Mike Krukow opens up about life in and after baseball – and the first time he met Duane Kuiper

RENO – Musical instruments and dazzling artwork greet visitors to the Krukow family home in the Eastern Sierra foothills, along with a gentle old golden lab named Patriot.

“The piano is Jennifer’s,” Mike Krukow said, gesturing toward the baby grand. “She’s the keyboard player.” He sticks to strings and drums, a beautifully melodic marriage of 51 years.

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There are a few nods to Krukow’s career here and there, but not many – a shelf full of Emmys and the glove the San Francisco Giants broadcaster used much of his 14 years in the big leagues. The majority of baseball memorabilia is what you might find in any serious fan’s place: seats from Candlestick Park, baseballs signed by Willie Mays, Vin Scully and Hall of Fame reporter Peter Gammons. “The three best in the three best areas of baseball,” Krukow said. Those are the only balls displayed in his office, unless you count the worn Bart Giamatti official baseball Krukow constantly rolls around in his hands.

Like Krukow himself, his home is about other people: his family – Jennifer, their five kids and five grandchildren – and his mentors, his idols and his passions. With its wide doorways and hallways and elevator, the Mediterranean-style house perfectly accommodates Krukow’s motorized wheelchair. He zips around comfortably, giving a tour, making coffee, feeding Patriot, seemingly unlimited in his activity.

A gifted musician, Krukow can’t play most of his instruments anymore. Inclusion body myositis, the progressive degenerative muscle disease he was diagnosed with 20 years ago, is not fatal but it is now affecting his fingers. He is limited to playing the ukulele and mandolin – he strums Tom Petty’s “Free Falling,” note-perfect – plus his dozens of drums and the harmonica, 10 of them lined up in different keys. His many guitars, banjos, basses, bouzoukis and the gleaming cello in his office are too heavy for him to handle.

“Month to month, things would change,” Krukow said. “You’d see it as gradual, and then it was progressing more like week to week.

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“Well, now it’s day to day. Every day you wake up and it’s a different set of rules.”

Krukow, 74, has become accustomed to these gradual losses, but a major shift looms this week that he and the Bay Area dread. Krukow is retiring from the TV booth and from the job he has loved for 37 years, and the week takes on even more poignancy after his longtime partner, Duane Kuiper, announced Sunday he is being treated for throat cancer. Kuiper said he will be back Tuesday and this weekend to help celebrate Krukow’s career.

Sunday, Krukow will take off the headset for the last time as part of the regular broadcast crew. And Monday, he and Jennifer will leave their San Francisco apartment for good. The movers are already scheduled. Their Reno home is just safer.

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“Because you lose these muscles, you’re susceptible to falls – and you have to avoid falls at all costs,” Krukow said. “The more I ride in this chair, the more I atrophy and the less I can walk. Now it’s gotten to the point where it’s hard to do everything and it isn’t going to get any better. I have problems swallowing now, I have to be really careful when I eat. It’s the nature of the game.”

Krukow is thankful, though – he feared he had ALS or multiple sclerosis when he first went to the ALS Center in San Francisco.

“I walked in with a cane and I was in a waiting room with probably 12 other guys and they were banged up,” he said. “Probably seven of them had ALS and the others had MS. And I’m sitting here thinking, ‘I don’t know which one, but I have this.’

“The doctor runs me through a few tests, and he goes, ‘I can tell you right now what you have, you have IBM. It’s not life threatening. It’s life altering. We don’t know the speed with which you’re going to deteriorate, but you’re going to deteriorate. You’re going to be on a cane. You’re going to be on a walker. You’ll be in a chair.’

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“I walked out of there, I felt like I hit the lottery because it’s allowed me to stay in this game, it’s allowed me to do a lot of the things that I still love to do or at least be there and witness them, going to my grandkids’ baseball game or tennis match or whatever they’re playing.”

Three of the Krukows’ five kids live nearby, which is why they moved up from San Luis Obispo, but the 3½-hour drive to San Francisco and back twice a month is tough. “Jennifer’s done all the driving for four years and never complains,” Krukow said.

They’re getting a new vehicle that will accommodate his motorized chair, and they are adding extra help around the house for Krukow. Getting back to the city, maybe even broadcasting a few games isn’t out of the question if it can be done safely, but for now, when Krukow steps away after Sunday’s finale, he’s approaching it the only way he can.

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“I don’t know where it’s going to go into retirement,” Krukow said. “I’m going to go dark for a while, only because I have to, and just sort through some of this unbelievable emotion that has been shared with me.”

At some point, he’ll write a book, a repository for all those stories viewers have heard over the years and that just pour out of Krukow. Bring up a name, a team, a scenario and he’s off: Over the course of an afternoon, he veers from tales of the disco era to cricket to Dom Perignon fountains in Montreal with Don Robinson. (The upshot of that last one? Krukow had to explain a $900 bill to Jennifer.)

Hall of Famers make many appearances. Krukow recalled the first time he faced Rickey Henderson, during a spring game while pitching for the Cubs against Henderson and the A’s. “I’d heard so much about him coming up through the A’s system that I wanted to see this guy,” Krukow said. “First guy up, it’s Rickey, first pitch of the game, wow, left field, now he’s at first base. I come set, and I can’t see him, his lead was so far.

“I go, ‘I’ll pick his ass off,’ throw over there – he’s back standing up. I come set, leg up, boom, he steals second standing up. I come set. I vary my looks. I turn to go. As soon as I go, Rickey steals third base standing up.”

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Krukow filed all that away to become a better pitcher, learning to handle the running game, and to this day he still uses a stopwatch during games, checking times to the plate, catcher pop times, runners’ times to first.

