“I Hope Your Team Sucks and Loses”: Inside the Head of John Kruk

John Kruk / Illustration by Britt Spencer

Last April, while broadcasting a Phillies game in San Diego, John Kruk noticed he had a window. The seventh inning had just started. The Phillies had a comfortable lead over the Padres. And a distinct, marine-layer lull had crept into Petco Park. It was a perfect opportunity for the legendary Phils slugger to rear back and throw play-by-play partner Tom McCarthy his favorite six-word question starter: Did I ever tell you about …?

On this particular Saturday night, Kruk leaned deep into his past. He recalled one of his Caribbean Series winter ball experiences in Mexico from the ’80s, when he’d taken a bus to play an exhibition game against a prison team. As the leadoff hitter that day, he’d grown curious about the team’s hard-throwing pitcher and inquired about how the imposing southpaw had landed behind bars. “I asked the catcher,” Kruk explained in between pitches. “He said, ‘Oh, he found his girlfriend cheating and he burned up her car with her and her boyfriend in it.’”

“Oh my GOSH,” McCarthy laughed in immediate exasperation, before pivoting back into broadcaster mode to call Trea Turner’s double. As the shortstop coasted into second base, Kruk used the organic interruption to button his profane tale.

“Very uncomfortable at-bat.”

The brief anecdote quickly made its rounds on social media and sports media aggregators eager to spread Kruk’s increasingly unfiltered gospel. As Kruk recalls, he hadn’t discussed the memory during that afternoon’s production meeting, nor had he been thinking about interjecting it earlier in the day. Not even McCarthy, keen on Kruk’s unique history, knew where his colleague was going to lead him. “Tom has no idea what I’m gonna say,” Kruk says, almost proudly. “And if the game’s boring, stuff just pops in my head and it comes out of my mouth. After the game, I’m like, ‘Man, I don’t know if I should have said that.’ But I forget about it after a while.”

The prison story is one drop in a bucket of colorful John Kruk musings — strange journeys into the recesses of the Krukker’s history and personality. Last season alone, he broke down the reality series Dance Moms, proposed naming a baby after an umpire, wondered why boys aren’t born with chest hair, recalled a frightening encounter with a giraffe, and described the moment a West Virginia farmer shot at him for stealing beer from his barn. After years compressing his candid observations as an ESPN analyst, Kruk has fully leaned in to the free-wheeling, fan-forward flexibility of the local broadcast booth — the casual camaraderie, the unabated passion, the digressive lulls — and become must-watch television because of it. “He can get off on a tangent sometimes, but I think that that’s part of who John is,” says Ruben Amaro Jr., former Phillies general manager and current game analyst. “He’s happy to be in somebody’s living room talking about his favorite sport.”

But Kruk’s appeal as a color commentator is more than his well of wild yarns, baseball IQ, and innate comic timing. In the same way Bryce Harper seamlessly embodies Philadelphia’s gritty, blue-collar ethos, Kruk oozes a passionate, unapologetic authenticity. He knows the franchise and its evolution. He loves crab fries and chews out inconsistent umpires. He hates to lose and desperately wants another ring. More than ever before, he’s in perfect alignment — with the city, the fans, and the idiosyncratic roster of himbo sluggers that ever-so-slightly resembles his own red-pinstriped teams. “He loves everything about this city,” McCarthy says. “He’s made for the passion of it, and he’s really embraced it.”

Kruk’s path to the Phillies broadcast booth wasn’t always inevitable. In fact, for a time, it seemed like his relationship with the organization had been permanently fractured.

After Kruk returned home to West Virginia at the end of the 1994 strike-shortened season, he got a voicemail from the team’s general manager, Lee Thomas, asking him to call his office. After a couple of rounds of phone tag, a local reporter contacted Kruk to verify a story Thomas had started spreading — that Kruk didn’t want to play for the Phillies anymore. “I said, ‘Well, that’s a fricking lie. I never said that,’” Kruk says. “I wanted to stay in Philly. I didn’t wanna leave.” Later that offseason, the Phillies signed first baseman Gregg Jefferies and sent Kruk a letter, thanking him for his service and expressing their decision to part ways. “I thought a phone call from someone would have been better than a letter,” Kruk says. “It was very impersonal, and I thought I’d built a relationship with not only the front office, but the people that work there, the fans and everything.”

