Longtime Blue Jays TV announcer Buck Martinez announced his retirement this morning. Martinez joined the Jays’ booth as a colour commentator nearly 40 years ago, for the 1986 season. He moved down to the dugout to manage the 2001 and 2002 seasons. After leaving the team, he worked for seven years in the the Baltimore Orioles’ booth before returning in 2010 as the play-by-play announcer with Pat Tabler as his main colour analyst for the next 13 years.
Buck missed the first half of the 2023 season while receiving cancer treatment. He returned in July, moving back to his old job providing colour and pairing back up with Dan Shulman, with whom he’d worked from 1995 through 2000.
The Buck/Tabby booth was the source of a lot of jokes on our site for many years, but in my opinion the Shulman/Martinez pairing was one of the best local broadcast booths in the league.
Buck turned 77 in November, so you can’t say he hasn’t put in his time. He’s been a part of the Jays organization my whole life (barring the brief Orioles stint), and I’m not young. I hope he amd his wife Arlene enjoy a long and happy retirement.
Why don’t we use the comments to share some memories of Buck’s Blue Jays calls. For me, the great “barbecues on boats” digression, when a guy grilling on his boat in McCovey Cove excited him and Pat so much that it derailed the broadcast for about three innings, is a treasured memory. There were also lots of calls of huge moments on the field, of course, but as much as anything a baseball broadcast booth functions as a couple of buddies you watch the game with, and there are a lot more August afternoons in indifferent seasons than there are World Series game sevens. That night in San Francico, for me, epitomizes what it was like to hang out with Buck and Pat, our friendly if loopy collective uncles, as they only sort of pay attention to what’s going on on the field.
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