Opinion | Tom Cheek’s impact on the Blue Jays will always resonate

CLEARWATER, Fla.—He was the voice of our summers for more than a quarter-century, and now he rests here. His ashes inside a bench by a pretty pond at Sylvan Abbey Memorial Gardens, only about 10 minutes away from where his beloved Blue Jays spend every spring preparing for their coming season.

Tom Cheek was the first voice of the Jays, calling their 9-5 win over the Chicago White Sox at Exhibition Stadium on that snowy April 7, 1977 with Hall of Famer Early Wynn by his side on what was then known as the Hewpex Sports Network.

“In the early going, he was the face of the Blue Jays,” remembers Paul Beeston, the team’s first-ever employee who went on to be club president for two separate stints covering 17 years.

“We drafted a lot of young kids that first year, we had (manager) Roy Hartsfield telling his stories, but it was Tom who was out there and Tom became the constant.”

After that first game, he called the next 4,305 Jays games in a row — along with countless spring training, playoff and all-star games — never missing a day of work until the streak stopped when Cheek missed the Jays’ 6-1 win in Oakland on June 4, 2004 to attend his father’s funeral. A week and a half later, he was at Toronto Western Hospital having surgery to attempt to remove a brain tumour that would ultimately take him from us on Oct. 9, 2005.

A Hall of Famer on both sides of the border, Cheek is most widely known for one call on Joe Carter’s home run that ended the 1993 World Series, bringing a second straight championship to Toronto. But his imprint goes far beyond “Touch ’em all, Joe, you’ll never hit a bigger home run in your life.”

“When we had the caravan, Tom was there,” said Beeston. “When we had to have a luncheon — we had those monthly Blue Jays luncheons back then — Tom was there. Tom’s work wasn’t just the games; it was all-encompassing for what the whole brand stood for. He was out there all the time. He had a tremendous amount of effort that went into selling the ball club and the team.”

In the days when radio was the main conduit to baseball fans — games were only on television once or twice a week in the first couple of decades of the franchise — Cheek was the one who taught an entire generation of Canadians about the game, and about how a baseball broadcast should sound, too.

“To me, Tom Cheek was the Blue Jays,” said Dan Shulman, whose turn it is now to get ready to broadcast another Jays season on Sportsnet. “He was as well known as any player they had in the early days. He was the one who taught us about baseball. He was the one you thought of when you said to yourself, ‘Is the game on now?’”

It’s not hard to imagine Cheek taking in the action as the Jays get ready for their Grapefruit League opener Friday afternoon against the Baltimore Orioles in Sarasota. He would have been right in his element on this warm, cloudless Florida morning.

He would have loved seeing Vladimir Guerrero Jr. doing battle with Alek Manoah and Nate Pearson: at times hitting rockets, at times taking his lumps.

He would have rolled his eyes at the bloated modern-day coaching staffs, the Trackman and the Rapsodo and said something like, “Do they need all this equipment to be able to tell that he just hit the ball really hard?” Then he would break into his huge grin and disarming laugh that could be heard all the way on the other side of this giant complex.

I make it a point to visit Tom’s grave before the first game of every pre-season, though I wasn’t able to last year because the pandemic kept us all at home. It’s important to pay tribute to him, to thank him for everything he did for us as Jays fans and to keep his memory alive. Getting to sit beside him in the broadcast booth for 2 1/2 seasons was a dream come true.

The forever voice of the Blue Jays has been at rest for more than 16 years now, but his impact still resonates and always will.

Mike Wilner is a Toronto-based baseball columnist for the Star and host of the baseball podcast “Deep Left Field.” Follow him on Twitter: @wilnerness