TORONTO – As Opening Day approaches, Toronto Blue Jays fans are outraged that Rogers will no longer be offering a distinct Blue Jays radio broadcast and will instead be replacing it with a simulcast of their television feed. Rogers released a statement today reassuring fans that the money saved from cutting the radio feed will be repurposed into nothing.
“I understand where fans are coming from,” said Edward S. Rogers III, the Chairman of Rogers Communications. “There’s a certain romanticism to hearing an expert radio play-by-play man use words as a paintbrush to create an image in the listener’s mind. But I need those fans to trust me when I say that the media business is a complicated one, and if they only saw us throwing the money we saved on the floor of our head office and leaving it there, they would understand.”
Since the announcement, many sports business experts have speculated that the cost-cutting measure was necessary to fund the signing of a free-agent pitcher, or to build a new baseball-only stadium. Instead, it will be used to do nothing.
“We put the money on the floor,” explained Rogers CEO Tony Natale. “And none of us who work at Rogers pick it up off the floor, because we already have lots of money in our pockets, from the 449 million dollars we made in profit last quarter! So don’t worry. We’re not using it for anything.”
Rogers initially defended the slashing of the radio broadcast by claiming it was because of pandemic-related travel restrictions, but Ben Wagner, the Blue Jays radio play-by-play announcer for the last three seasons, quickly debunked this.
“We did a radio broadcast last year during the pandemic without too much trouble, so that’s obviously not the reason,” said Wagner. “But I went to Rogers head office, and they showed me all the money on the floor, and now I get it. Thanks for still employing me in a very limited capacity, Rogers!”
At press time, Rogers was preparing to announce that, during the Blue Jays TV broadcast, they would be showing only the Blue Jays score and not the opposing team’s, because “Blue Jays fans love the Blue Jays!”
