Joe Buck is calling the Mets-Dodgers game on ESPN this Wednesday, April 15. As far as he\u2019s concerned, that\u2019s probably it for the season.<\/p>\n
Appearing on Sports Media with Richard Deitsch<\/a>, Buck \u2014 who during the same episode said he wants to spend the rest of his professional career at the Worldwide Leader<\/a> \u2014 addressed whether postseason baseball was ever on the table for him at the network he\u2019s been at since 2022. While he\u2019s made it inherently clear that that chapter of his career is closed, the opportunities haven\u2019t exactly gone away.<\/p>\n \u201cAs you and I sit here right now on April 10, I don\u2019t even know who\u2019s got the postseason anymore,\u201d Buck said. \u201cI assume ESPN\u2019s got a game, maybe they don\u2019t\u2026 Well, there you go \u2014 NBC has the Wild Card, so I\u2019m not going to be doing that. That was on the table last year, if it was something that I wanted to do. When ESPN had their games in the early round, it just was at a bad time. We were doing a Broncos game, and I would\u2019ve had to do the old stuff \u2014 leave in the middle of the night, go do a Tuesday night game after Monday Night Football. And believe me, I\u2019m the luckiest guy in the world; I wrote a book about that, that I got to do any of it. But I just feel like that\u2019s a chapter of my life that really it\u2019s an itch that doesn\u2019t need to be scratched anymore. I\u2019ve done all that stuff.\u201d<\/p>\n The postseason opportunity Buck is referring to existed when ESPN still had its old $550 million annual deal with MLB, which included Sunday Night Baseball, the Wild Card round, the Home Run Derby, and Opening Night. ESPN and MLB mutually opted out of that deal in February 2025<\/a> after commissioner Rob Manfred sent teams a memo<\/a> calling ESPN a \u201cshrinking platform\u201d and citing decreased coverage of the sport. ESPN carried its full existing package through the 2025 season while the two sides negotiated a new arrangement. Under the new three-year deal<\/a>, ESPN pays the same $550 million annually but gets a dramatically different package, which now includes 30 exclusive weeknight games, local broadcast rights for six league-controlled teams, and control of MLB.tv within its direct-to-consumer app. The Wild Card games and Sunday Night Baseball went to NBC as part of its return to baseball<\/a> after a 26-year absence.<\/p>\n The postseason Buck once could have called is now at a network he doesn\u2019t work for.<\/p>\n Buck\u2019s relationship with baseball<\/a> since leaving Fox for ESPN\u2019s Monday Night Football\u00a0booth in 2022 has been a slow, deliberate re-engagement. He left behind 24 World Series and a career\u2019s worth of October baseball, told anyone who asked that he didn\u2019t have the itch anymore, and declined ESPN\u2019s request to call a game<\/a> in 2022. Last spring, ESPN senior VP of production Mark Gross \u2014 who works closely with Buck on Monday Night Football \u2014 reached out about Opening Day at Yankee Stadium. Buck hesitated, then said yes. He called the Yankees-Brewers game<\/a> in March 2025 and told The Athletic afterward<\/a> that he felt like he hadn\u2019t left.<\/p>\n This year, Gross came back with the same ask. Buck is calling Mets-Dodgers for Jackie Robinson Day and will be joined<\/a> by Ron Darling and Orel Hershiser. By his own account, Buck has said he finds it easier to prepare for early-season games<\/a>, that launching off the beginning of a season is more natural for someone who hasn\u2019t been embedded in the sport daily for years. A Dodgers-Mets game in April, in other words, is the right assignment. A Tuesday night Wild Card game after a Monday Night Football broadcast was not.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Joe Buck is calling the Mets-Dodgers game on ESPN this Wednesday, April 15. As far as he\u2019s concerned,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":674887,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2288],"tags":[5,29037,2328,2304,4,11851,2305,2303,85574],"class_list":{"0":"post-674886","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mlb-postseason","8":"tag-baseball","9":"tag-joe-buck","10":"tag-major-league-baseball-playoffs","11":"tag-major-league-baseball-postseason","12":"tag-mlb","13":"tag-mlb-on-espn","14":"tag-mlb-playoffs","15":"tag-mlb-postseason","16":"tag-sports-media-with-richard-deitsch"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@mlb\/116398683967479814","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/674886","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=674886"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/674886\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/674887"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=674886"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=674886"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=674886"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}