From a supernova first half of the season, the team devolved until they looked like drunk Little Leaguers. Bats went cold, pitches went wild, players got injured. The Giants "dynasty" seemed, for the time being at least, eminently diminished.
At the moment they're in second place in National League West behind their much-hated rivals, the Los Angeles Dodgers, to whom they lost a series 2-1 this week. To be fair, new pitcher Matt Moore pitched a near-no-hitter for that Giants 4-0 shutout against the Dodgers Thursday, and last night the Giants smoked the Atlanta Braves, at home, 7-0.
Still, the season's recent downturn was all but unbearable to most fans. It was made just a little less so, however, by the presence of the team's longtime local cable television announcers, Duane Kuiper (pron. KIY-per), the play-by-play guy, and color commenter Mike Krukow (KRU-koh). The pair are known as "Kruk and Kuipe," although I shall hereinafter spell their names "Kruke and Kipe" to retain the phonetics of the way fans refer to them.
Both men are deeply versed in baseball's intricacies--Kruke, especially, offers perceptive insights into pitcher-catcher communications and choices--and their knowledge derives organically. Kipe played second base for the Cleveland Indians in the mid-to-late seventies, and was a Giant from 1982 to 1985. He overlapped in his final three years on the team with Kruke, who joined the Giants pitching staff in 1983 after splitting the previous decade between the Chicago Cubs and the Philadelphia Phillies. Thirty years ago, the right-handed Kruke pitched an astonishing 20-9 season. (He retired in 1990.)
The men, both in their mid-sixties, are longtime friends, and it shows in their commentary and banter. While they can be funny, even goofy in an understated way, their particular genius is in their capacity to leave space: they know when not to talk. Theirs is--cliche alert--a laid-back West Coast approach. It stands in opposition to the style of, for instance, ESPN's three-announcer teams, who will talk through and over pitch after pitch after pitch, often not even about the game itself.
Kruk and Kipe have a longtime colleague in the great Jon Miller, who has a radio man's knack for filling time with interesting observations, facts, asides. (Baseball is nothing if not an obsessive's game that mixes statistics and memory.) Miller does radio play-by-play, alongside Dave "Flem" Fleming, on KNBR-AM (680). Miller and Kipe often swap seats for a game's fourth through seventh innings: Miller pairs with Kruke on TV; Kipe and Flem do radio duty. Miller's delivery is enthusiastic, upbeat, fascinated; at sixty-four, he still sounds like a kid who can't wait to give you the play-by-play on the most awesome ground ball double play ever.
But for my money, it's Kruke and Kipe who consistently call it right.
Kipe speaks in a deep basso rumble; Kruke's voice, at a slightly higher pitch, has a hypnotic burr. They're easy to listen to, soothing, free of what sometimes seems the frenetic drive of younger announcers. For all of Major League's Baseball's attempts to speed up the game, baseball is unhurried, contemplative, redolent of some long-gone agrarian idyll. Kruke and Kipe are the easy voices of long, hot summer days spent lolling in the grass and staring at the sky.
Kipe often calls a play the way a lazy radio man might do it. For instance, referring to Giants second baseman Joe Panik and first baseman Brandon Belt, he'll say of an opposing team's weak hit, "That one's on the ground to second, and Panik gets it to Belt in time." He says what's onscreen, which of course is unnecessary; you're seeing it. But he'll only describe bits of the action, leaving your eyes (and brain) to fill in the rest. (Miller, and old-school radio guy, is more likely to describe everything.) This doesn't mean Kipe isn't excitable: his voice will rise to a near shout at, say, a great outfield play ("Denard Span is running, diving--AND HE MAKES THE CATCH!"), and a Giants home runs spark his catch phrase: "It. Is. OUTTA HERE!!" (See the second video, below.)
Their game commentary is invaluable, informative, incisive, but it is in their observations of fans picked out by the cameras that Kruke and Kipe really shine. A shot of a woman and her kids will prompt from Kruke a truly sweet disquisition about, well, moms and their kids. Women of any age decked out in Giants gear are dubbed "gamer babes." (There is exactly zero sexual connotation to the phrase. Some women even carry handmade signs assigning themselves the name, in part to attract TV--and thus Kruke and Kipe's--notice.) Seeing a kid licking an ice cream cone, Kruke will say, "Hey--I want one!" Fans dressed in nutty costumes will elicit a verbal thumbs up. In this way, the announcers make the stadium seem like one big family; TV viewers feel like part of the tribe. As Kruke will say, "Put on the colors, come to the yard, and hang out with forty thousand of your closest friends."
