Mike Krukow will retire from the Giants broadcast booth at the end of the 2026 season, ending 36 years alongside Duane Kuiper in the longest-running broadcast partnership in Major League Baseball. The 74-year-old former pitcher announced the decision Thursday morning. He has spent roughly two decades fighting inclusion body myositis, a progressive muscle disease with no cure.

Here is the part most exits leave out.

"I don't want to quit," Krukow told NBC Sports Bay Area. "Unfortunately the rules change, first from year to year and then month to month and now it's day to day. It's becoming unsafe."

That is not how these announcements usually go. The genre has a script — a good run, a full heart, more time with the grandkids — and the script exists to make the leaving sound like a choice. Krukow declined it. He said out loud that he is going because his body has stopped negotiating, and that he resents it.

He was more specific than that, too. He and Kuiper had a plan, and the plan was never to have a last day.

"We had always planned that we would be Richie Ashburn and Harry Kalas and we would drop dead behind the microphone," he said.

You have to know the reference to feel it. Ashburn and Kalas were the Phillies' booth — Krukow pitched in Philadelphia before he was ever traded west — and both of them worked that job until it ended on its own terms, not theirs. That was the ambition. Two guys who never had to say goodbye because they never stopped. Krukow is now the one breaking the pact, and he knows it.

"I feel really bad that I'm the one that wants to get off the bus," he said.

The disease has been in the booth a long time

Krukow made the diagnosis public in 2014, though he had been carrying it well before that. Inclusion body myositis is degenerative and incurable; it wastes the muscles of the thighs and lower legs first, then the wrists and hands. There is no version of it that gets better.

The accommodations arrived slowly and then all at once. A customized wheelchair. A golf cart to get him around Oracle Park. Then the road went away entirely — he stopped traveling to away stadiums, and the broadcast adapted around him with a "splitcast" arrangement: Kuiper calling play-by-play from whatever city the team is in, Krukow doing color from the NBC Sports Bay Area studio back in San Francisco.

That workaround is worth sitting with. A television operation restructured its production so a man who could no longer make the trip could keep the job anyway. Franchises do not usually bend like that. This one did, year after year, as his physical range kept narrowing — and the reason is not complicated: there was no replacing him, and everyone involved knew it.

He was a real pitcher first

The broadcasting is the legacy now, but Krukow got there the hard way. He came up with the Cubs, spent a season with the Phillies, and was traded to San Francisco in 1983. He won 124 games in the majors. His 1986 was the peak — a 20-win season and an All-Star nod, at a moment when the Giants badly needed someone to be good.

A shoulder injury ended it in 1989. He moved about two hundred feet, from the mound to the booth, and stayed for 36 years. There is a plaque with his name on the Wall of Fame at Oracle Park, and it is not there for the broadcasting.

What the Giants said, and what he said

Giants CEO Larry Baer framed the partnership as the thing that mattered: "With his beloved and inseparable partner Duane Kuiper, he has taught generations of fans about baseball."

True enough, and undersold. Kruk and Kuip were not primarily an instructional service. They were the ambient sound of summer in a region that does not otherwise agree on much — a two-man argument about a slow game, running six months a year, for three and a half decades.

Krukow seems to understand exactly what he was, and it is not "analyst."

"I would just say thank you for letting me sit at your dinner table every night and share dinner and share the Giants and just share the vibe," he said.

In his statement through the club, he kept it shorter: "I will be retiring at the end of the season. I want to take this time to thank you for your incredible support."

He and his wife Jennifer, he told the San Francisco Standard, "have been so blessed to be able to stay in the game for as long as we have." He also said they are "bracing for the emotional hits we know we are going to feel in the next few weeks."

That is the honest register, and it is rarer than it should be. Nobody is pretending this is a happy ending. It is a good run that a disease is ending early, announced by a man who would obviously keep working if the disease would let him, and who was unwilling to dress it up as anything else.

There are roughly two months of baseball left. Watch them.

Sources: NBC Sports Bay Area · The San Francisco Standard · CBS News Bay Area · ESPN