As the clock ticked past midnight on one of the most memorable nights in Canadian sports history, roughly 110 minutes after George Springer’s seventh-inning home run sent an entire country into a baseball-crazed frenzy, Dan Shulman met his son, Ben, in shallow left field at a still lively Rogers Centre.

Even at that point of the evening, there were still Blue Jays players and personnel, plus assorted family members, celebrating on the turf, so father and son took advantage of the moment and posed for a photo that will surely be a Shulman family keepsake.

Some of you are familiar with Dan Shulman given his longtime TV work in the United States, but a refresher for others: In Canada, he is the Sportsnet television voice of the Blue Jays, an accomplished play-by-play voice with an extensive ESPN resume that includes calling a dozen World Series for ESPN Radio, as well as calling properties such as ESPN’s “Sunday Night Baseball” (2011-17), “Wednesday Night Baseball” (2002-07) and major ESPN college basketball and NBA games.

Ben Shulman is the lead radio voice of the Blue Jays. Just 25, he is one of the youngest broadcasters calling games for a major pro sports team. He landed the full-time radio gig prior to the 2024 season, after a couple of years of working on the radio broadcast.

“I said to him, ‘Man, this is pretty cool,’” Dan recalled. “You are going to go to Dodger Stadium in a few days to call the World Series. He looked at me and said, “This is pretty cool for you, too.”

The Shulmans are one of the cooler media stories of the upcoming World Series — a Canadian father and son calling the Blue Jays’ first World Series appearance since 1993 for the national TV and radio rights-holder. Unlike their U.S. counterparts, Canadians can watch the same home country television broadcast during the postseason that they do during the regular season. The reason? Since the Blue Jays are the only MLB team in Canada, their home television territory is the entire country.

Sportsnet, owned by Canadian media conglomerate Rogers Communications, which is also the parent company of the Blue Jays, is the Canadian rights-holder for all Blue Jays games, as well as being the Canadian rights-holder for a substantial package of MLB regular-season games and the entire postseason. The international media deals are not competitive with Fox because Fox’s rights are for the U.S. only. It will be the first time a Canadian broadcaster will produce a World Series for television, let alone for its home audience. (The Fox broadcast will also be available in Canada.)

The Springer game averaged six million viewers in Canada, nearly 1/6 of the country’s population of 41 million, and the combined U.S./Canada audience for Game 7 was 15.03 million viewers. Viewership for the entire ALCS in the U.S. (Fox/FS1) and Canada (Sportsnet) averaged a combined 9.39 million viewers. These are astonishing numbers for baseball north of the border.

“I’ve been lucky enough to do 12 World Series on ESPN Radio, and I’ve been lucky enough to call games for my hometown team,” Dan said. “But never before have those two crossed. All I’ve ever wanted to do is broadcast games that matter to a lot of people. Not only clearly do these games matter to a lot of people, but they matter to a lot of people in my life. These games matter to every single person that I know in Toronto, every single family member and friend that I grew up with.”

“Even being in the playoffs, frankly, was incredibly exciting for me,” Ben said. “Doing playoff baseball was a much bigger thing than I’ve ever done before. I missed the early 1990s Blue Jays teams, and I remember the excitement of 2015 and 2016, but those teams still felt far away from the World Series. To get to experience this really is a privilege.”

Ben Shulman said he has wanted to be a sports broadcaster since he was a child and can recall the many games his father called over the years. He would visit his father on the road a handful of times when he reached his teenage years and attended Syracuse University’s well-known Newhouse School as an undergraduate.

Dan Shulman was much more of an accidental broadcaster. As a first-year student at the University of Western Ontario (now Western University), he volunteered to work at the campus radio station and called college sports for a couple of years. But it was a secondary pursuit to studying for his actuarial exams. Upon graduation, Dan Shulman worked as an actuary for six months before making a career change at 22.

“Ben was different,” Dan said. “I think Ben, by 13 years old, was kind of thinking about this.”

The two Shulmans work one floor apart from one another on the third and fourth levels of the Rogers Centre. Ben lives within walking distance of the Rogers Centre, while Dan travels by car to get to the ballpark. Dan usually gets to the ballpark about 4 1/2 hours before first pitch and 30 minutes before Ben. The two Shulmans see each other on the field before games, but Dan said he has made it a point to give Ben some distance. “If he is talking to a player, I will never go up and insert myself into that conversation,” Dan said.

Ben Shulman said he is so locked into his radio broadcast that he is not thinking much about his father during games. (They do exchange baseball-related texts during the course of a game.) It’s a little different for the father.

“I think a father thinks about a son more than a son thinks about a father, and Ben will see that in later years,” Dan said, laughing. “I bet you there’s not a single game this year where we haven’t exchanged text during the game, but it’s much less in October than it is in the regular season. We don’t live together, so it’s not like what gate do you want to meet at after the game. Sometimes when I’m in the booth and filling out my scorecard, I’ll hear a video package on the Jumbotron. I’m kind of immune to reacting to my own voice, but when you hear your son’s voice, as a parent, you turn your head right away. It’s just instinct.”

Ben said he catches his dad’s work in highlight form, whether on Sportsnet’s “Blue Jays in 30” program or via YouTube highlights. Dan said he will listen to Ben’s calls through audio highlights put out on social media from Sportsnet The Fan 590. The two have worked together just once — an independent league baseball game in 2019 featuring the Barrie Baycats of the Intercounty Baseball League. (Dan did a couple of innings with Ben on Father’s Day.) This is not the first time they have been assigned to the same team. As a student, Ben called Syracuse basketball, and Dan did a couple of Orange games for ESPN when Ben was a student there.

I asked the Shulmans how they felt about their respective calls of Springer’s now-famous home run.

Dan: Satisfied. Didn’t love it.

Ben: I was pretty happy with my call. I think there’s one or two things I could have cleaned up on it slightly. But I would say in between loved and satisfied.

Dan: Because it happened in Toronto, the ballpark was bananas. I’m a big believer in laying out and letting the pictures and the sound tell the story. I think maybe I could have gotten one more line in there before I laid out. That’s my postmortem.

The younger Shulman said he has dealt with some online comments about nepotism, claiming that he only landed the job because of his last name.

“When the initial announcement came down, there was certainly a pocket of it online,” Ben said. “For the most part, I treat it like a lot of things online — I just mostly ignore it. I understand how it looks to certain people from the outside. I’m not gonna yell and scream at people. They have a right to their opinion.”

Someone who can relate to what the Shulmans have experienced is Joe Buck, the voice of ESPN’s “Monday Night Football” and the son of Jack Buck, the legendary sports broadcaster. Joe Buck did not know both Shulmans would be calling the World Series until I informed him this week, and he was overjoyed that the Canadian father-son broadcasting duo would experience something that he still carries with him today.

“Learning about this takes me back to when my dad and I were doing the radio and TV for the Cardinals, or when I was working the postseason for Fox and he was doing the radio broadcast,” Buck said. “There’s just nothing like seeing your dad in the hallway. I think this is so great, so congrats to them. I can’t imagine how proud Dan must be. He’s one of the great guys in the business and I think it’s the ultimate compliment you can pay a parent that you follow them into their line of work. I can tell you with my dad that it doesn’t last forever. So I hope they’re enjoying the hell out of this.”