After a bout with cancer, former player and manager, and now broadcaster Buck Martinez, reflects on a long career and considers leaving the Blue Jays booth. ‘Maybe this is a sign that I should change,’ he tells Simon Houpt
Last month, as he was standing for a rare idle moment in the Toronto Blue Jays’ dugout a few hours before game time, a reporter approached to ask if he might be interested in sitting for an interview at some point. It’s been a weird few years for him, after all, not least because last April he announced he would be stepping aside for a while to be treated for cancer. Okay, sure, he said. He’d talk.
After hanging up his catcher’s mitt, he transitioned to broadcasting Jays games for TSN, served as manager of the team for 1 1/2 lacklustre seasons in 2001 and 2002, left town to join the broadcast team covering the Baltimore Orioles, and, in 2010, signed with Sportsnet to cover the Jays. His exhortation of well-hit shots to “Get up, ball! Get up!” and clear the home-run fence, is iconic.
The Sportsnet booth next door is Martinez’s usual domain, but the network won’t be carrying tonight’s game, a matchup between theand the Orioles. The broadcast is instead being handled by Apple, the US$2-trillion tech company that, in a sign of the times, last spring scooped up seven years’ worth of rights to a collection of Friday night MLB games for a reported US$85-million a season.
In an interview, Shulman said that Martinez, with whom he’d partnered from 1995 to 2000 and again since 2016, “told me my very first year, ‘If we can make this sound like two guys sitting at a bar, watching a ball game, we’ll be okay’.” He added, “I think we both try to keep it conversational. We don’t plan things. We both want to inform, but we also both want to entertain.”
He’s getting tired now, he admits – while he’s certainly feeling stronger, he still doesn’t have the stamina he did before his diagnosis of a type of head and neck cancer known as a squamous cell carcinoma. He received six weeks of an innovative treatment known as proton beam therapy, along with chemotherapy. Happily, though the tumour was located at the base of his tongue, it didn’t affect his voice.
“Nah, nah, nah,” he says. “It has nothing to do with Rogers. It’s just me. You know, I’ve been through a lot. And, you know, my wife and I have had a lot of discussions about it. I don’t know.” He mentions that, the following Monday, he’s due to fly to Houston for three days of medical follow-ups.
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