He was one of the most prominent St. Louisans in the latter part of the 20th century, spending 20 years doing play-by-play of Blues games in a run that ended in 2004 and also included six years of calling Cardinals contests.
But it now has been two additional decades since Ken Wilson unceremoniously was gone from the Blues, and he had been mostly out of the sportscasting business ever since. But he’s back calling ball again, albeit far from the big league limelight. Wilson, now 76 years old, is living more than 8,700 miles from St. Louis as he has been serving this season as the voice of the Brisbane Bandits of the Australian Baseball League for games that are shown via streaming.
It’s a leisurely pace. He only is doing the club’s home contests, and the six teams in the ABL play only a Thursday-Sunday schedule adding up to 40 contests per club. The regular season ended last weekend, after Wilson called 20 games, often with big breaks between series when the team was on the road.
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So while folks in his old Midwest stomping ground have been shivering through some frigid stretches this month, Wilson has been basking in temperatures that this week have reached the mid- to upper 80s. After all, it’s summertime in the Southern Hemisphere.
“I’m sitting here looking at the skyline of downtown Brisbane and the Brisbane River,†Wilson said in a recent phone interview. “It’s an absolutely beautiful place.â€
He has taken a winding road to Australia after leaving St. Louis, where his trademark was punctuating calls of exciting plays with a booming “Oh, baby!†— a fan-favorite exclamation. But Blues officials, none of whom still are with the club, grumbled that Wilson didn’t attend many practices or socialize much and cited that in their reasoning for not brining him back after his contract expired. (It was their call and not that of the telecaster, what now is Bally ÁñÁ«ÊÓƵ Midwest.)
Wilson contended that he got very little — if anything — to use on the air from practices and the real reason for the move was that team executives didn’t want him passing the legendary Dan Kelly to become the club’s longest-tenured broadcaster — which he would have done with another season on the air. He was replaced by a son of Kelly’s, John Kelly, who remains the club’s TV play-by-play announcer in this second stint broadcasting the team and has surpassed his dad's longevity mark.
“I am unable to fully explain their disdain for me other than to assume their agenda overwhelmed any and all reasonable thinking when it came to Ken Wilson,†he said at the time.
Wilson never returned to sportscasting on a full-time basis. His most notable ensuing endeavor in the business was when he was one of several people who filled in on Seattle Mariners broadcasts in the 2011 and ’12 seasons following the death of longtime team announcer Dave Niehaus. Wilson, who had called Mariners games years earlier, averaged about 75 games those two years.
But he had a highly successful broadcasting career before his rough end in St. Louis. Before doing Blues and Cardinals contests, he was ESPN’s lead play-by-play broadcaster on its NHL coverage for several seasons (including calling games in the Stanley Cup Final) and spent two seasons early in his career as the Chicago Blackhawks’ TV voice. In baseball, he did games for the Reds, White Sox, Angels and Athletics in addition to the Mariners. His call in 1985 of the Reds’ Pete Rose breaking Ty Cobb’s career record for hits still pops up occasionally on sports shows and .
Wilson said he was planning to leave St. Louis for Hawaii anyway before he was ousted, although he would have wanted a scaled-back Blues schedule of assignments to West Coast games. He had worked in Hawaii early in his career and upon returning had aspirations of running for governor — before realizing how much it costs to run a serious campaign. So instead, he worked as a television news reporter in Honolulu for a year, then owned a pizza parlor there for nearly three years before relocating to the Pacific Northwest for about a decade to run two college baseball summer leagues and a team, plus a women’s collegiate softball league. The foundation for those jobs was poured in his latter St. Louis years, when he co-owned the Frontier League’s River City Rascals and Gateway Grizzlies baseball clubs.
Wilson and his wife, Marlene, lived in Portland, Oregon, at the time before returning to Hawaii, then going back to Portland, where two of their four children and two of their grandchildren now reside.
On the move
Wilson and his wife never have been ones to sit still for long and have enjoyed traveling the world. It was a trip to Australia about a decade ago that led to his recent reentry into baseball broadcasting.
“We did what people do on that trip: We went to Sydney, Brisbane and to Melbourne, and we go, ‘My God, what a great place this is, this is absolutely terrific,’†Wilson said. “The beaches are nicer than in Hawaii. What a nice place.â€
A little over a year ago, while spending a lot of time around family in Portland, they were thinking about a new start.
