The Giants Gave Up Joe Morgan For Mike Krukow And Got Forty-Four Seasons

On December 14, 1982, the Giants traded Joe Morgan and Al Holland to Philadelphia. Three players came back. One was a right-handed pitcher named Mike Krukow, who was 30 years old and had just gone 13-11 for the Phillies.

He has not left since.

Krukow announced Thursday, in a written statement from the club, that he will retire from the broadcast booth at the end of this season. He is 74. The reason he gave is the one he put on the record himself in 2014, when he disclosed that he has inclusion-body myositis, a degenerative muscle disease. The club says the run in broadcasting is 36 years. Count from the trade instead and it is 44 seasons, 1983 through 2026, in a uniform and then on the air, with nothing in between.

Most of the coverage since Thursday morning has been about the second half of that. The first half is worth the arithmetic.

Krukow pitched 14 years in the majors and finished 124-117 with a 3.90 ERA. That is a career, and it is not a great one. He made 355 starts and threw 2,190 and two-thirds innings. In five of his fourteen seasons his ERA was better than the league average, adjusted for his ballparks. In the other nine it was not.

Then 1986 happened. He was 34, which is not when this is supposed to happen. He went 20-9 with a 3.05 ERA, threw 245 innings and ten complete games, struck out 178, made the All-Star team and finished third in the Cy Young voting. It was the only 20-win season of his life and the only All-Star selection of his life, and he got both of them in the same summer at an age when most pitchers are being told about the bullpen.

The postseason record is one line long. October 1987, the National League Championship Series against St. Louis, one start. He threw a complete game, gave up two runs and won it. The Giants lost the series in seven. That is every postseason inning Mike Krukow ever pitched.

He was granted free agency on November 13, 1989, and never signed anywhere. The next year he was in the booth.

What he watched from there is the part worth counting. Eight men have managed the Giants since 1990: Roger Craig, Dusty Baker, Felipe Alou, Bruce Bochy, Gabe Kapler, Kai Correa for three games, Bob Melvin and now Tony Vitello. Three World Series titles, in 2010, 2012 and 2014, all of them under Bochy, whose record managing this franchise is 1,052-1,054. Bochy finished two games under .500 in San Francisco and won three championships inside it. The Octobers themselves went to the national networks, the way they always do, so the parades are the part of those years Krukow got to be in rather than call. He rode one of them on a fire truck up Market Street in 2012.

Here is where the tributes are slightly off, and it is not a small thing.

Nearly all of them have run some version of the partnership ends in September. It does not. It goes from two to one, and the half that stays is the half that was there first.

Duane Kuiper reached San Francisco a year before Krukow did, traded from Cleveland for Ed Whitson in November 1981. He played four seasons for the Giants and was released on June 28, 1985, which ended a 12-year career in which he came to the plate 3,754 times and hit exactly one home run. Krukow was still pitching then, and kept pitching for four more years. By the time Krukow's playing career ended, Kuiper had already been broadcasting. Awful Announcing dates Kuiper's first season in the booth to 1986 and Krukow's to 1990.

So the man leaving is the one who arrived second. Kuiper has been doing this job longer, and Kuiper is not the one who announced anything on Thursday.

What can honestly be said about him is narrow, and it should stay narrow. In March 2025 all four of the club's broadcasters, Kuiper, Krukow, Jon Miller and Dave Flemming, signed multiyear extensions. Krukow's comment at the time was that "we signed a new deal, and we're pretty damned excited about the whole thing." Nothing published since says Duane Kuiper intends to stop. That is not the same as a commitment, and nobody should read it as one. It is the absence of an announcement, which is all the record contains.

Larry Baer, the club's chief executive, said in Thursday's statement that Krukow and Kuiper "taught generations of fans about baseball" and called every game "with incredible insight, unmistakable humor and genuine heart." Krukow's own words in the release were about his wife. "Jennifer and I have been so blessed to be able to stay in the game for as long as we have," he said, "and it's really made it impossible to feel sorry for myself that my career is coming to an end."

The Giants will mark it on September 27, against the Dodgers, in the last regular-season game at Oracle Park. The schedule picked that date and that opponent long before Thursday, so the Dodgers being in town for it is luck. The club took the last home game it had.

It also lands on a bad team. San Francisco was 48-67 through Thursday and sold at the deadline, with 47 games left. Most of them will not matter, and Krukow has spent a good part of 36 years making that kind of game sound worth the three hours anyway.

The Giants gave up a Hall of Fame second baseman to get him. My read is that it worked out, though it took about four decades longer to prove than a December trade is usually given.

Kuiper keeps the booth. He was in it first.

Sources: Baseball Reference (career and postseason pitching records for Krukow and Kuiper; Giants managerial register; transaction records via Retrosheet), MLB.com and The San Francisco Standard (Thursday's announcement, Krukow's statement, the Baer quote, the September 27 date), ESPN and NBC Sports Bay Area (announcement details, remaining schedule), Sports Illustrated (March 2025 broadcaster extensions), Awful Announcing (booth start years).