His frustration was justified. In his five-plus years with the organization, Kruk had made an indelible mark on the club and the city — he was a three-time All-Star and a prominent member of Macho Row, and he helped carry the 1993 team to the World Series. More important, he met the fans’ expectations. The mulleted “country bumpkin,” as Amaro affectionately calls him, was brutally honest, loved the game, played hard, and never changed his routine, which sometimes included sleeping overnight at the stadium, slamming a couple of chili dogs, and rapping out three hits. “He just sort of embodied that blue-collar spirit that was pretty popular back then and is still popular in Philadelphia,” Amaro says. “You play your tail off, give everything you got, and then go drink a beer — it’s like he was playing beer-league softball but at the major-league level.”

In the clubhouse, Kruk could be ornery and shrug away reporters. As Frank Fitzpatrick, a former Phillies beat writer for the Inquirer, recalls, he “was always trying to come up with a good wisecrack or the funny line or the clever nickname,” but the reporter knew “there was a deeper, more profound side to him somewhere.” It mostly existed on the field. As a player and a teammate, “Kruk had very high expectations of himself,” Amaro says. “It looks like he rolled out of bed and got a hit, but he worked hard at his craft.”

Ricky Bottalico agrees. Teammates with Kruk for part of a season (and now a colleague at NBC Sports Philadelphia), the former reliever remembers a spring training pickoff practice in which Kruk pulled over bench coach John Vukovich and demanded he pull a player making errant throws off the field. “He could have his fun time when he played,” Bottalico says. “But once he stepped in between those lines, he was as serious as they get.”

No moment proved that more than his first at-bat in the 1994 home opener. Kruk had just returned to the roster only a month after being diagnosed with testicular cancer. After receiving radiation treatment that morning, he got his doctor’s clearance, inserted himself into the lineup, and immediately ripped an RBI double to right-center field. It was one of the loudest environments in Veterans Stadium history. “I still count it as one of my greatest memories watching the Phillies,” says longtime Phillies beat writer Jim Salisbury. “If you’re willing to show your human side and on top of it, you’re a successful athlete, it buys you a lifetime of respect and adulation.”

Kruk’s accumulation of memories — his dedication to his team and his popularity with the fans — made Thomas’s letter taste all the more bitter. Eventually, after narrowing down a few teams ahead of the 1995 season, Kruk signed with the White Sox, where an accumulation of injuries and a lost desire to play crystallized into retirement halfway through the year. Still, Kruk remained hurt by the Phillies’ dismissal, and became adamant about cutting ties with the organization he’d helped win a pennant. “I was never going to set foot in that place again,” he says of the Vet.

That changed five years later, when Harry Kalas reached out with a request. The broadcaster was celebrating his 30th anniversary with the team and wanted Kruk to be there for his honorary night. “I said, ‘Harry, you have to understand, I have no desire to come back there,’” Kruk says. But Kalas kept calling, kept pestering. At a certain point, Kruk took a longtime friend’s suggestion and decided to just show up to the field for the ceremony, then walk back through the tunnel and straight to the parking lot before the game started. “That’s all I can ask,” Kalas said.

The night of the game, Kruk did as he promised — he strolled up the first-base line, gave Kalas a bear hug, and then promptly walked back through the tunnel toward his car. But before he could escape, the team’s part-owner and chairman Bill Giles slowed him down. “I ain’t got nothing to say to you,” Kruk remembers telling him. But Giles stood his ground. “We need to get you back in good favor with this organization,” he told his former first baseman. Giles then coaxed Kruk upstairs to his office, where he apologized for the way the team had handled his departure. “I was probably in there for 20 minutes, it ended, and I didn’t punch him, so that was a good thing,” Kruk says.

Kruk couldn’t hold a grudge forever. That wasn’t in his bones. After a while, he began attending Phillies golf outings and other charity events, slowly integrating himself into the organization again. “I figured, I’m done playing, it’s water under the bridge,” he says. Still, he chuckles remembering that night, when Giles told him that the organization’s mistreatment had nearly cost him his marriage. “I was his wife’s favorite player,”­ Kruk says.