“We said, ‘What do we want to do now?’ because I didn’t have anything to do,†Wilson recalled. “Where do we want to live? What do we think? That kind of thing. We don’t have a La-Z-Boy, and we don’t sit and do nothing. Most places we go, we’re the only people we see who are over 40 — and we’re well over 40! We’re complimented when people will say to my wife, ‘You look like you’re in your late 50s,’ and they look at me and say, ‘You look like you’re in your 60s.’ I’ll take the compliment and run.â€
They considered a move to Portugal, which they visited on a scouting trip.
“We loved Portugal,†he said.
They also took another major trip, back to Australia — specifically Brisbane — in 2022.
“We spent the time like we lived there, not as tourists,†he said. “We rented a condo there, lived there for 21 days and said, ‘My gosh, what a wonderful place this is.’ At the time, I obviously was aware of the Australian Baseball League, and I never go to a town without going to the ballpark. That’s a given. I talked to the folks there; they had no idea what they were doing. They said, ‘What will we have to do to get you to do the games?’ I said, ‘Well I’m not exactly tied up, I’m not exactly busy.’ So we talked.â€
The schedule for the then-upcoming season was favorable, just the 20 home games plus possibly some playoff contests. A deal was struck.
“We decided to come over here from the middle of October until the middle of February,†Wilson said. “I said to myself, ‘This looks like a vacation to me.’ I can go to Brisbane for their summer and miss most of the (Portland) winter. Plus I can do 20 games; I can do that in my sleep. My wife was kind enough to say, ‘OK let’s go.’â€
Wilson, never one to lack confidence, said he has been well received.
“I had no idea what people would think, and it really didn’t make a difference to me,†he said. “Who cares, right? But as it turns out, they think I’m the greatest thing since sliced bread. They haven’t a lot of exposure (to American announcers). The accent is different; the whole presentation is different.â€
The ABL on Friday named the Bandits' broadcasts the best in the league.
Wilson said most other teams have Aussies doing the play-by-play, so he is a novelty to many of his listeners.
“I come in and a couple guys say, ‘We’ve never had a baseball broadcaster as great as you in Australia.’ It’s just a whole different thing to them.â€
He said his broadcast partner, CJ Barnes, an American who has been in Australia for a decade and a half, adds local flavor and will translate Wilson’s use of feet for measurements on the field into metric-system terms used in that land.
“He says, ‘For you folks in Australia, that’s such and such,’†Wilson said.
Wilson does not need any translations when he utters an “Oh, baby!†although when he was broadcasting in the States, he used the exclamation much more in hockey than in baseball. But he slides some in on occasion.
“I’ve had a number of people come up to me and say the strangest things,†Wilson said. “The first thing is, ‘I can’t believe how good you are; I can’t believe what a great voice you have.’ I thank them, and they say, ‘I love Oh, baby. I love Oh, baby.’ ...
“They also say, ‘You have a cute accent,’†leading to chuckles from Wilson. “You can imagine a guy with a very distinctive Australia accent doing Major League Baseball. I’m that in reverse.â€
The level of play, however, is far from big league quality. The Brisbane roster is comprised of local players, several Koreans, some young big league hopefuls and several Americans near the end of their pro careers. Among those on the roster is a player with St. Louis ties — Sam Gardner, 27, who has pitched for the aforementioned Grizzlies.
“It’s a very odd conglomeration of players,†Wilson said. “It’s interesting. But I’m not trying to tell you it’s like the Cardinals playing the Cubs. It’s not that.â€
Unlike in America, the country’s national team, not the local clubs, is the focal point in Australian baseball.
Nonetheless, his time in Brisbane has been a fun experience.
“It’s been good for me because I was curious,†Wilson said. “I’m 76, I haven’t done a game since 2012, so who knows†how it would go? “I was telling my wife I actually think I’m better now than I ever was. On the air, my voice sounds just the way it did in the ’70s or ’80s. I keep thinking that sometime I’ll have the voice of an old guy, and I never do. People think I’m 35 or 45 years old just from the audio.“
His style is relaxed.
“When I sit and do games in Brisbane, Australia, and I have not a worry in the world about what I say,†he said. “They’re the most entertaining broadcasts ever because I tell people stories that probably I wouldn’t tell in most situations. I’m just having fun, I’m not exactly auditioning.â€
Wilson said his delivery has changed.
