COMING IN FROM THE RAIN
Jays head home after washouts.
To this day, more than four years later, Joe Siddall still doesn’t know why he added the line to the email.
It was February 2014 and Siddall’s family was grieving the loss of their youngest son, Kevin, who died a week short of his 15th birthday after a six-month battle with blood cancer.
Siddall, a retired catcher born in Windsor, was working parttime with the Detroit Tigers and had received an email from legendary Blue Jays broadcaster Jerry Howarth a week after Kevin’s funeral, offering condolences. The men didn’t know each other well at the time, but the world of professional baseball is small — and the Canadian scene is even more insulated.
In his reply, Siddall thanked Howarth and included an offhand comment that would lead to a new career — first on radio with Sportsnet 590 The FAN, now on TV as the studio analyst on Blue Jays Central — and help his family heal.
“I think I said, ‘Looking forward to seeing you when you come to Detroit,’ ” Siddall remembered during an interview at spring training in March. “And then at the very end I put something about, ‘Or maybe in the broadcast booth one day.’ I still to this day don’t know why I put that comment, but I think that he would tell you that if I didn’t put that comment, none of this would have happened.”
As it happened, Howarth’s former broadcast partner, Jack Morris, had just left the show and Sportsnet was looking for someone new. Within weeks, Siddall was in Dunedin, Fla. for spring training and a 20- to 30minute crash course from Howarth before his first game. He was part of two spring shows before he was offered the job full-time — a role he occupied until this past January, when he was announced as Gregg Zaun’s replacement on the TV side.
That time was surreal, Siddall says now. He and wife Tamara — the “rock” of the family, he calls her — were in a fog, while also trying to make sure they were there for their other kids: Brett, Mackenzie and Brooke.
They had two choices: move forward and be grateful for what they still had, or wallow and risk going to an even darker place. There was no easy course, but they opted to keep putting one foot in front of the other. Today, Siddall says the family is in “probably as good a place as they can be” as they navigate “the most devastating thing anyone can ever have happen to them.”
“Even sitting here talking to you, it’s almost like I’m lying,” Siddall said, admitting it has probably taken him four years to talk in such a way. “Like I have to lie to myself. You have to convince yourself that, ‘Yup, that’s where we are.’ When this all happened, you start wondering, ‘How the heck is this happening? Why is this happening? You ask all those questions, but I think more than anything you keep rolling with it. I think more than anything we learned, you try to make the most of this life and have fun with it, because you just never know.”
Getting back into baseball fulltime helped save him, Siddall said. Primarily a stay-at-home dad since he retired from playing in 2000, he coached his kids in high school ball. Brett, now a prospect in the Oakland Athletics system, played for him and Kevin would have gone into Grade 9 the year he died.
“February rolls around and this happens, so I was getting ready to go into the gym and get ready to have tryout for the high school team,” Siddall said. “A few of (Kevin’s) buddies were going to be on that team ... I don’t know how I was going to do that, I really don’t know how I was going to do that. I think baseball maybe rescued me a little bit.”
“Rescued” doesn’t mean everything is good now, Siddall emphasized, but his job at Sportsnet became a family affair. Tamara, a doctor, came to visit on weekends, no matter which ballpark he was working from. The kids tagged along when they could. “Maybe it has helped all of us,” he said. “As a group, it’s been pretty fun.”
Making the switch from radio to TV — after Siddall tossed his hat into the ring late last year and successfully auditioned in January — has been another positive step for Siddall, who believes Kevin would have had the same reaction to the new gig as his siblings: that it’s pretty cool. And maybe not surprising, according to Brett, now 23.
“It’s funny because even when he was coaching us growing up, we’d always watch baseball at home — that would be the only thing on during the summer and we’d be sitting on the couch,” he said this past week. “I can’t even tell you how many times he would say something right after a play happened and, sure enough, the broadcaster said it right after that. We were like, ‘Wow, you should be talking on TV.’ ”
While Brett hasn’t had a chance to watch a full broadcast yet — he’s playing for the A’s Double-A Midland (Texas) RockHounds — his friends are “constantly” sharing videos of his dad on TV, all dressed up and with a new haircut to boot.
“All my buddies were razzing him about that,” Brett said.
As for what Siddall has to offer in his new role, it’s not a far cry from what landed him in broadcasting in the first place.
“I learned long ago: be yourself,” he said. “People have talked about who I’m replacing and all that. No, I’m Joe Siddall. I’m going to be myself. I roll with it.”