Good news for sports radio junkies

It’s been a slow week, but this is news to shake up the Toronto sports-media scene: AM640 is going to turn their Leafs Lunch show with Bill Watters into Leafs Drive Home, an effort to steal some numbers from Bob McCown’s Prime Time Sports on The Fan 590, which rules the roost in this town. If, like me, you’ve ever found youself listening to McCown’s in the afternoon show in frustration—listening, and waiting, and wondering when the hell he’ll ever stop with the pregnant pauses and the pointless chitchat and calling Nick Kypreos a Greek (har har) and finally get around to actually saying something interesting, which is the job he’s paid so handsomely to do—then you’ll welcome this news. Maybe McCown will shape up.

If you listen to the show long enough, you come to get a handle on the show’s formula. McCown doesn’t bother to chat with the traffic and weather guys; his throws to their segments appear to be pre-recorded, which makes the show seem lazy. He and his cohosts bide their time until after the five o’clock news (which, I’d wager, is the time when the show’s audience peaks), then manage ten minutes of well-paced, insightful discussion, before digressing back into pointlessness. I was always thankful that I could switch over to AM640’s afternoon news program, which often sunk its teeth into city hall issues and which—given how often he appears on the station—I had taken to calling the Denzil Minnan-Wong show. The change will be a blow to coverage of Toronto City Hall on AM radio. So good news for sports junkies, but bad news for political junkies, and for those like me who enjoyed carrying on both conversations at once.