before
the Giants' game at Arizona on May 21, something hilarious
takes place where, mercifully, there are no cameras. Shortly
before the broadcast, Kuiper parades into the press-box
restroom and proudly displays several dents on the door.
It turns out that Kuiper bolted in there a few years ago
just a minute before he was supposed to be back on the air.
In his haste to get back to the booth, he ripped off the
door handle and got stuck inside. He pounded on the door
in hopes of a rescue, but it came too late.
"He
didn't make it back until there were two outs in the inning,''
Krukow said, "and even after he did, he wasn't worth
a damn the rest of the night.''
The
two laughed hard, again, as they had since their first sip
of coffee. Then they slipped inside the broadcast booth
for another night of work.
Contact
Daniel Brown at dbrown@mercurynews.com
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