With the pitch clock, here's where Jason Benetti's multisport training could come to the rescue.
TheScore's Travis Sawchik centered Benetti, Steve Stone and NBC Sports Chicago producer Chris Withers in his story about how the pitch clock makes demands of everybody. Whether it's the play-by-play broadcaster, the analyst, or the people in the truck, everybody is going to have to tighten up their games considerably.
It's worth reading the entire story to understand all the ramifications of what we'll be watching. I've noticed some of them in the handful of spring training broadcasts we've been afforded. The pace of the game hems in time for replays (sometimes bad) and promos (thank God). The low stakes of spring training games means we don't exactly know how it'll cut down on the drama. I don't like the idea of removing or easing the pitch clock for the eighth and ninth innings, since that it would effectively punish all but the game's worst offenders. It does seem like there should be some sort of common-sense solution to thinks like curtain calls and other pauses that really do serve to connect the fans to the game.
As it all hashes out, the White Sox should be in good hands here. Seeing Benetti talking to Sawchik from Boise reminded me of the Chicago Magazine feature from 2021 that also mentioned that city.
Steve Stone told me — with some wonder — that Jason once got an assignment from ESPN to do a regional play-in in a collegiate basketball tournament and was offered a week in either San Diego or Boise, Idaho. “Of course you choose San Diego — who wants to spend a week in Boise? But he went to Boise! Why? Because, he said, he had eight teams to study, and he didn’t want any distractions!”
Here, Benetti says that college basketball forces him to absorb the most important thing from his notes.
When calling a college hoops game, Benetti doesn't have much time to look at notes. He must memorize facts he might want to retrieve on air since he has to keep his eyes focused on the frenetic, free-flowing action.
In the baseball booth during his first seven seasons calling White Sox games, he had plenty of time to search through a document of facts he'd prepared to find a particular note.
"Previously, with the ability to just wander between pitches, while Steve is talking and I'm listening to him, I could look in my notes and say, 'Oh, here that is,' if I needed to jog my memory," he said. "For instance, if we are talking about a guy and I wanted to confirm a statistic, or where somebody was from, you just had the time. Now you don't."
The question is whether that'll force him to treat every city like he does Boise, especially since every team is on the schedule this year. That's all the more reason to keep him in the fold.
(This feels like it's knocking Boise, a city I've never been to, but I'd probably like.)
Speaking of NBC Sports Chicago, the White Sox are the only AL Central team whose games don't air on an affiliate of Bally Sports, whose disintegration into bankruptcy continues apace.
The New York Post reported that Diamond Sports, the parent company of Bally's, "is expected to use the bankruptcy proceedings to reject the contracts of at least four teams to which it pays more in rights fees than it collects back through cable contracts and ads." One of those teams is the Cleveland Guardians.
Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred will have the league take over the local broadcasts of the money-losing teams and stream them for free in their respective local markets as he negotiates with their cable companies for lower contracts, a source with knowledge of the discussions said.
