Sports media: Wilner to baseball-yak it up on the old yak-box

This ought to be good for the geek love. The FAN 590's Mike Wilner announced on his blog tonight that his station is adding a daily baseball show, to run in Hockey Central's normal noon-hour time slot.

"Starting tomorrow, Monday the 6th, the Fan590 will be carrying a daily, one-hour program dedicated solely to the discussion of the greatest game there is — Baseball Today will be on Monday through Friday at noon Eastern and (for the time being, at least), be hosted by yours truly. It's still kind of open as to what kind of show it will be. I'm going to want audience interaction. I'm going to want discussion of not only the goings-on in Blue Jay land, but across the landscape of MLB. I'm going to want to have the audience learn about newer metrics to measure and predict performance. I'm going to see if I can get a Blue Jay or two to pop by in studio (when they’re at home, of course) to chat and take phone calls. All kinds of things. Tomorrow’s premiere edition will be a phone-in show, because I'm going to want to hear from you, the listeners, about what you want from a daily hour-long baseball show."

It might even take more of a commitment. You are going to have to take a leave from a job and dissolve all personal relationships.

Clearly, this might have come out of Rogers bean-counters figuring a hour of baseball talk each weekday might be good cross-promotion for the Jays. The FAN 590, case in point, has a tennis show that's a pretty obvious attempt to whip up interest in the Rogers Cup. It's either that or there are a lot of males 18-49 who want to call in and talk about Juan Carlos Ferrero's second serve. Nevertheless, this is welcome news, presuming CSIS will not trace all the calls since anyone in Canada who wants to talk about baseball instead of hockey in the middle of July is probably capable of treason.