Booing a pickoff move is as ingrained in baseball fan DNA as complaining about umps or overpriced concessions. So when Blue Jays fans jeered Orioles reliever Shawn Dubin for checking over at Myles Straw on first base, it was just another Friday night in Toronto.
The Blue Jays were up 3-1 in the eighth inning, trying to put away a division rival while protecting their three-game lead over the Yankees in the American League East. Dubin, naturally wanting to prevent Straw from getting into scoring position, threw over and heard about it from the Rogers Centre crowd.
That’s when Orioles play-by-play announcer Kevin Brown decided the boos didn’t make sense because of baseball’s new disengagement rules. “That’s like booing if a pitcher throws a ball,” Brown said, which felt like a fairly reasonable point about fans not entirely grasping the rule changes.
But then his broadcast partner, Brian Roberts, took it several steps too far.
“I got to be real, real careful what I say, but sometimes we have some major questions about the baseball IQ of some Canadians here and there,” the former Orioles second baseman said. “At times, it felt like maybe they enjoyed, or they knew more about hockey than baseball.”
Brown tried to pump the brakes, saying, “You’ve got to be really careful. I’d shut that down now if I were you.”
But Roberts kept digging.
“We’re not on the air in Canada, are we?” he asked.
“There’s this thing called the internet,” Brown offered.
“Oh, yeah, that’s right,” Roberts replied. “I don’t understand that.”
This is 2025. Brian Roberts broadcasts baseball games for a living, but apparently needs a lesson in modern media consumption. Blue Jays fans watch AL East games. They have internet access. They hear what opposing broadcasters say about them.
Roberts took what was a relatively innocuous crowd reaction and turned it into evidence that Canadians don’t understand baseball. He’s probably not going to be a popular figure north of the border for the foreseeable future.
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.