Joe Buck on Being Honored with Baseball HOF’s Ford C. Frick Award

The photograph shows a man standing in a meadow in Cooperstown wearing the expression of someone who just got away with something. Rich wanted to know what was actually going through his head. Joe Buck did not make him guess.

"That is a look of a man who just said, oh my god, I can't believe they didn't boo me," Buck said.

The occasion was the Ford C. Frick Award, which lands him in the broadcasting wing at the baseball Hall of Fame. He already had the Rozelle on the football side. Two halls of fame, and Buck spent approximately none of the conversation pretending to be solemn about it.

"I'm no longer the 27-year-old doing the World Series. I'm the old man now," he said. "I've got a gray beard. I've got dyed hair. I've got hair transplanted to the top of my head. But I'm in two halls of fame. So hey, yay me."

The weekend itself he described as genuinely heartwarming, standing on a stage looking out at people who were there for one reason, because they love baseball. Every inductee had a contingent. Every contingent had opinions.

Then there was the tie. Somewhere along the parade route, a fan informed Buck that he was doing this wrong.

"Somebody in the parade route said, where's the candy, you're supposed to be throwing candy," Buck said. "So I threw him my tie."

The postscript is better than the story. Buck had bought that tie off Instagram, and within roughly an hour of giving it away, the algorithm served the same tie back to him. He bought it a second time.

What actually carried the weekend was the arithmetic of who was sitting where. Buck was in that same crowd in 1987, a kid with his mother and his sister, watching his father receive this award. Thirty-nine years later his mother and sister were back in the crowd again, this time alongside his kids, both older daughters and his little boys, plus Michelle, his son-in-law, and his sister's family.

"Cooperstown is just an amazing place that feels stuck in time in the best possible way," Buck said.

Rich noted that the two of them first crossed paths at the 1996 World Series, Buck calling his first one, Rich doing SportsCenter. Thirty years of runway, and Rich used it to ask about the time Buck took a steroid to get through a broadcast.

Buck did not dodge it. He is, by his own admission, on the list.

"I got a shot. I got up off the deck. It was in Philly for an NFC Championship game. I think it was an Eagles-Panthers game," he said. He had woken up unable to make a sound, went to see an ENT in Philadelphia, and got a steroid injection from a man he still refers to as a genius.

"I don't know what kind of steroid that is. Whatever it was, I'm a big fan. I could talk by 7:00 p.m. that night."

Rich suggested the plaque should probably carry an asterisk. Buck agreed without argument. Two halls of fame, one tie purchased twice, and one broadcast that only happened because of pharmaceuticals.