“What I discovered is that I’m much more conversational now than I ever was,†he said. “If I was going to critique my style on baseball, I would say there were times when I was a little bit too much like an announcer and too much black and white, bamp, bamp, bamp, bamb. Now I’m more conversational and I think I’m actually better than I’ve ever been. But that and a dollar bill will get me nowhere.â€
Wilson does not hold any aspirations of returning to a big-league booth.
“The baseball is important here, but it isn’t the crux of this whole escapade,†he said. “It’s not a steppingstone to my future.â€
But he thinks he still could excel in a major-league booth and believes he was perceived as being too old for a new big-league job after the last one he had, the part-time work with the Mariners, ended a dozen years ago when he was in his 60s.
“People are not looking for 60-year-olds to come in,†he said. “How many guys in their 60s get hired for major-league jobs? How many in their 70s?â€
Not many.
“What I’ve always thought was the funny thing is that nowadays guys are with teams four years, five years, maybe six years and they move to another team or they wash out because they’re not good enough,†he said. “I could probably say to somebody now, ‘I’ll give you five great years.’ But they’re going to go, ‘(You’ll be ages) 76-81, I don’t think they see a future.’ But if they hire a young guy, he also might not be there more than four years.â€
Looking back
Wilson, who has said he was thrilled for Blues fans when the team finally won the Stanley Cup five years ago, looks back affectionately on his unconventional career.
“I’ve seen more owners, more markets, more managers and more players than most people,†he said. “My joke is I’ve never had to work a day in my life, and that’s not far from the truth. As my wife reminds me almost every day, ‘You’ve had a great life.’ People tell me, ‘Wow, what a great career you’ve had.’ You couldn’t have had things much better than I’ve had it. One of the things that has made it so great is that I’ve had a lot of variety. My personality needs variety. I’m not a live-in-the-same-house, have-the-same-job-for-40-years kind of guy.
“I’ve lived a lot of places, had a lot of jobs, got to do two sports I love. How many have had that opportunity? How many guys have done the NHL and Major League Baseball on a regular basis? I feel extremely fortunate.â€
And despite the rough ending locally, he said, “I love St. Louis,†and compares its rabid sports fans to those in his hometown of Detroit.
“St. Louis, you talk about being a baseball town, wow,†he said. “And St. Louis has been over the years a pretty darn good hockey town, too. I liked living there because I’m basically a Midwestern guy. I thought St. Louis was sensational, the fans were great and I was treated well. I have fond memories of St. Louis. Putting together the River City Rascals with some good folks certainly is part of the fond memories of St. Louis.â€
What’s next?
There have been many stops for Wilson since his St. Louis days, and there could be more as he hinted at a return to running a ballclub at some level.
But first, his time in Australia is rapidly winding down. In fact, he might have called his final game there last weekend. The Bandits slumped at the end of the season and finished in third place. The top four teams made the playoffs, which start with best-of-three semifinal series this weekend. Brisbane is at second-seeded Perth for the entire matchup, and because Wilson does not call road games, the Bandits would have to win for him to broadcast another contest this season. If they advance, they’d have at least one home contest in the championship series, against the winner of the semifinal matchup between top-seeded Adelaide and No. 4 Melbourne. (Games can be streamed for free on the app.)
Either way, Wilson said he and his wife aren’t sure if they’d want a return engagement next season.
“I have no idea,†he said. “We have to decide what we want to do with our lives. She’d like to spend part of the year in Europe traveling around, maybe for three or four months. We absolutely love it here (in Australia), it’s sensational. But we have two grandkids in Portland, so that pretty well leaves Portland as part of the equation.â€
That’s where they’ll head next month.
“Then we’ll be sitting there saying, ‘What do you want to do now?’ If you know somebody who needs a guy to do 100 TV games, I’m available until the end of the line ... whenever that will be,†he said, chuckling. “Lots of guys I’ve known and worked with are no longer on the Earth, so I should be thrilled just to be here. I’m having a great time and always looking for something to do. Keeping busy, that’s what it’s all about.â€
Listen to some of Ken Wilson's calls:
- Former St. Louis sportscaster Ken Wilson calls aÂ
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- °Â¾±±ô²õ´Ç²ÔÌý in 1993 that involved the goalies
- Wilson broadcasts aÂ