Legendary Joe Castiglione Recalls 2004 Red Sox World Series Call

Legendary radio broadcast Joe Castiglione is set to be honored by the Baseball Hall of Fame, and it’s a well-deserved honor, especially for Boston Red Sox fans.

Castiglione this month will receive the 2024 Ford C. Frick Award in Cooperstown, N.Y., for excellence in broadcasting. The Red Sox Hall of Famer was celebrated in 2022 at Fenway Park for 40 years in broadcasting with Boston.

A generation of fans remember Castiglione’s call for the 2004 World Series when the Red Sox broke the “Curse of the Bambino” and won a championship for the first time in 86 years. That kind of moment is big for any broadcaster, and Castiglione knew how he wanted to handle it.

“Game 4, (Johnny) Damon leads off with a home run, and I’m thinking the whole time, how am I going to describe it if it does happen? And I had all these thoughts,” Castiglione told NESN’s Tom Caron and The Boston Globe’s Alex Speier on the “310 To Left” podcast. “And then I came to the realization you can’t script it. You don’t know how it’s going to end, and I was just hoping it would be something definitive, not a check swing. ‘Did he swing or didn’t he?’ Not a diving catch. ‘Did he catch it or didn’t he?’ Just a routine groundball to the pitcher.

“It was perfect because it was simple. It was going to happen. ‘Can you believe it?’ It was a phrase I used after the Bill Miller home run in July off (Mariano) Rivera. And I thought it was appropriate because the Red Sox completed the greatest comeback of all time, no one had ever come from 3-0 to win a series. I thought the ‘can you believe it’ was appropriate, and it just came out.”

Castiglione dove more into his road to Cooperstown, N.Y. with Caron and Speier on the “310 To Left” podcast. You can hear more of their conversation in the video embedded above.