Fans of veteran Baltimore radio traffic guru “Detour Dave” Sandler have mounted an online campaign to show their support for him, amid rumors that the Hearst-owned stations he works for, WBAL and 98 Rock, may be dropping him after 26 years.

“This is unreal, just cause he has health issues wbal is going to let him go,” wrote one of the 1,222 people who have “liked” the “Keep Detour Dave on the Air” Facebook page. “Well if you do I will not listen or watch anymore. Hes a great guy and a hard worker.”

The health issues they refer to include an Aug. 2009 collapse during a softball game, resuscitation by a fellow player (who was also a cardiologist) and subsequent heart bypass surgery. More recently (Dec. 20), Sandler had surgery for related cardiac issues, he told us, and has not, according to WBAL, been on the air since November.

In a phone interview yesterday, Sandler, 51, stressed his gratitude to the stations for “their years of support and loyalty” and said fans “may have misinterpreted something I said on Facebook about how I may be in the market for another job.”

But he also said “there have been some conversations” with management about how they want to cover traffic. Although he describes fans’ concern as “premature,” he also has prominent links on his Facebook page to the “Keep Detour Dave on the Air” page set up by a friend.

Meeting With Management

Both Sandler and Merrie Street, WBAL news director, said Sandler’s future will become clearer after he meets with management next week.

“We’ll all know more after Wednesday,” Street said, “I can’t really discuss any of this at the moment.” Asked about angry fan rumblings that the stations are “kicking him to the curb” because of his illness, Street said emphatically: “I can’t agree. We have been absolutely supportive of Dave.”

Asked if Sandler had been absent often due to illness, Street deferred to Sandler, saying he should be the one to answer any medical questions. But she did volunteer that he tried once to come to work once since going off the air late last year and it didn’t work out: “He had difficulty breathing.”

Sandler said he has been “an exclusive vendor to Hearst,” doing morning and afternoon drive-time traffic reports “on the 5s” for WBAL radio (1090 AM) and two reports an hour for 98 Rock (97.9 FM). Sandler said he’s been suffering from the lingering effects of treatment for a bout with Hodgkin’s disease in the 1980s. “They have a way to treat it but the treatments cause problems,” he said. “It’s a double-edged sword.”

Street said since Sandler went off the air in the fall, “we have paid out-of-pocket to have someone covering” for him.

She said the stations have been using traffic data and reporting from Total Traffic Network, described on its homepage as providing “a best-in-class, real-time traffic data service for broadcast, web, wireless and navigation consumers, with an emphasis on providing accurate, relative and timely information to help motorists navigate their routes more intelligently.”

That used to pretty much describe what, until recent years, human beings like Sandler did from helicopters and airplanes.
As both Street and Sandler observed, in interviews with The Brew, “traffic reporting has really changed.”

Up in the Air

Sandler, who said his work for WBAL began 26 years ago, recalled buying a small plane and reporting on Baltimore traffic from the air for many years.

“After the tragedy of 9/11, there was a lot of concern about who’s got a small plane out there,” he said, “and traffic reporting came inside.” After that he and other traffic reporters did their work “in the traffic center,” a shift made possible by all the new traffic information sources becoming available.

“We’ve got state highway traffic sensors, underground sensors, speed sensors,” he said. “We can do it better maybe even now than when we went up in the air.”

Asked whether the station wants to cut back on traffic coverage, Street said, “not at all, traffic is hugely important to our listeners.”

“When there’s an accident on the Inner Loop of the beltway near Dulaney Valley Road, you need somebody who can tell you how to detour around it,” Street said, “That’s something a traffic reporter can do.”

Judging by the outpouring of support for Sandler online, fans feel a connection with him after his years of guiding them through Baltimore’s increasingly clogged roadways. As one fan put it: “Taking Dave Sandler off the air on WBAL / 98 Rock is like when Angelos took Jon Miller away from the Orioles.”