Joe Buck gets honest about social media

After seeing Bob Costas endure the wrath of a social media groupthink during the Major League Playoffs, Joe Buck can relate.

Buck joined The Michael Kay Show Monday afternoon to preview ESPN’s Monday Night Football matchup between the New York Jets and Buffalo Bills. And near the end of the interview, Kay asked Buck, who called 23 World Series, what he thought about the vitriol being directed at Costas . While Buck noted he tells everyone who seeks is guidance to ignore the critics on social media, he didn’t always heed his own advice.

“Forever, I was the only guy doing national baseball during the social media era and I’ve taken my lumps. And it wore me out,” Buck admitted. “I could sit here and go, ‘Oh, that stuff didn’t bother me.’ It bothered me. And I don’t know how if you’re a human being who cares about what other people think and do, and you try to be a good person and you try to do a good job, and then you read how much you suck or ‘You’re lucky you had a famous dad’ and ‘You hate my team’ and all that other stuff.

“As silly as some of that stuff is, it gets annoying. And it just takes some of the fun out of it. So when people go, ‘Hey, do you miss doing national baseball?’ Yeah, on one hand, sure…but there’s that other side of the coin too so, it’s just ridiculous. I get it, because fans care. And that’s the good side of it. But for Bob to go through that, or anybody…you have to just tune that stuff out and go do your job and you either do that or don’t do it. These days, I’m not doing it.”

No one faced more criticism on social media during the division round of the MLB playoffs than Costas, who called the New York Yankees-Kansas City Royals series alongside Ron Darling. Unfortunately, once fans gather on social media to prey on a target, it’s hard to slow the ensuing snowball effect.

“It affected my calls,” Buck said. “And here’s the part where we tab Awful Announcing. In 2006, I made a call at the end of the World Series and I was so beaten down by the, ‘Oh, he’s from St. Louis, the Cardinals are gonna win the World Series, they’re gonna beat the Tigers’ and ‘How’s the St. Louis guy doing this?’ and ‘This is awful.’ And I can honestly say, when you do these games, I’m worried about my job…but when you get death by a thousand cuts, it starts getting in your head.”

And according to Buck, it got in his head so much during the 2006 World Series that it had a negative impact on his final call. Twitter had just launched a few months before that World Series, so it’s safe to say the social media vitriol didn’t really exist the way it does today. But that doesn’t mean Buck was without his share of critics.

Buck, however, says he started saying ‘screw it’ to the social media noise and criticism shortly after having vocal cord surgery in 2011. Which means Buck was able to have a sort of awakening before social media became the toxic echo chamber it often proves to be today.

[ The Michael Kay Show ]

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