Rickey Henderson ran on Mike Krukow once, and Krukow kept the stopwatch

The Dodgers come to Oracle Park on Friday night for the last three games of the season. Friday starts at 7:15. Saturday starts at 1:05 and Sunday at 12:05, and when Sunday's game is over Mike Krukow takes off the headset for the last time as a regular member of the Giants' television crew.

He is 74. He started in 1990, part-time, on KNBR, and he and Duane Kuiper became full-time partners in 1994. Counted from 1990 it is thirty-seven seasons, and that is the number Krukow uses himself. On Monday morning he goes on KNBR one more time.

The stopwatch#

Before any of that he was a pitcher, and before he was a good one he was a Chicago Cub, and one spring the Cubs played Oakland and the first man up was Rickey Henderson.

Krukow told the story this month to Susan Slusser of the San Francisco Chronicle, at his house in Reno. He had heard about Henderson coming up through the A's system and wanted a look at him. Henderson singled to left on the first pitch of the game. From the set position Krukow could not see him, the lead was so long. He threw over, and Henderson was back standing up. Henderson stole second standing up. Krukow varied his looks, turned to go to the plate, and Henderson stole third, standing up again.

Krukow filed it away. He learned to handle the running game, and he still keeps a stopwatch going during games, timing pitchers to the plate, catchers' pop times, runners down the line to first.

Around the same years, at a golf tournament in Southern California, Bill Rigney, who had managed the Giants, told the young Cub he had not come close to his potential and asked him whether he was working hard enough to reach it. On Tuesday night at Oracle Park, the local chapter of the Baseball Writers' Association of America gave Krukow the award that carries Rigney's name, which usually goes to the player or coach who is most accommodating with the press. Krukow told the Rigney story when he accepted it. "There was no nicer human being on the planet," he said.

1985#

He came to San Francisco in the December 1982 trade that sent Joe Morgan to Philadelphia. In his third season with the Giants the club lost 100 games. It went 62-100 in 1985, and Krukow was 8-11 with a 3.38 ERA for a team he remembers as one that did not hit much and did not catch the ball well.

Al Rosen and Roger Craig took over at the end of that season. "By the end of spring training, we all believed," Krukow told Slusser. "Nobody was giving us any chance to do anything other than lose 100 or more in 1986, but all you had to do was see how we caught the ball." The 1986 Giants went 83-79. Krukow was 34 that summer, and he went 20-9 with ten complete games. It was the only time he won twenty.

He brings up 1985 because of the team he is leaving, which has lost more than 90 games this year. He watched one recent game from a suite rather than the booth, sitting off to the side instead of behind the plate, and he said the angle let him see the whole defense move at once, "take that first step, get that first lean, that first cheat step." He named Turner Hill, Jonah Cox, Grant McCray and Drew Gilbert as the players he was studying.

The last pitch Krukow threw in the major leagues came on Sunday, June 4, 1989, in Atlanta. He went four and two-thirds innings and allowed five earned runs, and he did not pitch in the big leagues again. The next season he was on the radio.

Sunday's game against the Dodgers is also on a Sunday. There are 13,629 days between the two.

The locker next door#

The first time Krukow saw Kuiper, Kuiper was a Cleveland second baseman taking infield in Tucson, where Krukow, as he tells it, always seemed to get his first spring start, on an infield so hard and dry he compared it to pitching on the moon. Kuiper was putting on a show. "I didn't like him," Krukow told Slusser, and called him a peacock, with an adjective in front of it.

By 1983 they were teammates in San Francisco, and the clubhouse manager, Mike Murphy, gave them lockers side by side. On the days Krukow did not start, the two of them sat on the bench and talked. When they both became broadcasters, Krukow said, the days did not change much: "get up, go have coffee, go have lunch, go back and have a nap, then sit on the bench and talk about baseball, basically."

On Tuesday night, calling the game against Minnesota, Krukow was praising the young players, and Kuiper opened a negotiation on the air, as the Chronicle's Shayna Rubin transcribed it.

"So, you like September?" Kuiper said.

"I love September. It's a baseball player's favorite month," Krukow said.

"Maybe just come back for Septembers. We'll negotiate that."

Dinner#

"We're having dinner with everybody every night," is how Krukow puts the job. There was Len Herzstein, a ball dude with big feet who took a ball off one of them and got a new name on the air for it. There were the Gamer Babes, a group of women who came to games together; the booth named them the Gamer Babes of Half Moon Bay because it sounded good, and one day in Half Moon Bay, Krukow said, somebody was selling the T-shirts. Then came signs for the Gamer Babes of Visalia and of Petaluma.

"I feel like in the last 37 years, at one point or another, we put every Giants fan that ever came to the ballpark in the history of the Giants on TV," he told Slusser.

Since he announced in August that this season was his last, the club has saluted him between innings at every home game he works, and he waves back from the booth. He told Slusser it took him some time to settle on the wave. "Rose Queen or Pope's walk?"

Hands#

The house in Reno has a baby grand piano, and it belongs to Jennifer. They have been married fifty-one years. Krukow plays strings and drums, and his office holds guitars, banjos, basses, bouzoukis, a cello and ten harmonicas, each in a different key.

He has been plain about the inclusion body myositis he made public in 2014, and it is the reason he gave for stepping away. When he announced his retirement on August 6 he told Alex Pavlovic of NBC Sports Bay Area, "I don't want to quit." He told Slusser that the doctor who diagnosed him said it was not life threatening but was life altering, and that he walked out of the appointment feeling he had hit the lottery, because it meant he could stay in the game.

The only baseballs on display in his office are three signed ones, from Willie Mays, Vin Scully and Peter Gammons. "The three best in the three best areas of baseball," he said. There is a fourth, a worn official ball with Bart Giamatti's name on it, and Slusser reported that he rolls it around in his hands constantly.

One night on the concourse at Oracle Park, Slusser reported, he posed for pictures with about thirty fans in fifteen minutes. Two of them were children, and he stopped to teach them how to shake hands. He made sure each grip was firm, and that each of them said their name clearly.

Sunday#

Sixty or more family and friends are coming on Sunday, some from other states, and they will fill two suites. His children, Jarek, Baker, Tessa, Chase and Weston, will be there with their families. He has an idea of what he will say to the crowd and he has kept it to himself.

For four years Jennifer has done all the driving, three and a half hours from Reno to San Francisco, twice a month. On Monday he does his last KNBR spot, and the two of them leave the apartment in the city for good. The movers are already scheduled.

Sources: San Francisco Chronicle: Susan Slusser, "Giants announcer Mike Krukow says he will retire after this season" (August 6, 2026; the 1990 KNBR start and the 1994 full-time partnership), "Mike Krukow opens up on life after baseball, first meeting Kuiper" and "Mike Krukow looks back at 1985 Giants, feels good about Vitello's team" (both published September 21, 2026, from interviews at his home in Reno), and "Krukow says Giants fans 'did more for me than I've ever done for you'" (published September 23, 2026); Shayna Rubin, on the Bill Rigney award and Tuesday's broadcast (published September 22, 2026). NBC Sports Bay Area: Alex Pavlovic, "Giants broadcaster Mike Krukow to retire at end of 2026 season" (August 6, 2026; the phone interview and the 2014 disclosure). MLB Stats API: Krukow's year-by-year pitching record and 1989 game log, the Giants' 1985 and 1986 records, and the final home series schedule and telecasts.