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Plenty of fans argued it was time for Bob Costas to hang up his headset based on some of the calls we were treated to when the MLB playoffs rolled around this year, and they’ll be getting their wish now that the legendary broadcaster has announced he’s done calling baseball games.
At this point, Bob Costas has nothing left to prove, as the man who’s been covering sports and calling games for a living since the 1970s has one of the most impressive résumé a broadcaster can ask for.
Costas may be best known for his role at the Olympics (he was a staple of NBC’s coverage between 1988 and 2016), but he’s covered basically every major sports league over the course of his career. That includes the MLB, as he first hopped into the booth to provide play-by-play coverage in the early 1980s and has spent more than four decades in that particular line of work.
The 72-year-old Costas has always had his fair share of critics, but they’ve gotten increasingly vocal in recent years as more and more baseball fans have become increasingly fed up with his tendency to go off on tangents and barely attempt to hide his favoritism when covering games.
This year, Costas caught some heat for his painfully effusive praise of Giancarlo Stanton and the fairly egregious botched call we were treated to during a game between the Yankees and the Royals and the ALDS.
According to The Athletic, anyone who’s tired of enduring Costas on MLB broadcasts will now be able to breathe a sigh of relief, as he told the outlet that Game 4 of the aforementioned ALDS was his final time covering baseball in a play-by-play capacity.
Costas says he plans to address the decision a bit more in-depth at some point in the near future, and the report cites sources who said he had already made up his mind before the most recent season got underway knowing his contract with Warner Bros. Discovery (the parent company of TNT and TBS) was slated to expire.
This doesn’t mean Costas will stop covering baseball as a whole, as he plans to continue to contribute to MLB Network but won’t be calling any more games.