In late June of 2003, Kruk made his on-air debut as a broadcaster. Throughout the Vet’s final season, the Phillies wanted various alumni to share memories of their playing days and build excitement for the opening of Citizens Bank Park. By this time on better terms with the organization (he’d started coaching in the team’s minor-league system), Kruk agreed to call the middle innings of a few games on radio. “When I was told that that plan was even in the works I was so excited,” says Jon Slobotkin, a coordinating producer for Phillies games from 1997 to 2005. “He doesn’t shift personalities depending on the audience. He gives you who he is, which is why I think a lot of people thought he would be a natural at this.”

When Kruk entered the booth, analyst Chris Wheeler suggested he call the first six innings of the game. Even as a former player, Kruk had no preparation, no blueprint for what he was about to do, except for some crucial advice Kalas had just given him: “You can say whatever you want, I don’t care,” Kalas said. “The only thing? Just shut up when the pitcher’s starting to pitch.” It wasn’t long before Kruk got comfortable, enough so that Wheeler encouraged him to stay on the mic for the rest of the game. “Well, it ended up being like 13 dang innings,” Kruk says. Todd Pratt’s walk-off home run ultimately softened Kruk’s perception of the gig. “I thought, you know, this is pretty fun. It kept me around the game,” he says. “If the Phillies would’ve lost, who knows? I might have said, ‘Oh, this sucks.’”

Kruk had already blown his first chance at television years earlier. After he retired, ESPN called and invited him to audition for its baseball division. But the night before meeting with executives, Kruk went out with some friends, got home late, and missed his flight to Bristol the next morning. “This is when I partied too much,” he says. “I was a mess, so I thought, ‘I guess I’m done with them.’ Almost a decade later, he got a second chance — flanking Karl Ravech as an analyst on Baseball Tonight. This time, he made the audition and began his broadcast career. “I thought, ‘Let’s give this a shot,’” Kruk says. “The worst part was I had to wear a dang suit. I never understood that.”

Over the next eight years, Kruk split up his weeks commuting by car from Jersey to Connecticut (“I don’t like flying,” he says) to contribute to the studio show. Then, in 2012, the network offered him a different role: Sunday Night Baseball. With the assurance that he could return to the studio if he wasn’t the right fit, Kruk agreed to pinball from city to city every summer weekend and join play-by-play broadcaster Dan Shulman and color analyst Orel Hershiser in the nationally televised broadcast booth. “You couldn’t have two people with less in common than me and him — and we hit it off instantly,” Shulman says. “When he was grouchy, I found it lovable right away.”

The new role capitalized on his game analysis, opinions, and unpredictability, though Kruk found production meetings and planned storylines to be antithetical to the broadcast. “Krukkie does not like meetings very much,” Shulman laughs. “He thought they should be about four minutes long.” Kruk had his reasons, though. “My thing was, well, how can we predict [a game] when it ain’t been played yet?” he says, specifically recalling a Rangers-Astros matchup that Texas was supposed to win. “Well, the Rangers got the crap kicked out of ’em. I’m like, now what are we gonna talk about? We can’t talk about how great the Rangers are because they’re getting their ass kicked.”

Kruk soon found a groove, incorporating his baseball instincts alongside fun behind-the-scenes tours and food segments at various ballparks. He mostly leaned on some advice Ravech gave him before his first broadcast. “We’re not trying to entertain the people watching, we’re trying to entertain ourselves,” Ravech told him. Kruk eventually realized: “If we’re having fun, then people watching are going to enjoy it.” Shulman saw things similarly. Every week in his discussions with Kruk, he took notes about the things his partner found unique, hoping to incorporate them organically in the broadcast to “sound like a couple guys sitting in a bar,” he says.

“I think Krukkie always had a sense of that,” Hershiser says. “It wasn’t like he studied the mechanics of broadcasting as much as he just has a feel.”

