Joe Buck will survive his grueling October with a private plane and lots of coronavirus tests

With the sports schedule scrambled this fall by the pandemic, Buck, the lead play-by-play announcer for Fox Sports’s baseball and football coverage, saw his itinerary warped, too.

“The silver lining in all of this, at least in my life, is baseball is in one location,” Buck said in a phone interview from Bills Stadium in Buffalo on Monday afternoon. “But it still comes at you pretty quick.”

Buck’s sprint began last week with six National League Championship Series games in Arlington, Tex., and continued over the weekend. He called Game 6 between the Los Angeles Dodgers and Atlanta Braves on Saturday night, then hopped on a private plane to Tampa for the Sunday showdown between Aaron Rodgers’s Green Bay Packers and Tom Brady’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers on Sunday. (He missed Game 7 of the NLCS.) Then he flew to Buffalo for Monday’s game between the Bills and Kansas City Chiefs before returning to Arlington, where the World Series started Tuesday night.

That was the first of as many as seven World Series games, if the series between the Dodgers and Tampa Bay Rays goes that far, with two more NFL games, in Philadelphia and Charlotte, mixed in.

“It’s snotty-sounding,” Buck said of his private plane. “But just to make sure that you’re not waiting on a mechanical issue and you miss a game, we have to make sure we’re there. It’s kind of a necessary evil.”

Travel today takes on added significance, with the coronavirus still surging across the country. Buck will be tested at least every other day while he is on the road, with the logistics handled by Fox.

The politics of the virus already has invaded announcing booths, with NBC’s Al Michaels and Cris Collinsworth appearing to mock a local government mandate that they wear masks during the telecast of a San Francisco 49ers game in Santa Clara, Calif. But Buck said he welcomed the rigor, particularly with his 81-year-old mother recovering from the virus. “I think she’s on the back side of it,” he said.

Buck said he is traveling mostly with the same crew, there are few people in the booth during games and everyone is sitting at least six feet apart. “I’ve done everything possible to try and avoid a [bad situation] with it,” he said.

Buck started this season calling baseball games for Fox from a studio in Denver. Now that he is traveling to call games in person, the mechanics of the job are not so different from a normal year. Baseball is allowing some fans into the stadium, and NFL crowd noise is pumped into his headset.

What is different, he said, is his time management. He sets several alarms over the course of the day to make sure he switches from preparing for baseball to football. “I have to have some unusual discipline for me,” he said. “There’s not a lot of long-term retention going on right now. But I’m pretty good at what’s in front of me.”

The run of games already offered an unexpected hiccup beyond the schedule for Buck and Aikman. A hot microphone caught the two sarcastically discussing the military flyover before the Packers-Bucs game.

“That’s a lot of jet fuel just to do a little flyover,” Aikman is heard remarking.

“That’s your hard-earned money and your tax dollars at work,” Buck replied, seemingly tongue in cheek.

To which Aikman responded, “That stuff ain’t happening with [a] Kamala [Harris]-[Joe] Biden ticket. I’ll tell you that right now, partner.”

Buck talked to The Washington Post before Defector Media published the audio Monday. Through a representative, he declined to comment Tuesday. On Twitter, Aikman attempted to put his comments in context, saying he is an “unwavering patriot” who enjoys flyovers but found it odd to see one “over a mostly empty stadium.”