Sports radio host, former baseball coach Schlemmer dies at 65

Schelmmer’s former co-host, Justin Kinner of WING-AM, paid tribute to Schlemmer on Twitter.

“He started out as my co-host & he ended as one of my closest and best friends,” Kinner wrote. “We all knew this day was coming. It doesn’t make it one bit easier. Thanks for everything, Mark Schlemmer. The laughs & memories will never be forgotten. Your pain is gone. RIP my friend.”

Hall of Fame baseball writer Hal McCoy also praised Schlemmer in a story on HalMcCoy.com.

“Schlemmer was one of the toughest guys I ever knew,” McCoy wrote. “He fought hard for several years with an assortment of ailments, any one of which would floor anybody else. And never once did I hear him complain or say, ‘Why me?’ He was heavily opinionated and not afraid to voice them and defend them. His Facebook page was extremely popular, especially his Sunday Sermons and his Sunday list of one-sentence pieces of advice.”

Schlemmer had open heart surgery in April, he wrote then on Facebook, and had been hospitalized since the surgery, according to Facebook updates by his friend Donna Grusenmeyer.

Until his surgery, Schlemmer had been regularly sharing his sports opinions on his Facebook page.

“Now 3-14 this Reds team is awful,” he wrote in April. “At my age I could hit .148. If you think the seats are empty now, just wait a few more weeks. ... And all of the stupid bobbleheads won’t help.”

Long before gaining fame on the radio, the 1974 Fairmont West graduate Schlemmer made a name for himself in baseball. He played at Union College in Kentucky and then in the Detroit Tigers farm system, reaching Single-A. He was an assistant coach at the University of Dayton for two seasons before being named head coach in 1989. He stepped down just before the 1993 season and then spent four years managing in the independent Northern League, where he coached former big leaguers Dennis “Oil Can” Boyd and Pedro Guerrero.

Schlemmer was inducted into the Dayton Amateur Baseball Commission Hall of Fame in 2009. He competed in the DABC as a player and manager from 1972-89. His father Robert, uncles Jack and Jim and cousin John Schlemmer are also members of the Hall of Fame.

Schlemmer experienced tragedy in 2002 when his only child, Lindsay, died at 16 in a car accident in Shelby County.

“People say time heals, but no, it doesn’t,” Schlemmer told Dayton Daily News columnist Tom Archdeacon in 2011. “There’s no playbook that tells you how to survive. It just took all the gas out of me.”

Schlemmer credited another sports radio host, former Dayton Daily News sports writer Chick Ludwig, for helping him break into radio. He made that move in 2007, joining 980 WONE-AM as a baseball insider. By the following year, he had his own show from 6-8 p.m. on Mondays, Wednesdays and Friday.

“The best part of sports-talk radio is the interaction with fans,” he told Ludwig for a Dayton Daily News story in 2008. “I love all the calls from our audience, which keeps growing. It’s not my show. It’s the callers’ show. It’s important to keep that in mind.”

”Dayton is a real sports town, but we had nothing,” John Ortez told Archdeacon in 2011. “If you wanted sports talk, you had to go to a Cincinnati station, but they never gave Dayton a fair shake. Mark gave everybody here a voice and people loved it.”

In 2011, Schlemmer lost his job at WONE and spent months homeless. When word got out about his situation, friends held a fundraiser for him that same year at the Brixx Ice House in Dayton. Former Dayton basketball stars such as Don May, George Janky and Monk Meineke attended, as did Wright State mens’ basketball coach Billy Donlon, Archdeacon reported.

“I’m just so overwhelmed,” Schlemmer said. “This is gonna sound bad, but I feel like I’m at my own funeral.”

Schlemmer returned to sports talk radio with WING-AM in 2018 and hosted a weekday show from 3-6 p.m. with Justin Kinner. He stayed with the station until March 2020 when he announced he was retiring because of health issues.

“I want no sadness or sympathy, just laughs and fun,” he wrote. “Like me or hate me, if I made you laugh or think over the past many years, I did my job.”