The Phillies eventually came calling. At the end of 2016, the organization wanted to shake up its booth, which McCarthy had shared with Jamie Moyer and Matt Stairs throughout the previous seasons. The Phillies, in the midst of a years-long rebuild, were struggling on the field and losing eyeballs. “We thought just having John back would be amazing because it would in many ways kind of reignite the fan base and bring a little more juice to the booth,” says Slobotkin, now the senior vice president of content and live programming at NBC Sports Regional Networks. Luckily, Kruk and ESPN had parted ways around the same time, providing an opening for the regional network to offer Kruk a job with his old team. “I knew I wanted to do something,” Kruk says. “Being around the Phillies, back with the organization like that, on a full-time deal, I couldn’t have been happier.”

The decision to join a local broadcast made sense for Kruk. Though he enjoyed his tenure at ESPN, providing national commentary meant being impartial, condensing his stories, and wearing those uncomfortable suits. “When you’re doing one game a week, you have to play it straight,” Kruk says. But with at least 80 games, he could indulge — in his memories, in his history, and in his fandom. He had a targeted audience, aware of his history with the franchise and eager to see one team win.

As the Phillies struggled to put together a winning product over his first two years, Kruk admits that staying positive on air was tough — and yet, pulling for his team among tens of thousands of fans every night rekindled a passion he’d lost. It made baseball mean a little more. “It’s very humbling when you’re sitting in a booth in Citizens Bank Park and you see people everywhere with your jersey on and you haven’t played there in 30 years,” he says. It was a good reminder. “I’m still a Philadelphian.”

It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment at which Kruk became ingrained as a beloved local broadcaster, but August 15, 2019, feels like the right date. That night, the Phillies had played uninspired baseball at home against the Cubs and trailed by four runs in the ninth inning. The team had been flirting with a playoff run and needed a spark, something to prove to itself and its fans it was moving in the right direction. “It was a horrible game,” Bottalico remembers. “And then it suddenly had a face to it.”

The bottom frame started off promising, developed into a rally, and then suddenly supplied Bryce Harper with a bases-loaded setting, a chance to tie or win the game with one big swing. Like most of Philadelphia, Kruk hadn’t seen Harper’s heroics up close before, so when the new face of the franchise eventually made violent contact and sent a fastball soaring into the night, he couldn’t help himself.

In the split second after Harper’s nuclear explosion, Kruk’s brain ceded functioning to his adrenalized heart. Before McCarthy could start his narration, Kruk felt he was witnessing a seismic event, a wake-up call, a promise that this team suddenly had found the player — galloping at full speed around the bases in jubilation — who would lead them back to brighter days. Kruk had once been told by Kalas to stay quiet around pitches, but this moment deserved something more, something real, and Kruk obliged with a typical, authentic, exuberant, passionate, and abbreviated reaction: “OH, MY GOD!!!”

“It’s one of my favorite calls because of the way the game ended, but I genuinely loved his natural appreciation for that moment,” McCarthy says. “You talk about the soundtrack, the crowd, and everything — his reaction made that call even better than what it ever could have been, because he was basically echoing what everybody else felt.”

Indeed, Harper’s signing during the offseason started a new trajectory for the club. True to owner John Middleton’s promise, the Phillies regained their footing, acquired a string of big free agents, and began to win more. It gave Kruk new life, a new outlook on his job, an opportunity to give voice to a fan base returning from a nearly decade-long hibernation. With increased attendance and a bigger buzz in the ballpark, Kruk turned into the local broadcaster he’d always wanted to be — engaged in every game, embedded with the city’s aching desire to win, eager to predict something special.

Nowadays, it’s his natural setting. “C’mon Bohmer,” he’ll urge his third baseman. “Just a little double, J.T.,” he’ll tell his catcher. “I’ve got a feeling this ball could travel long distances here,” he’ll narrate during a Kyle Schwarber at-bat. And then, on the next pitch, it usually does. “I’ve had people say, ‘Oh, you’re a homer, you’re a homer,’” Kruk says. “No shit! I pull for the Phillies. I hope your team sucks and loses.”

