WDME picks the Sea Dogs over Red Sox

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Owners of a Dover-Foxcroft radio station have decided to replace their Red Sox with the teal and black of the Portland Sea Dogs.

Frustration over Major League Baseball’s inability to end the baseball strike has prompted owners of WDME (103.1 FM) to drop Red Sox broadcasts in favor of Sea Dogs games.

“We just weren’t too thrilled with what the Red Sox were going through,” said co-owner Jim Ganley. “They didn’t offer any discount on the package even though replacements might be playing. They just kind of said `Take it or leave it.’ ”

So Ganley and his brother Rick decided to leave it.

“There was no animosity. It’s just their philosophy was we were bugging out in the middle of a three-year contract and they felt we should honor it,” said Ganley. “We felt we weren’t getting the product we were promised.”

The Ganleys are still discussing the contract with the Red Sox, trying to “find a resolution that will satisfy both sides,” Jim said.

But even if the strike is settled, WDME is committed to airing Sea Dogs games in place of the Sox.

“We tried to hold off on this as long as possible but finally had to make a decision two weeks ago,” said Ganley.

Ganley said the station will broadcast all 142 of Portland’s regular-season games plus postseason games if Portland qualifies.

The idea of doing Sea Dogs games was planted late last summer when WDME was offered Pawtucket games by the Red Sox radio network in place of the cancelled major league games.

“We took them and the response was tremendous. So I figure we’ll try the Sea Dogs and hopefully it will be even greater,” Ganley said.

Before making a final decision, WDME’s staff aired promos for a week and talked to many listeners about airing the Sea Dogs. The consensus was listeners prefer Sea Dogs games to replacement ball.

WDME is one of eight stations in the Sea Dog radio network. The flagship station is WPOR (1490 AM) in Portland.

After airing the University of Maine’s NCAA hockey playoff game last week, Bangor radio station WYOU (97.1 FM) has been left out in the cold this time around.

Neither WYOU nor sister station WABI (910 AM) will do Thursday’s Maine-Michigan Final Four game.

“We offered, as a public service, to do the game,” said George Hale, station manager at WABI.

“UMaine made the request to the NCAA for us to do the game,” he said. “But the NCAA, apparently due to space restrictions, was only allowing one commercial station and a college station to do it.

“But that wasn’t really final… it was very indefinite,” Hale added. “We expected them to get back to us, but they never did.”

Hale waited until noon Wednesday to make a final decision. Not hearing from the NCAA, he cancelled plans to do the game.

“It’s too bad because we had a lot of positive response from listeners who won’t be able to see or hear the game Thursday,” Hale said.

Maine’s game will be televised at 1 p.m. by ESPN and aired by WZON (620 AM) in Bangor and WMEB (91.9 FM) in Orono.

Don’t look for ESPN2 on your cable system anytime soon.

ESPN2 recently debuted in the Portland area on Time-Warner Cable’s programming lineup. So far, that’s the only system in Maine on which “the Deuce” can be seen.

Systems like Bangor’s Cablevision are simply unable to add ESPN2 because they’ve used up all of their channel capacity.

“At this time, we don’t have plans to rebuild the system, which we would have to do to increase our channel capacity,” said Debbie Chapman, Cablevision’s sales manager.

Chapman said the recent additions of the Sci-Fi Network, Comedy Central and Bravo to family cable packages were possible only because they were already in the 40-channel system. They just went from being premium channels to family cable channels.

Sea Dogs Radio Network

WDME Dover-Foxcroft (103.1 FM)

WJTO Bath/Brunswick (730 AM)

WKTQ South Paris (1450 AM)

WOXO Norway (92.7 FM)

WPOR Portland (1490 AM)*

WQEZ Kennebunk (104.7 FM)

WTBM Mexico (100.7 FM)

WTME Lewiston/Auburn (1240 AM)

* Denotes flagship station