Buck’s quarantine gig: Play-by-play of your home videos
Around dinnertime March 22, Andrew Cordisco grilled chicken wings on his back deck. He aimlessly scrolled through Twitter while waiting to flip the wings. Cordisco doesn’t follow Joe Buck, but a friend had retweeted the sportscaster’s post asking for household videos.
With the absence of sports spawned by the novel coronavirus pandemic, fans have sought to fill that gaping void with game simulations, replays and sports movies. Buck’s contribution to the effort began that weekend, when he committed to offer play-by-play for videos as simple as preparing dinner.
Cordisco chuckled when he saw the tweet, then asked his wife to film an uneventful clip in which he placed the sauced wings back onto a sizzling grill, never acknowledging the camera. After Cordisco sent in his submission, he let the video slip out of his mind.
By Tuesday evening, Cordisco saw hundreds of Twitter notifications rolling in. He immediately knew why.
“Look at this,” Buck says as Cordisco places the wings onto the grill. “They were already hot coming out. They’re back on the grill. The sauce is inside the bowl. Reaching back in. Wanting more. They keep coming out of that bowl. How many can you give us, Andrew? Unbelievable!”
Buck, the son of legendary announcer Jack Buck, has called 22 World Series and six Super Bowls for Fox. From his St. Louis home, he is now calling these lighthearted videos, which Fox dubbed “Quarantine Calls.” Buck has provided humorous analysis of dogs chasing each other on an empty field, chickens wandering around in their coop with a seesaw and an airline employee marshaling a plane to its gate. Dozens of these videos fill Buck’s Twitter feed and have combined for millions of views.
“I didn’t know that it would take off,” Buck said in a telephone interview. “That’s where we are. I think people are starved for something along these lines.”
Buck’s foray into this realm of playful sportscasting began with a text from his boss, who joked he could call internet videos to stay sharp. But that quickly turned into a realistic idea to fill the time.
Some of the submissions that have caught Buck’s attention have been makeshift family sporting events, such as a two-on-two living-room basketball game — “anything that’s creative like that and points out how we’re all in the same sort of situation,” Buck said. He has also received numerous pet videos because, he said, “everybody’s very proud of their dog.”
Having such a positive experience on social media has been “mind-blowing,” Buck said, and he plans to continue until others grow tired of it. In the meantime, he’ll continue narrating an indoor tennis match between brothers and analyzing a professional golfer’s effort to hide his receding hairline.
“I’ve been doing this a long time,” Buck said, “and you find there’s always something to say.”