What Does Grab Some Pine Mean?
Short answer: go sit down on the bench. The longer answer is a Giants pitcher, a word for rookies that came out of a clubhouse, and a call that has been ending strikeouts on San Francisco broadcasts for decades.
"Grab some pine" means go sit down on the bench.
The full version, the one people are actually asking about, is "Grab some pine, meat," and Mike Krukow says it on the San Francisco Giants broadcast when an opposing hitter strikes out. It is a taunt. It is an affectionate one. It takes about two seconds.
The pine is the bench. Dugout benches were pine planks, and baseball has been sending people to sit on them for a long time. Baseball Almanac's dictionary defines it without crediting anybody: pine is the bench, and to be told to grab some pine is to be told to sit on it. Krukow did not invent that. What he did was weld it to one moment, every night, for long enough that a large number of people in Northern California can no longer hear the first thing without the second.
The man saying it#
Krukow pitched for the Giants before he talked about them. San Francisco acquired him from Philadelphia on December 14, 1982, in the trade that sent Joe Morgan the other way, and he has been attached to the franchise ever since. He pitched fourteen years in the majors and won twenty games in 1986, at thirty-four, which is not when that is supposed to happen. It bought him his only All-Star selection and third place in the Cy Young voting.
He reached the broadcast booth in 1990, first as an occasional radio analyst and then full time, according to Wikipedia's account of his career.
He was not the first one through that door. Duane Kuiper, his partner in the booth and his teammate before that, had been calling Giants games since 1986. "Kruk and Kuip" is the shorthand, and the two halves of it are not the same age.
What "meat" is doing there#
The word carrying the insult is "meat," and it came from the clubhouse rather than the booth. ESPN's feature on the partnership describes the phrase as an extension of Krukow's playing career: when he came up, every rookie was called Meat. It stuck hard enough that his son Baker told ESPN he was around ten before he worked out that Meat was a nickname and not his name.
So the call is a pitcher's needle, carried upstairs. A hitter strikes out, and the man on the microphone calls him a rookie and sends him to the bench in the same breath.
When it started, and the part nobody can date#
Kuiper's own account, in NBC Sports Bay Area's collection of the pair's sayings, puts it in 1983, the year the two of them first became teammates. That is seven years before Krukow was on the air with it. Wikipedia files it under the "Kruktionary."
What no published account seems to contain is the first broadcast it turned up on, and that is worth saying plainly rather than smoothing over. The habit is dated. The debut is not.
Where it stands right now#
He is still saying it, for a little under five more weeks.
Krukow announced on August 6, 2026 that he will retire at the end of this season. He is 74, and he has lived with inclusion body myositis, a degenerative muscle disease, which he disclosed publicly in 2014. The club counts 36 seasons in the booth. The Giants will mark the end of it on September 27, against the Dodgers, in the last regular-season game of the year at Oracle Park. On August 7 the ballpark ran a video tribute after the second inning of a game against Detroit and stood up for him.
His own words, in the statement the club released: "Our time together has been a gift." He closed it by borrowing a line from Green Day and answering it in the affirmative.
And the website#
Grab Some Pine takes the friendlier half of a phrase that was built as an insult. Nobody here is calling anybody a rookie. Pull up a bench. Sit down a while.
This site has no affiliation with Mike Krukow, the San Francisco Giants, or anyone who works for either. The name is a tip of the cap.
Sources: Baseball Almanac (baseball dictionary, "pine") and Wiktionary ("grab some pine") for the phrase and the bench; NBC Sports Bay Area (the Kruk and Kuip sayings collection) for the strikeout call and Kuiper dating it to 1983; ESPN (the Krukow and Kuiper partnership feature) for "Meat" and Baker Krukow's account; Wikipedia for the 1990 booth start, the full-time date and the "Kruktionary"; Awful Announcing for Duane Kuiper's 1986 booth start; ESPN and the San Francisco Standard (both August 6, 2026) for the retirement, his age, the illness and his statement; NBC Sports Bay Area (August 7, 2026) for the Oracle Park tribute; Baseball Reference and Retrosheet for the 1982 trade and the 1986 season.