Cubs-Cardinals on TBS: Who’s Calling, and Who Once Did

USA — The Chicago Cubs and St. Louis Cardinals meet Tuesday night at Busch Stadium in the second game of a four-game series, carried nationally on TBS. Here is every voice you can find it on.

World Baseball Network recently caught up with Joe Buck in Cooperstown at his HOF induction ceremony.

Where to watch and listen

First pitch: 7:45 p.m. ET / 6:45 p.m. CT · Busch Stadium, St. Louis

National television — TBS

Part of MLB Tuesday, in its fifth season, with a 30-minute pregame and postgame show. TBS’s 2026 booth features play-by-play announcers Brian Anderson and Alex Faust with analysts Ron Darling and Jeff Francoeur. Lauren Shehadi reports and hosts studio segments alongside Pedro Martínez, Curtis Granderson and Jimmy Rollins.

Cardinals — Cardinals.TV

Chip Caray on play-by-play, with Al Hrabosky, Brad Thompson and Mark Sweeney as analysts. Jim Hayes, Scott Warmann and Dani Wexelman handle hosting and reporting.

Wexelman is new to the booth this season and a St. Louis native — a 2011 Missouri journalism graduate who worked at SNY in New York and covered baseball for ESPN before coming home. Her approach, she said in March, is to chase the human material behind the box score: “I’m trying to humanize the sport.”

Cardinals — radio, KMOX 1120 AM / 104.1 FM

John Rooney on play-by-play, with analysts Ricky Horton and Mike Claiborne. Spanish-language coverage on WIJR AM 880 with Polo Ascencio and Bengie Molina.

Cubs — Marquee Sports Network

Jon Sciambi on play-by-play, Jim Deshaies on color. Rick Sutcliffe, Ryan Dempster, Cliff Floyd and Elise Menaker rotate through secondary roles.

Cubs — radio, 670 The Score

Pat Hughes on play-by-play, Ron Coomer on color, Zach Zaidman hosting pregame and postgame.

Hughes has held the Cubs radio chair since 1996. He was named the 2023 Ford C. Frick Award winner, the 47th recipient, joining Jack Brickhouse and Harry Caray as the only Cubs announcers to receive it. He called Kerry Wood’s 20-strikeout game, eight Cubs no-hitters, and became the first Chicago broadcaster to call a Cubs World Series championship in 2016.

He has also shared a booth with three Hall of Famers: Bob Uecker, Ron Santo — and Harry Caray.

The booth this rivalry built

That last detail is the thread. The chairs being filled tonight sit in a lineage unlike any other in American sport, and it runs directly through this matchup: multiple Frick Award winners, four generations of one broadcasting family, and one president of the United States.

That last one is not a figure of speech. Scroll the list of Chicago Cubs broadcasters and you will find, between Pat Flanagan and Russ Hodges, the entry: Ronald Reagan (1933–36).

June 7, 1934

A 23-year-old announcer at WHO in Des Moines was calling a Cubs-Cardinals game he could not see. That was normal for the era. He worked from a studio hundreds of miles from the ballpark, reading a telegraph operator’s typed slips and building a word picture as though he were sitting behind home plate.

The score was 0-0 in the ninth. Billy Jurges was batting. Dizzy Dean was on the mound. The wire went dead.

Rather than lose his audience, Dutch Reagan improvised a streak of foul balls that lasted nearly twelve minutes, until the line came back. By his own account, he told that story for the next fifty years.

There is a footnote to it. Dean — the pitcher Reagan was inventing foul balls off of — would join the Cardinals broadcast booth himself in 1941 and stay through 1946.

The trip to Catalina

Reagan had grown up moving between small Illinois towns as his father, an itinerant shoe salesman with a drinking problem, lost one job after another. He graduated from Eureka College in 1932 into an economy where roughly a fifth of the country was out of work.

He looked around the Midwest and saw no film studios. He saw radio stations.

In 1937 he persuaded his bosses at WHO to send him to Cubs spring training on Catalina Island, off the coast of Los Angeles, pitching it as a way to get to know the players. He had another reason. Once in California, he slipped away to Warner Brothers for a screen test, and Jack Warner liked what he saw.

“He basically conned the owner of the radio station,” biographer Max Boot said of the trip on The Ryen Russillo Podcast, describing a man whose aw-shucks manner concealed ferocious ambition.

Fourteen years later, back on a Burbank lot, Reagan took pitching instruction from Cleveland’s Bob Lemon while preparing to play Grover Cleveland Alexander in The Winning Team.

Twenty-five years, one voice

Harry Caray called Cardinals games from 1945 to 1969. Jack Buck arrived in 1954, and across fourteen seasons together they formed one of the sport’s great two-man booths.

It ended abruptly. After the 1969 season, owner August A. Busch Jr. informed Caray his contract would not be renewed. He eventually landed with the Cubs, calling their games from 1982 to 1997 and becoming a fixture on the other side of the rivalry he had spent a quarter-century describing from St. Louis. He received the Frick Award in 1989.

Editor’s note: the wire caption above misspells both Red Schoendienst and Harry Caray.

Two days after both were honored at Cooperstown, Caray and Cardinals coach Red Schoendienst shared a moment before a Cardinals-Cubs game in St. Louis.

The night Jack Buck walked out

Jack Buck called Cardinals games from 1954 to 1958 and again from 1961 until 2001 — more than four decades. In 1986 he left the KMOX booth mid-broadcast and handed the microphone to his 17-year-old son, alone, live, in front of a Cardinals radio audience.

Joe Buck swam. He joined the Cardinals broadcasts in 1991 and stayed through 2007, then became a national voice calling World Series and Super Bowls across three decades.

Jack Buck died in June 2002. The mourning in St. Louis was of a kind usually reserved for players.

On Sunday, July 26, 2026, Joe Buck was introduced at the Hall of Fame induction ceremony in Cooperstown as the 50th recipient of the Ford C. Frick Award — the honor his father received before him.

Four generations of Carays

Harry’s son Skip called Braves games for decades. Skip’s son Chip called Cubs games from 1998 to 2004 — the same booth his grandfather had held — then took over as the play-by-play voice of the Cardinals in 2023, more than five decades after Harry had that job. Chip was also TBS’s play-by-play voice when Turner Sports took over National League Championship Series coverage in 2007, meaning the network carrying tonight’s game has a Caray in its own history.

Chip’s twin sons make four generations. Chris Caray broadcasts for the Athletics. Stefan Caray works for the Cardinals and has shared a booth with his father, including a Spring Breakout game against the Marlins in March 2025.

Ahead of that broadcast, Chip was asked whether he might pull a Jack Buck and walk out on his son.

“Do I still get paid?” he said.

Stefan had an answer ready: “Well, dad’s not as good as Jack Buck, so he hasn’t earned that right.”

The two families are not separate stories. Stefan’s great-grandfather and Chip’s grandfather are the same man — and that man spent fourteen seasons beside Jack Buck before either family had a second generation in the business.

Back to Wrigley

On September 30, 1988, with a few months left in his presidency, Ronald Reagan returned to Wrigley Field and threw out a ceremonial first pitch before the Cubs hosted the Pirates.

Then he went up to the booth and called part of the game alongside Harry Caray.

“You know, in a few months I’m going to be out of work,” Reagan said, “and I thought I might as well audition.”

Fifty-four years after he invented twelve minutes of foul balls in a Cubs-Cardinals game he never saw, he was back in the chair — beside a man who had called both clubs, in a booth that has since produced Frick winners and four generations of a single family.

Somebody sits down in it again at 7:45 tonight.