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| How Else To Explain It |
Although the biggest Blue Jays story in recent days is for sure the enticing prospect of a new ballpark (someday! maybe! although if it ends up anywhere but right where the Skydome is it will probably feel like a mistake!), and the second biggest is Vladimir Guerrero's Jr.'s ongoing wagon-reduction efforts (arguably misguided, I must say, and yet fundamentally I am here to support Vladito in all his doings), number three would have to be the surprising dismissal of longtime Fan 590/Sportsnet Radio Blue Jays commentator Mike Wilner. Well, sort of longtime, longtime for some stuff: although he'd only been doing play-by-play (selected innings) for the last few years, he had been on the radio for about twenty, and first came to my attention as the person whose on-air responsibilities consisted chiefly of reading the Home Hardware Out-of-Town scoreboard, a task to which he possessed adequacy. I would argue that less adequacy -- perhaps not inadequacy, but less adequacy -- was displayed in Wilner's handling of the "Jays Talk" post-game call-in, in which he often treated ill-informed callers with derision and disdain. I will be the first (or at least among them) to admit that the quality of the calls Wilner received was often disappointing, but there was, to me, an unattractive and angry smarty-pantsness (smarty-pantsness is not a good quality) to the way these calls and callers were handled. This smarty-pantsness (or smarty pantsèdness, perhaps), I am pleased to report, didn't especially carry over into Wilner's actual play-by-play work when he was later afforded that opportunity. To say that Wilner was no Tom Cheek, or Jerry Howarth, or Dan Shulman, or Alan Ashby is both totally true and also no great slight, but I have seen very little comment on his dismissal to the effect that "oh man they shouldn't have let him go, he was great!" and instead a good deal along the lines of either "that's too bad; he really loves baseball" (which, as a thing to say, is interesting) or "you know what, I can see it" or, less charitably, "good." I of course have absolutely no desire to see anyone lose their job, especially given our present circumstance (but really whenever). At the same time, I can totally see why the Blue Jays might want to go in a different direction with their radio team. Ben Wagner seems pretty good! Maybe get him another guy! The 2020 television broadcasts were unrivaled, pretty much, as Dan Shulman (with Buck Martinez) is I think the best announcer in baseball these days (did you listen to the ESPN Radio feed of the World Series to hear Dan Shulman? or were you instead like "you know what, I really do like it when John Smoltz has things to say about John Smoltz" as you opted for Fox [haha!]). It felt unnatural for television to be more pleasing than radio for Blue Jays baseball. And frankly I want that stopped.
The several-day internet focus on Toronto Blue Jays' broadcasters and broadcasting that followed Wilner's largely unexplained (and yet not inexplicable) dismissal on what we might as well call "the boards" has led to some fairly intriguing stuff, like a revisiting of the impressively durable rumours that Jerry Howarth didn't give a hoot about Mike Wilner (conspicuously unmentioned in Howarth's memoir, I am told), and that Wilner himself returned no hoot (of the many thanked in Wilner's note of farewell, Howarth was not among them), all of which is devastating, as Howarth is Toronto-baseball Mr. Rogers, and previously known only to have it in for Jose Reyes (I liked him!) and J. P. Ricciardi (I really didn't!).
But by far the most important thing that came out the collective remembrance and reflection surrounding Wilner's dismissal is how, in 2015, people kept calling in to Jays Talk to ask if Jose Bautista was a male witch, as immortalized in a reddit thread titled "People keep calling in to Jays Talk to ask if Jose Bautista is a male witch." There is not much more to it than that, other than that a number of callers from the Cambridge/Kitchener area, seemingly in some manner of (coven-like?) co-ordination, kept calling in to Jays Talk to ask if Jose Bautista was a male witch. And Mike Wilner was not having it. Miraculously, a ten-minute audio compilation of several of these calls survives, and I would like to share them with you at this link. The final moments of the final call are the greatest moments in Blue Jays radio history that feature neither Tom Cheek nor Jerry Howarth. Alas that it seemed not so to Mike Wilner, whom we wish the best in all his future endeavours.
KS
