Pat Caputo, the longtime Detroit sports radio host and Oakland Press columnist, died this week at 67 from pancreatic cancer. The death was confirmed by the family on May 8.
Caputo spent more than four decades covering Detroit sports. He was a daily columnist at the Oakland Press from 1984 onward, eventually serving as the paper's sports columnist of record across the run of the Bad Boys Pistons, the 1984 Tigers, the Steve Yzerman Red Wings, and the Calvin Johnson Lions. The column was the part most readers knew him for first.
The radio came later. He hosted on WDFN, WXYT, and 97.1 The Ticket across multiple shifts and partner formats over the last twenty-five years. Most recently he was on 105.1 The Bounce. The rotation across stations is the way Detroit sports radio has worked: hosts move between the AM and FM properties, sometimes between competing networks, and the audience follows the voice rather than the call letters.
Caputo's voice was the differentiator. Skeptical of front-office statements. Unimpressed by athlete celebrity. Comfortable with the math of contracts and rosters. He treated his audience as adults who could follow a payroll-cap conversation and a bullpen-arm-by-bullpen-arm trade analysis. Most of the daily Detroit radio audience wants exactly that.
He covered every Lions Thanksgiving game since 1984. He covered the Pistons through three Eastern Conference Finals runs and two championships. He covered the Red Wings through every Stanley Cup of the 1990s and 2000s. He covered the Tigers through the 2006 and 2012 World Series losses and the long stretches in between.
He is survived by his wife and two daughters. Funeral arrangements have not been announced.