The best stories center around his longtime partner in the booth, Kuiper. The two are synonymous now, the beloved Kruk and Kuip of Giants fame, but Krukow’s first glimpse of Kuiper as an opponent during spring training in Arizona was not encouraging.

“My first experience with him was miserable,” said Krukow, who was with the Cubs at the time. “It seemed like I’d always get my first start in spring in Tucson, it’s the world’s hardest infield and it’s like pitching on the moon. It’s dry and ugly and then you watch all these guys with (Cleveland) who were taking infield and batting practice without their hat on and it pissed me off.

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“In the middle of all this was this peacock at second base, Duane Kuiper. When you watch him take infield, he was putting on a show. You couldn’t take your eyes off him. … I didn’t like him. F-ing peacock.”

By the time the two became Giants teammates in 1983, Kuiper was in more of a part-time role but, just as he had in Cleveland, he was running the show. Clubhouse manager Mike Murphy made them locker mates. Krukow was impressed with Kuiper’s easy air of leadership. They found themselves on the bench together, talking nonstop, on days Krukow didn’t start.

It was a conversation that never ended, with Kuiper going into broadcasting when his baseball career ended and Krukow following in a part-time role initially in 1990.

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“We did the things we did as players: get up, go have coffee, go have lunch, go back and have a nap, then sit on the bench and talk about baseball, basically,” Krukow said.

The friendship transcends baseball and broadcasting, but has not stopped Kuiper from making Krukow the frequent target of his wicked humor. Take the time he talked Krukow into rollerblading one morning along Lakeshore Drive in Chicago when that trend was taking off.

“I’m putting these things on, I’m lacing them up and whatnot while Duane is skating backwards and doing figure eights,” Krukow said. “Well, if he could do it, I could do this, right? We get about a mile, I hit a crack in the road, and whoop! I go down, boom, land on my stomach and hurt my ribs, I’m kind of laid out there and Duane comes up and he goes, ‘Well, I’m not going to carry you and I don’t think it’s bad enough to call 911 so you need to get your ass up.’ That’s the sympathy I got. I get up, we turn around – right into the headwinds, I’m miserable.

“So now we (later) get on the bus to the game, we’re heading up Lakeshore Drive and I look out the window at the spot, which everybody can see: Kuip had taken white chalk and done the outline of my body like a homicide victim. What an asshole!”

No one makes more fun of Krukow, though, than Krukow himself. Asked to share his best moments on air, he turns it into a discussion about the broadcast team as a whole and how much postgame shows with Kuiper, Jon Miller and Dave Flemming meant to him.

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His worst? He plunges straight in gleefully, remembering the time Aaron Rowand was playing with a rib injury and was hit by a sinker.

“When you get hit with a sinker, it’s just like you’re getting punched by a prize fighter, so he was in excruciating pain,” Krukow said. “My color commentary, I got caught right in between ‘a nasty hit’ and ‘a nasty shot,’ and it came out, ‘Aaron Rowand just took a nasty s-.’

“Kuip looks at me, like: ‘You’re on your own with this one.’ Howard Stern got it and he opened up his show for like two months in a row with it.”

Krukow accidentally swore one other time, when announcer Joe Angel knocked Krukow’s coffee into his lap at the close of an inning. “We’re going out, ‘And at the end of three innings, Giants 3, Marlins 2,’ and at the very end of it, you hear me going, ‘F- me!’ at probably 20% of the volume,” Krukow said. “You could just hear it, but I immediately get a couple text messages from friends going, ‘Hey, did you just say, ‘F- me?'”

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Krukow would like nothing more than to continue his longtime gig, and there’s hope he’ll return in a limited capacity, but he’d need new digs that can accommodate his mobility limitations safely. A home studio would be ideal but the equipment, a producer and an audio engineer are likely to be too expensive.

“I’m looking forward to when I can come back to San Francisco,” he said. “Hopefully I can do it as much as I possibly can physically. We’re trying to work that out.”

His family, including kids Jarek, Baker, Tessa, Chase and Weston, will be on hand with their partners and children Sunday. Sixty or more friends and family will cram two suites, many coming from other states.

“I can’t think too deep into it, I’ll start crying,” Krukow said. “This is a who’s who of ‘Who’s got it better than us?’ Jennifer is good and the kids have been great. When I first announced my retirement, they all came over for dinner – and it wasn’t the normal dinner. They were talking about what our lives have meant to them together because they’ve only known this lifestyle. They don’t know what’s beyond this.

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“I’ll never forget that night. It was warm and nobody was in a hurry to get home and it was just really nice. It’s been emotional for them, too.”

Krukow has an idea what he’ll say to fans Sunday, but he’s keeping that to himself, saving it for them. He’ll wrap up his broadcasting commitments the next morning.

“I don’t want to talk about the playoffs. I don’t want to talk about the Dodgers and I damn sure don’t want to talk about the basic agreement,” Krukow said. “I’m going to go off of KNBR on Monday (Sept. 28), and whether I come back or not, I don’t know. But if I did, it would be when baseball comes back.”

Scully warned Krukow when the Giants won their first title in San Francisco in 2010 that now he, Kuiper and the rest of the broadcast team would be etched on hearts.

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“Vin said, ‘Now you’ve done it, they’re never going to forget you – until the day you die, you’re going to be the one that told them the story of their beloved team,'” Krukow said. “That means I’m never going to retire – wherever I go, when I go to Costco, anywhere, they’re always going to come up to me and they’re always going to give me that love.

“I’m not retiring, I’m just going in different directions to reach out and stay in touch with this glorious relationship that we’ve had.”

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This article originally published at Mike Krukow opens up about life in and after baseball – and the first time he met Duane Kuiper.