San Diego Padres: Tony Gwynn Jr Comes Home

It is quite a relief for San Diego Padres fans that Tony Gwynn Jr. is now expected to join the Fox Sports San Diego broadcast team this season.

The thought had occurred to me on several occasions over the last year or so. It sprang up for the first time when I read before last baseball season that the Los Angeles Dodgers had hired Tony Gwynn Jr to work their post game radio broadcasts.

WHAT!

It was bad enough that he had played for our hated rivals up north but what was even worse was to have them hire him to work in their radio booth when he rightly belonged here, in his home town, working for the team his father played and broadcast for.

I couldn’t believe that the Padres had allowed this to happen. Especially when it was so obvious to anyone who listened how much the San Diego fans loved to hear his voice on the radio, whenever any one of the local sports radio talk show hosts were willing to interview him or seek his opinions.

I had not heard that the Dodgers hadn’t invited him back for this season but then I read a tweet on my twitter feed dated Jan 15 (of this year) that caught my attention.

This made me mad as it seemed obvious to anyone in SD that this was the perfect set up. The Padres hire Tony Jr as a color analyst or radio analyst to help with the transition over to a new radio station and/or contribute more local flavor to the TV broadcast.

I decided to be patient and give this a little time to gather momentum. There was no way that the Padres could miss this opportunity. They just couldn’t be that stupid.

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Then, last week, twitter began to spread the word that Jr was indeed joining the Padres broadcast team. Although unofficial, the report came first from Dennis Lin of the Union Tribune.

The official tweet, from Fox Sports San Diego, came today, officially welcoming Tony and former Padres pitcher and frequent radio analyst, Bob Scanlon, to the broadcast team. The official announcement states that Scanlon will be the main sideline reporter for the TV broadcast and Tony will be a fill-in analyst for the pre and post-game show. The new pre and post game shows will be titled Padres Live, replacing the interactive Social Hour pre game show of previous seasons.

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It remains to be seen how many games Tony will be a part of but we can only hope this is just the beginning of a long and successful relationship for Tony and the Padres.

We will always miss his Dad and no one thinks that Jr can replace him but it will bring a smile to my face whenever I hear that patented Gwynn laugh coming across the airwaves.