In the NFL world, one of the bigger stories of the last week or so has been the changing media landscape but now, that media landscape has traversed into the baseball world.
According to Andrew Marchand of The New York Post, Joe Buck will be likely be leaving FOX Sports to join ESPN to broadcast Monday Night Football. If he does leave FOX, Buck will no longer be broadcasting the All-Star Game, a League Championship Series, and the World Series each year.
Joe Buck may not be broadcasting the World Series on FOX anymore
Joe Buck has been broadcasting Major League Baseball on a full-time basis since he was 22 in 1991. He was the TV broadcaster with the St. Louis Cardinals through 2007 but he joined FOX Sports in 1994 as an inaugural member for them with broadcasts for football. He later gave up football when FOX got rights for baseball in 1996 but he has pulled double duty as their number 1 voice for both sports since 2002.
As a result of that, he only worked part-time with the Cardinals from 2002 through 2007, before he gave that up to be with FOX full-time.
In his time at FOX, Buck has called 24 World Series (1996, 1998, 2000-2021), which puts him in a three-way tie for the all-time lead. Buck’s former analyst Tim McCarver (1985, 1987, 1989, 1990-93, 1995-2013) and broadcast legend Vin Scully (1953, 1955-56, 1959, 1963, 1965-66, 1974, 1979-1982, 1984, 1986, 1988, 1990-97) are the two broadcasters tied with him.
If Buck joins ESPN, he will likely do baseball in some capacity, but FOX has exclusive rights to the World Series. ESPN will have rights to all four Wild Card games in 2022, but those are the only televised playoff games that they have.
They do have rights to all playoff games on radio so, for Buck to break the all-time record for World Series broadcast, he will have to broadcast the games on radio and something would have to happen with Dan Shulman, who has been with ESPN since the late 1990s. He has been the radio play-by-play broadcaster for the World Series on ESPN Radio since 2011.
As for replacements on Buck on MLB coverage, Los Angeles Dodgers TV broadcaster and Buck’s MLB #2 Joe Davis is the clear frontrunner as an internal replacement.