False fire alarm persisted for 10 minutes during Blue Jays remote broadcast

Editor’s note: The original version of this article stated that the broadcast was temporarily “halted.” That is not accurate and has been edited to reflect it.

With life returning largely to its pre-pandemic state, remote broadcasts are largely a thing of the past. Some teams, though, still use them for road games. One of those teams, for their radio broadcast, is the Toronto Blue Jays.

And during Toronto’s season-opening series on the road against the St. Louis Cardinals this weekend, one of the potential flaws of that arrangement came to life.

There was a fire alarm in the studio where the Blue Jays broadcasters were announcing the game on Sportsnet.

Fortunately, no damage was done.

“We had a fire alarm at the studio,” Jason Jackson, Rogers Sports & Media’s senior manager of communications said in an email on Monday (per The Canadian Press — H/T Yahoo Sports). “It was a false alarm — all is OK.”

That’s the good news. The bad news? The alarm persisted for a while and was a notable part of the radio broadcast.

“A fire alarm was to blame for 10 minutes of beeping noises that could be heard during Sportsnet’s remote call of the Toronto Blue Jays-St. Louis Cardinals radio broadcast over the weekend,” the report from Gregory Strong of The Canadian Press said. “Blue Jays voice Ben Wagner, who describes the action by watching TV screens when the team is on the road, paused briefly when the alarm started before resuming his call.”

Remote broadcasts have some drawbacks. One, the broadcasters are completely at the mercy of what’s being shown on their monitors. During the 2020 and 2021 seasons, when nearly road broadcasts were remote, that led to some moments where announcers called replays from previous games as live.

That was an accepted drawback among fans, when travel restrictions limited what announcers could do. That, though, is no longer an issue. As such, things like that, as well as what happened during Saturday’s Blue Jays vs. Cardinals game, become more annoying to the audience.

Hopefully going forward it’s something that the networks and teams realize is a real drawback and stop running remote broadcasts. The Jays and the Los Angeles Angels are the only MLB teams not currently sending their radio broadcasters on the road.

[The Canadian Press via Yahoo Sports]