Not that Kruke is always benign. When an opposing team's batter strikes out, he might break out his wry catch phrase, "Grab some pine, meat," another way of saying, "Siddown, dude." The "pine" refers to old-time dugout benches constructed out of wood.
Longtime viewers soon come to see that definite codes exist in the land of Kruke and Kipe.
Referring to foul balls batted into the stands and caught by fans, Kruke often says, "Bring a glove, get a ball." But it's whom you give the ball to when you catch it that counts. If a guy neglects to offer a caught ball to the woman he's with, Kruke and Kipe may razz him for an entire inning. "Give her the ball, dude," they'll say, over and over, as the camera cuts back and forth from field play to shots of the guy and his date. The ribbing is always gentle, and never wholly unkind. But it still digs. (See the first video, below.)
If there's no woman nearby, the code dictates that you give the ball to a child. Giants (and other teams') fans do this all the time; one of the evident joys of being at the ballpark lies in catching a foul ball and then making a kid's day by handing it to him. Not all teams observe the practice, however, and during Thursday's Giants-Dodgers game, held in LA, that got under Kruke's skin.
Teams hire men and women to don a uniform and a glove and to sit in front of the stands on the first and third base lines. They're there to catch batted balls that have rolled foul, so that the things don't bounce onto the field of play. In Kruke and Kipe's world, these folks are known as "Ball Dudes" and "Ball Dudettes."
The Dodgers' first-base-line "Dudette" on Thursday made a great stop of a bouncing foul ball rifled off a Giants bat. But she tossed it to a middle-aged man in the stands who sat in front of two young boys. Kruke noted her choice, saying, doubtfully, "Maybe she was trying to get it to the kid behind him."
An inning later, she made a similar play, impressing Kruke and Kipe. But she flipped the ball to a heavyset guy in the front row. "She made a great pick," Kruke said, referring to the catch. "Now, if she could just figure out who to get the ball to, she'd have the whole package."
Yet later in the broadcast, the young woman made another terrific stop. Kruke still carped about her choice of ball recipients, pointing out the heavyset front-row dude.
"There's no reason that guy should get the ball," he said.
"Unless," Kipe added, drily, "he's her father."
The attraction of Kruke and Kipe, to me, exceeds the confines of the ball yard. Any longtime local will tell you that San Francisco has changed almost beyond recognition. Big new glass buildings scrape (and block) the sky. Rents and purchase prices have soared. The middle class, communities of color and artists have been priced out of the place. What once was a progressive bohemian haven now seems the exclusive province of the very well-off.
The same has happened, in varying ways, to surrounding communities, and this has affected the tenor of the region. Forty years ago, the Bay Area had a simple national reputation: "anything goes." (It was not wholly accurate: there have always been conservative pockets here.) Now, the city and its outlying environs can seem to bristle with tension; some days, anxiety seems the ruling norm.
If baseball is indeed redolent of an agrarian past, a notion brimming with melancholy and nostalgia, Kruke and Kipe themselves are relics (in the best sense) of an era when the San Francisco Bay Area was nuts (in the best sense), when people handled calamity with elbow-in-the-ribs humor, when kookiness was the norm and every day seemed to promise magic, at least to those who believed in such things. (We were many, and we were evidently deluded, alas.)
All of this will one day go, of course. Baseball, beset by its own changes and battling both smart-phone halved attention spans and endlessly multiplying entertainment options, is losing its audience. San Francisco isn't "San Francisco" any more. Kruke and Kipe will age out of the announcer's booth someday. The Baby Boomers will pass off the scene, largely unlamented. And life will go on.
Until then, I'll continue to tune in to hear Kruke and Kipe call plays, parse strategy, mock or praise fans, and otherwise describe the passing moments of a passing pastime in a passing life, and I will happily release myself to the comforting burble of their gentle chatter until such time as this whole mad game itself shall end.
Kruke and Kipe
Give. Her. The. Ball.
It is OUTTA HERE!
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