Live, in 3, 2, 1 …
Burlington’s Doug Walton shows Canada the Blue Jays
The Toronto Blue Jays were born only 11 years after he was, and Doug Walton became an instant fan.
Now, the 50-year-old Burlington resident supervises the delivery of the team’s daily narrative to hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions, of its fans.
Walton is the producer of Blue Jays Baseball on SportsNet. Of the team’s 162 games, he’s in the TV production truck for a whopping 120 of them. The others are handled by Rick Briggs-Jude, another industry stalwart.
“The producer is an overseer,” Walton explained at last Tuesday’s matinee in Toronto between the Jays and the Philadelphia Phillies. “Basically making sure all the oars are rowing in the same direction.
“You work closely with the director and he makes it happen. He dominates the conversation once the game begins. I’m just looking at the bigger picture. You’re taking the show where you think it needs to go. You’re the head coach, essentially.”
Walton ascended to head coach of baseball by spending years as a player, and as a coach in other sports.
He moved with his family to Burlington from Vancouver when he was 10, attended Pineland Public School and Lord Elgin (now Robert Bateman) High School.
He lived on the same street as Tom Cheek, the Jays’ original and iconic radio play-by-play man, became close friends with Tom Jr. and often rode to games in the Cheek car.
“I used to think, ‘This guy has the coolest job ever,’” Walton laughs, with some irony.
While studying Radio and Television Arts at Ryerson, he landed the classic TV entry-level job with TSN, working on nightly highlight packages. After graduation, he worked full time at TSN, then did statistics for the Blue Jays, then returned to TSN as an associate producer for two years before producing the Sabres games in Buffalo. Soon, it was back to TSN to produce hockey and figure skating, then over to Hockey Night in Canada and finally, in 2010, he joined SportsNet and Jays’ baseball.
Walton, producer Troy Clara, and technical producer Dan Brener, face a bank of screens on the end wall of the trailer. The screens show what each of the 15 cameras is seeing, plus what’s actually on air at the moment. Behind that trio another dozen or so production people are immersed in a lateral wall of screens, their own personal set of camera angles (for replays), or laptops.
“All these guys have been doing it a long time, so it’s very professional and there’s pretty good chemistry,” Walton says of the atmosphere in the truck, parked in the concrete bowels of Toronto’s vast Rogers Centre, a 200-metre walk from the actual field.
About 90 minutes before the Toronto-Philadelphia game goes to air, the Phillies’ public relations director drops by the truck to inform Walton where the family of Zach Eflin, the Phils’ starting pitcher making his major-league debut, will be sitting.
The camera shots of the family’s ingame reaction will be part of the inventory that Walton must find spots for, while not interrupting the game flow established by on-air commentators Buck Martinez and Pat Tabler. Walton does most of the direct communication with the commentators to keep them informed of what’s up next, so they can integrate it into their dialogue.
“I’m supposed to be the Big Picture guy,” he explains. “You come with the vision, you create the storylines, you oversee all the details. The scheduling, sponsored items and graphics, interviews and guests, all the different elements that can go into the show funnel through the producer in any sport, and he’ll let everyone know what the plan is and they can go ahead and execute it.”
Prior to air time, Walton reviews the story-telling graphics, SportsNet house ads, interview snippets, replays from the previous night’s game which might add to today’s storylines and other elements which he’ll need sometime during the three-or-so-hour broadcast.
“I think there’s pressure, because it’s live TV,” he says. “You only get one shot at it, you can’t do it over. Everything you do is to try to eliminate mistakes: be prepared so you can react to whatever situation comes up. You have to be constantly thinking of what hasn’t been thought of.
“Focus is one of the hardest and most important facets of this job. Baseball is unusual in that it can go on for some time. You can be in the chair for three and a half or four hours, sometimes with not a lot going on. So you have to maintain your focus on a daily basis, but also on a weekly basis, on a monthly basis. The same focus you had in April you have to have in August even though it’s the Dog Days. It’s a grind, and it’s every day, but you still have to be focused and ready because anything can happen. I consider myself a laid-back guy and I think in this job, calm is good.”
The air thickens with a slight tension as game time approaches but, as Walton said would happen, when he counts down from five, theme music plays and Martinez’s voice says, on air, ‘Welcome to Rogers Centre!’, a familiar tempo takes over.
Clara immediately begins his constant rhythmic patter, directing which camera’s shot is to be used at the moment and which is to come next, Brener beside him reacting to his instructions — “Take 4, Ready 7; Take 7, Ready 2; Take 2; Ready 4” — with rapid button-pushing to broadcast the right camera angle.
Meanwhile Walton is thinking longer term, dictating what will be on screen (a graphic of the Jays’ defence, shots of the Eflin family) after the break between the top and bottom of the first inning, and providing a few “maybes” which will depend on the situation: “If he walks, go to billboard.”
The batter did walk and a quick logo of Rogers 4K TV pops onto the screen.
It goes on this way all afternoon long, with Walton overseeing things, Clara on the second-by-second matters, everyone else silently and quickly reacting to their voices.
And they will do it all again the next night in Philadelphia, and the night after that, and the night after that in Baltimore, continuing for at least three more months.
Sometimes, in the midst of that grind, when he’s driving from Burlington to the ballpark, Walton channels his inner 11-year-old.
“I’ll think back and say ‘I did this same drive so many years ago swith Tom Cheek and now I’m doing it for my own work,’” he says.
“There’s definitely a ‘pinch-me’ quality to this job.”