Pressure is growing for Hall of Fame to do the right thing with Mike Krukow and Duane Kuiper

It still probably hasn’t fully sunk in that SF Giants broadcaster Mike Krukow will be retiring after the 2026 season. We only have until September 27 to hear him call games so you can bet fans are going to be tuning in these last few months.

The outpouring of love and praise from the baseball world yesterday after the announcement has been profound. While Krukow is more of a regional treasure that Giants fans know about but the rest of country may not be as familiar with, it was cool to see national baseball writers like Ken Rosenthal, Buster Olney, and Jayson Stark all share tributes to Krukow.

Rosenthal and Olney even advocated that the National Baseball Hall of Fame should change its rules surrounding the Ford C. Frick Award to allow Krukow and his longtime broadcast partner and best friend Duane Kuiper to be given the award together.

Whether the Hall of Fame, a notoriously hypocritical institution, actually listens and changes the rules to do something that would be universally accepted by everyone is another matter, but the fact that important voices are speaking out on this suggests a change could come.

It would simply feel wrong for either Kuiper or Krukow to get the award without the other one. They are peanut butter and jelly. They just go together so well that it makes all the sense in the world for them to share the honor.

Then again, it will feel wrong that they won’t get to finish out their broadcast careers together in the booth. In a perfect world, they would’ve retired together five years from now but Krukow’s health simply didn’t allow for the storybook finish that both he and Kuip deserved.

Hall of Fame should get it right for once with Kruk and Kuip

That’s why the Hall should make an exception for these two. If they don’t get to finish their careers together, at least let them be recognized together as arguably the greatest broadcast duo the game of baseball has ever known.

It’s all well and good for Olney and Rosenthal to post about it on social media, but there needs to be a real pressure campaign to make the Hall of Fame do the right thing on this because it certainly won’t do it on its own.

No matter what the Hall of Fame decides to do, though, Giants fans don’t need some institution in New York to tell them how great Kruk and Kuip are. We already know they’re the best to ever do it and that’s all that matters at the end of the day.

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