“A lot of the stuff he complains about is all stuff that we also complain about,” says Chris, the lifelong Phillies fan behind the X account “Absolutely Hammered,” who frequently posts Kruk videos. “I think that’s his number-one connection with the fans. When he’s pissed off and he’s fed up with something, especially umpires, he just lets it fly. That’s what we all wanna hear.”

The rejuvenated, almost symbiotic connection between Kruk and the fan base has manifested inside the clubhouse too. Throughout his first couple of years, Kruk felt like the roster “didn’t wanna have anything to do with us,” he says. “You sometimes felt like you had to make an appointment to speak to them.” But the current group has flipped that notion. It started with Harper, then went another level with Schwarber (“One of my favorites of all time,” Kruk says). “You go in there now, and they welcome you with open arms,” Kruk says. “They’re good people.” Amaro thinks that’s a result of Kruk’s balance in calling out mistakes without ever taking critique too far.

“My feeling is that they respect him,” Amaro says.

Kruk’s enhanced camaraderie within the organization has led to lots of memorable moments on the air — bold predictions and random conversations, invitations into his world. It’s easy to get invested. When Kruk tells a story (over the air or in casual conversation), he often sounds mildly irritated, as though he’s been waiting for a turn to talk. He doesn’t bother with full setups or verbose descriptors — Kruk is all meat and potatoes, short sentences, and one- liners. He knows exactly when to deploy his “bumpkin” persona with an unforgettable punchline, a hint of disgust, or a self-effacing aw-shucks grace note.

Over the years, Kruk has shared his love for wrestling, hatred for the animated children’s program Caillou, and excitement about his daughter’s volleyball games. In St. Louis during the 2023 season, he bet play-by-play announcer Scott Franzke that if Schwarber hit a home run in the middle of the Cardinals series, he’d go to the top of the city’s 630-foot Gateway Arch — and then Schwarber immediately deposited a baseball into the first row of seats. (Kruk, afraid of heights, didn’t make it after the game or last year, but plans to this season. “I’m gonna go up at some point just because,” he says. “I gotta learn how to keep my mouth shut.”) Near the end of last year, in Washington, D.C., he even jokingly yelled at a kid in an adjacent press box (“I went over after the inning and apologized,” Kruk says. “Scared the crap out of him, but he was fine with it”), prompting McCarthy to erupt into belly laughter. “I don’t think you can plan to be funny,” McCarthy says. “I think it has to happen organically. And I think for him it does.”

How long does he want to keep doing this? If it’s any indication, Kruk, now 64, signed a four-year contract with NBC Sports Philadelphia over the winter. In fact, he recently told Harper that he hopes to stay in the booth until the slugger’s 13-year contract ends. “He said, ‘Well, I’d like to get an extension,’” Kruk laughs.

Despite some recent health scares, thinking ahead isn’t a big priority for Kruk. He remains ignorant of production sheets (“They call it a rundown, and to this day, I still have no idea what the hell is on those papers,” he says) and is oblivious to his growing esteem on X (“People text me, ‘Oh, you’re trending,’” he says. “What the hell’s that? Trending for what?”), and, even with frequent comparisons to Richie Ashburn, he’s never thought about his similarities to his broadcasting ancestors (“Everyone says, ‘Who did you pattern your style after?’ I say, ‘I didn’t pattern nothing, I just talk,’” he says. “You know, it’s just baseball. My God, I’ve been doing it my whole life. It ain’t like I’m curing cancer or anything”).

Kruk can downplay and wisecrack about his entire career, but his impact in the city and with the fans is undeniable. Even Kruk admits “it’s as strong as it’s ever been.” Mike Robertson, a Phillies lifer who runs a fan X account, believes that’s Kruk’s innate gift — representing and channeling the highs and lows of the city’s intense sports culture. “He’s always been an evangelist for this city,” Robertson says. “Kruk’s seen it all, and I think it means more coming from a guy who’s kind of been through all the experiences.” In other words, there’s a reason his drinks are free now.

“He’s a cult figure,” Slobotkin says. “A lot of times, cult figures come with a connotation of mystery. John’s the cult figure without the mystery.”

Published as “Homer at the Bat” in the March 2025 issue of Philadelphia magazine.