Toronto Blue Jays broadcaster Joe Siddall enjoys the moments before the team's season opener last month. A wristband is visible on his right wrist that pays tribute to his son Kevin, who lost his battle with non-Hodgkin lymphoma in 2014.Cole Burston/The Globe and Mail
There’s a moment in almost every interview Joe Siddall gives when he begins to talk about how he got into broadcasting, and the full sweep of life’s bittersweet pageant comes slamming into focus.
Sometimes he’ll try to keep it light, like on the recent podcast in which he quipped that listeners who “have a Google machine handy” probably know what he’s about to say. But if you don’t, here it is: In February, 2014, Siddall’s youngest son, Kevin, died of lymphoma at the age of 14, only six months after he had been diagnosed. A few days after the funeral, the long-time Blue Jays radio broadcaster Jerry Howarth sent along a condolence e-mail. Siddall thanked him and said that perhaps he would see Howarth down the road some time – maybe even, he joked, in the broadcast booth.
Howarth asked if he was serious. Sitting at the kitchen table with his wife, Tamara, Siddall didn’t even know himself; his head was in a fog. But by the time the baseball season began the next month, he was behind the mic and finding his voice, grateful for what he called “a great distraction” from his family’s tragedy.
“If he doesn’t do that, if he’s not Jerry – because that’s just the kind soul that he is – if he does not reach out to me, who knows where I am today?” Siddall mused recently. “But I can promise you, it’s probably not a broadcast booth.”
This was a few weeks ago. Siddall was at home in Windsor, Ont., taking care of some last minute domestic duties – getting his hair cut, visiting his 88 year-old mother – in the calm before the storm of the new season, and playing down the significance of the moment.
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He had just been named the main analyst on Sportsnet’s Blue Jays TV broadcasts. That meant he would be stepping into the shoes of Buck Martinez, who had been with the Jays as a player and then a broadcaster for about 38 of the team’s 49 seasons before suddenly announcing in February that he wouldn’t be returning.
Just don’t use the word ‘replace.’ “I don’t think anybody replaces Buck Martinez,” Siddall says. “Buck Martinez is a legend.”
“When the news came of his retirement, it probably took us aback a little bit,” he acknowledges. “We knew it was going to happen at some point, whether it was a year from now or two or three years, but I was preparing for that. And you know, nothing is ground in stone. You’d like to think that you’re going to be the next one in line. But you never know what direction they’re going to go.”
Like Buck (it never sounded right to say “Martinez”), Siddall served in the pros as a catcher. Which is why, after 12 seasons in other on-air positions – four years on radio with Howarth, then several years on Sportsnet’s Blue Jays Central panel hosted by Jamie Campbell, while slowly increasing his appearances in the TV booth next to Buck and then Dan Shulman – he feels he’s finally arrived in his natural role.
Siddall, a former catcher, at right, chats with Blue Jays pitcher Max Scherzer alongside colleague Dan Shulman during batting practice ahead of the Jays' home opener this season.Cole Burston/The Globe and Mail
“It’s probably what I love the most, because it’s the pitch to pitch, it’s the entire game, it’s the strategy,” he says. “It kind of gets the juices going, like you’re a player again.
“You’re thinking about the game, and sometimes two or three pitches ahead. That’s what a catcher’s doing.”
Unlike Buck, Siddall’s time in the major leagues was brief: though he played almost 13 seasons in the pros, he appeared in only 73 MLB games scattered across four seasons (including parts of two seasons with the Montreal Expos), with 869 games in the minors.
Asked about the grind of all those years on farm teams, Siddall deflects the chance for self-pity and instead expresses gratitude.
He spent a few years with the Ottawa Lynx in the early nineties when they were affiliated with the Expos, he explains, where Rick Williams (the son of the celebrated manager Dick Williams) served as pitching co-ordinator. “That man taught me how to call a game, and that was the strength of my entire career,” he says.
“What I learned early in my career from Rick was, you’d better have an answer for why you called every pitch. I’d sit down in the dugout, he’d come up to me and say, ‘Why’d you go 1-1 changeup to that second hitter?’ So, now I’ve got to, like, rehash the inning in my head and say, ‘Well, because he pulled the fastball foul down the right field line, so I thought we’d go down-away with the soft stuff,’” he says.
“You’d better have an answer, and if you didn’t, you got reamed for it. And you learn from it. He really emphasized having purpose with everything that you did.”
You can hear the rigour cultivated through all of those years in Siddall’s on-air commentary, which can sometimes lean into deep analysis and strategy rather than serving as patter to round out the play-by-play of his booth mate, Shulman.
That thoroughness underscores his on-air performance. Siddall is an inveterate preparer. When he made the transition from radio to Blue Jays Central, “he was very concerned with his presentation,” Campbell said in an interview. “Some people figure, especially if they’re former athletes, that their words are enough. But Joe wanted to get better at being a television analyst, versus a radio analyst.”
Siddall, right, and broadcast colleague Dan Shulman, have a developing on-air chemistry, after Siddall was chosen to fill Buck Martinez's role when the longtime analyst announced his retirement in February.Cole Burston/The Globe and Mail
Siddall and Campbell would talk about “slowing your pace, and enunciation and breathing, and all of those things that go into delivering the message succinctly. I admired his interest in learning.”
If Siddall seems more tightly wound than Buck, his chemistry with Shulman is an easygoing one. The men are almost the same age (Shulman turned 59 in February, and Siddall will hit that mark in October), giving them similar touchstones.
During a recent game, after Addison Barger caught a long fly ball and kept a runner at second base from advancing with the threat of a bullet to third, Siddall asked Shulman, “Do you like watching right-field arms as much as I do?” Shulman replied, “Love it,” and the two began reminiscing about how infielders and outfielders don’t run drills and chuck the ball around before the game as much as they used to. It felt as if we were listening in on a budding friendship.
It can be a fraught business, how much of oneself to share with an audience, but Siddall’s entry into broadcasting began with a radical act of bruising vulnerability and he continues to remain open.
He wears a lime-green wristband to raise awareness for non-Hodgkin lymphoma, and talks about it with anyone who asks. He notes that Howarth suggested he write Kevin’s name on the top right corner of the scorecard of the very first game he called, and he’s kept it up – “It’s ‘Kevin’ with a little smiley face,” he says. It’s not that he needs to be reminded of his son, “but what that does to me now is it makes me smile. It gives me a warm-and-fuzzy instead of a sad-and-wanting-to-cry-all-day, right? That’s what time does.”
His Instagram bio contains a quote that Kevin wrote in one of his notebooks while lying in his hospital bed: “your life could drastically change in a matter of seconds . . .appreciate each moment and live life to its fullest.”
The entire Siddall clan – Joe, Tamara, their son, Brett, and two daughters, Brooke and Mackenzie – tries to embody that gratitude. Siddall mentions that Mackenzie, who had been born with a congenital amputation of her right hand and went on to play softball for UBC, launched a clothing brand a few years ago inspired by Kevin, dubbed Attitude of Gratitude.
“It’s about being grateful and for what we have and what we’ve had,” he says. He admits there were some dark days. But, “it’s easier and better on my mind to think of the time we had with Kevin rather than the fact that he’s gone.”
It’s “crazy,” he says, how capricious life can be, how Kevin’s death led to Siddall forging a career which now has him at the pinnacle of Canadian sports broadcasting.
He would rather not think about that, he admits. “The last thing I ever want to portray is – ‘Look what happened to me because of that.’ Like, I’ll trade this in for anything, let me tell you. I’ll trade this entire career to have Kevin back, as you can imagine.
“But it’s strange how life works. Appreciate each moment. You just never know, right?”