One Southern California radio host believes one other might need gotten fired on the behest of the Padres.
John Kentera was let go from Audacy-run station 97.3 The Fan in San Diego, the flagship radio station of the Padres, last week.
Longtime San Diego sports personality Scott Kaplan speculated on his own YouTube program that Kentera’s propensity to be critical of the Padres factored into The Fan’s decision.
“I haven’t any insight of any kind. I don’t know anybody who works at that radio station, but here’s my thought,” Kaplan began, as covered by Barrett Sports Media.
“I’ll bet you that Coach Kentera was so tied in with (former Padres manager) Bob Melvin… And I’ll bet you that coach was so blunt together with his criticism of the Padres — and I saw people accusing him of being a racist on Twitter, because he’s not into the Caribbean sort of play and bat flipping and whatever. He’s an old white guy. What do you expect them to do? Love that? He’s an old-school form of coach.”
“My guess is there isn’t any program director at this radio station that makes that call,” Kaplan continued.
“Too big of a call. And I’d bet you that the company company in Latest York is like ‘We don’t care. We don’t care about this guy. He barely makes any money. We don’t care.’ I’d bet you the Padres were like, ‘Hey, he was tied in with Melvin. He was very, very critical of our organization.
“And guess what we would like? We’d like people who find themselves cheerleaders. We’d like people to support our product.’”
The Padres organization disputed the remarks.
“The claims made by Scott Kaplan were baseless and false,” the team told The Post in a press release.
“Station management of 97.3 The Fan is solely accountable for their programming decisions, and the Padres provided no feedback on their lineup change.”
After Kaplan’s comments went viral, a source with knowledge of The Fan told Awful Announcing that “the choice was not about any influence from the Padres, but moderately the station wanting to modernize its lineup,” and that the move was “the station’s decision alone.”