It's good news and bad news as Sportsnet announces their Blue Jays spring training broadcast schedule
After a week of bad press and questions about a weird lack of commitment to their parent company’s major league baseball team, Sportsnet announced some actual good news on the Blue Jays broadcast front on Friday morning. Sort of.
Rob Longley of the Toronto Sun reported back on Monday that Sportsnet wouldn't be producing their own broadcasts of Blue Jays games this spring. "We’re told that, when possible, Sportsnet will pick up games broadcast by the Yankees and Phillies," he added. "A small consolation for Canadian fans."
Longley followed his report up on Tuesday with more info, as well as a quote from Jays president and CEO Mark Shapiro which sure seemed to acknowledge the disappointing situation.
"We don't control that and we obviously are supportive of having as many games as possible being broadcast. But we're understanding that (Sportsnet) have their own business to run," Shapiro told him.
It was an absurd choice for the team broadcaster to be making, especially considering the excitement surrounding the Blue Jays, the amount of money they spent this off-season, and the fact — as I pointed out in my own commentary on the situation — that 2020 proved that broadcasts of these games could be produced remotely, and that local crews could be hired to operate the cameras, run the mics, and do all the other behind-the-scenes things necessary to bring broadcasts to our screens. It turns out that Sportsnet has come around to to this thinking, at least somewhat.
In their Friday morning press release, Sportsnet announced that a minimum of 10 spring training games will be available on cable and their online Sportsnet NOW service. All but three of these will feature the Blue Jays on the road, meaning it's a virtual certainty that Jays fans will simply be watching broadcasts produced by their club's opponents. But they've at least now added games produced by Fox Sports Detroit and AT&T SportsNet Pittsburgh, plus three of their own.
The games they currently have scheduled are as follows:
• Sunday, Feb. 28 @ NYY, 1PM ET
• Friday, Mar. 12 @ PIT, 1PM ET
• Monday, Mar. 15 @ DET, 1PM ET
• Saturday, Mar. 20 @ PHI, 1PM ET
• Sunday, Mar. 21 vs. NYY, 1PM ET
• Monday, Mar. 22 vs. DET, 6:30PM ET
• Wednesday, Mar. 24 @ NYY, 1PM ET
• Saturday, Mar. 27 @ NYY, 1PM ET
• Sunday, Mar. 28 vs. DET, 1PM ET
• Monday, Mar. 29 @ PHI, 1PM ET
It’s still not enough, but that sure is a whole lot better than how things originally looked. There is bad news in the announcement, though, and it’s on the radio side of things.
“In an effort to minimize travel and closely adhere to team, league, and government protocols related to the pandemic,” the release states, “Sportsnet will be streamlining production for the 2021 season by simulcasting TV broadcasts on Sportsnet 590 The FAN and across the Sportsnet Radio Network.”
The fact that this statement begins with a lie — that the reasons for this change are benevolent and not at all related to cost reduction — makes me worry about the suggestion that this will only be a temporary change. That would be bad, because radio broadcasts have long been an essential part of the baseball experience, and obviously radio broadcasters serve their audience in a different way than TV broadcasters do.
The Jays have some incredible professionals calling their games — the release informs us that Dan Shulman will indeed be back (though nothing is mentioned about how frequently he’ll call games, and it would be my guess that he won’t be there as often as in 2020), along with Buck Martinez and Pat Tabler — so I have faith that they’ll be able to serve their radio listeners as best they can, if that’s even what they’re going to be asked to do. But either way, it’s not a great setup. If the TV broadcasters aren’t attuned to what the radio listeners are unable to see, the radio broadcast will suffer. But if the booth acknowledges that radio listeners are there, it adds a degree of difficulty to their jobs and occasionally will require descriptive flourishes unnecessary for their TV audience. The fact that the length of commercial breaks are different on both sides of the TV/radio divide complicates things as well.
My suspicion is that radio simply isn’t important enough to be considered as anything more than an afterthought, and if so, that truly sucks and doesn’t bode well for a return of the radio booth in 2022. (And that’s without even touching on the fact that plenty of fans much prefer the radio crew to Buck and Pat to begin with.)
I suppose this switch also means that there won’t be Blue Jays radio broadcasts for all the non-televised games this spring, forcing the most engaged fans of the team to listen to opposing crews, who naturally will focus on what their own teams are doing.
The only real good news on the radio side here is that the release at least makes clear that Ben Wagner, Sportsnet’s lone remaining radio play-by-play guy after the company let go of Mike Wilner this fall, will remain part of the broadcast crew, “joining Jamie Campbell, Joe Siddall, Hazel Mae, and Arash Madani in covering all the bases throughout the season.”
Ben still being here at least gives me a little bit of hope that Sportsnet intends to produce a dedicated radio broadcast again in the future, and not to follow what may be something of a new trend.
Per Wikipedia, the Buffalo Sabres, Carolina Hurricanes, and Dallas Stars of the NHL also have TV/radio simulcasts. Some elite company there, Sportsnet.
Top image via Sportsnet
Sportsnet's decision seems like a rather obvious one. Unlike other teams, the Blue Jays' broadcast team will be in a studio, in a different country, calling the game off a live video feed. It makes little or no sense to have two broadcast teams sitting in different studios of the building calling the same game off the identical video feed. Particularly redundant is the radio team. Despite all the people on the internet who claim to listen to the game on the radio, the overwhelming majority of people listen to the TV feed, and Shulman and Martinez are an excellent pbp/colour pair. Radio has become almost entirely an 'in-car' medium, and in 2021 there's not going to be a lot of in-car radio listening. It makes no sense at all to have two broadcast teams calling the game in studio from the same video feed in the first place, let alone in 2021.
This is just fucking preposterous in every goddamn way. Stick an ex player in there with Wagner, , who is terrific might I add, let them learn the craft and get the hell out of the way.