For the last 18 seasons, the voice of Dave Wills was synonymous with Tampa Bay Rays baseball. Over the weekend, the long time radio broadcaster died suddenly. He passed away in his sleep early Sunday morning at the age of 58.
“I know for the last 24 hours or so since I found out, since we all found out, I think all of us are just in a fog and Rays fans are in a fog,” Pat Donovan said Monday morning to open WDAE’s Pat & Aaron.
Wills was a beloved figure in the Tampa Bay area. Donovan said that if you ever doubted that, all you needed to do was look at social media to see the way he was being discussed.
“I noticed on Facebook, I noticed on Twitter, I noticed everything I saw about Dave Wills had very little to do with the broadcaster he was, and he was a Hall of Fame level broadcaster. Very few people mentioned the kind of broadcaster he was because everyone was talking about the man that he was.”
Dave Wills is survived by his wife Liz, his son Alex and his daughter Michelle. Donovan said that he couldn’t help but also think about Andy Freed, who had been Wills’ partner on the Rays’ radio broadcast since 2005.
Donovan compared the relationship to his own with co-host Aaron Jacobson. He noted that if something were to suddenly happen to Jacobson, it would be hard to come back to the WDAE studio and do a show. Freed will have to do that relatively quickly with Rays’ radio broadcasts and returning to a booth that Dave Wills isn’t in is likely going to be painful.
“Very few people outside of this profession, and there aren’t many professions, where you have your entire life, almost your identity tied to another human being the way that we do, the way that Dave and Andy do,” Pat Donovan said.
The segment concluded with Donovan noting how ubiquitous Dave Wills was on the Florida Gulf Coast. He wasn’t just a broadcaster that came to town to do a job. One look at Wills’ social media pages, Donovan says, proves he was a part of the community.
“When you’re the play-by-play guy for anybody as long as he was, that’s a big part of your identity, but if you knew the guy at all, if you were Facebook friends with him, you see so many of his posts were about hanging out at this place and having a beer, hanging out at this place and eating food.”
