When John Kruk is on the mic during a Phillies game, fans never know what might come out of his mouth. The color commentator has a knack for weaving tales of prison baseball games and ruminations on chest hair into the action.
Phillies fans have long admired Kruk’s unique game-calling style, but it received national attention Sunday night when “Last Week Tonight” included a montage of some of Kruk’s off-topic anecdotes during the “And Now This” segment of the show.
Host John Oliver called it “The Delightfully Bizarre Musings of Phillies Color Commentator John Kruk.”
“You know, I was thinking about this today now that we have some time,” Kruk begins in the first clip. “Why aren’t we born with hair on our chest as men? … Why does it wait ’til like you’re 16, 17, 18, 20, whatever, and then it starts growing? Were those follicles dormant?”
Elsewhere in the montage, the former Phillies star tells of banning his kids from watching the cartoon “Caillou,” saying “all that kid did was complain,” and of seeing a “dang giraffe” appear outside his window while he was staying at Animal Kingdom in Walt Disney World. Most of his rants are met with laughter or incredulous responses from Phillies play-by-play announcer Tom McCarthy, who told the MLB Network in May that Kruk’s stories leave him “in awe like everyone else.”
Oliver ended his montage with the best Kruk story in recent memory – his account of a baseball game he once played against a prison team. Kruk says he admired the pitcher’s arm, and asked the catcher about him. He was shocked by what he found out.
“I asked the catcher, I said, ‘What did he do?'” Kruk recalls in the montage. “He goes, ‘Oh he found his girlfriend cheating, he burned up her car with her and her boyfriend in it.’ Very uncomfortable at bat.”
Kruk — whom NBC Sports Philadelphia reporter Taryn Hatcher has described as “genuinely the most fascinating person I have ever met or heard of” — captivated audiences long before he transitioned into broadcasting after his baseball career ended in the mid-1990s. In 1993, the year he helped the Phillies make the World Series, he charmed David Letterman by describing his aversion to running the bases at the Colorado Rockies stadium, where there was “no air.” His dry humor (and unkempt appearance) also inspired the “Philadelphia Slobs” sketch on “SNL” that same year, with Chris Farley portraying the Krukker.
The latest “Last Week Tonight” episode can be streamed on Max, but Kruk’s “delightfully bizarre musings” can be heard just about anytime Kruk is in the broadcast booth.