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Sports broadcasting legend Bob Costas knew it was time to walk away and used a baseball analogy to put it all in perspective.
“I have too much regard for the game, for the craft, and for whatever my own standard has been to hit beneath my lifetime batting average,” Costas told Tom Verducci on Monday night in his first public comments on the decision to retire from doing baseball play-by-play.
It was first reported last week that the Syracuse University alumnus would be retiring from doing play-by-play of Major League Baseball.
Costas hinted at retirement after calling Game 4 of the Yankees-Royals ALDS series for TBS, which turned out to be his last baseball broadcast.
“I felt that I couldn’t consistently reach my past standard,” Costas said on Monday. “There might have been individual games or stretches within games or moments in games that were just the same as if it was the 1990s or the early 21st century. But I couldn’t string enough of them together.”
Costas, a 29-time Emmy Award winner, covered multiple Olympics, Super Bowls and other major sporting events, but it was baseball that he was most associated with. Costas called three World Series, 10 league championships and earned the Ford C. Frick Award for broadcast excellence from the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2018.
Costas, 72, will continue with his emeritus work at MLB Network, though he will no longer call games for that network as well. He has also appeared as a commentator on CNN since 2020.
Costas began his professional broadcasting career while a student at Syracuse with WSYR-TV and radio in 1973 and as the play-by-play voice of the Syracuse Blazers, then of the North American Hockey League.
Syracuse University honored Costas with the George Arents Award, SU’s highest alumni honor, for excellence in sports broadcasting in 2001.
Costas received the Newhouse Sports Media Center’s first Marty Glickman Award for Excellence in Sports Media in 2014.
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