More than two months after Jason Benetti's surprising-and-not-surprising decision to leave Chicago for Detroit, the White Sox finally named his replacement in John Schriffen.
Schriffen, 39, has called all sorts of sports for ESPN over the past several years, joinng the network when it aired Korean Baseball Organization games during the pandemic year, and expanding to MLB games on radio along with numerous college sports.
That résumé sounds an awful lot like Jason Benetti's, although Benetti's work broadcasting the Syracuse Chiefs could be found for application for White Sox highlights. Schriffen's more of a blank slate, especially since he doesn't have Benetti's background as a Chicagoland native and White Sox fan.
The highlights I've seen mostly have him blasting through the windscreen, which makes sense considering they're, well, highlights. BillyKochFanClub dropped this one into this morning's discussion:
... or this XFL one:
His standard-action pattern is a little harder to immediately track down.
There's nothing Schriffen can say or do at this point to win anybody over, so I'm more or less content to know the name of the person who will be sitting alongside Steve Stone. The White Sox said they received hundreds of applications, and I'd believe it. Whatever you can say about how they disregarded and discarded Benetti, it's still one of 30 dream jobs, and as Benetti showed, once you get your foot in the door, you can pull the rest of yourself through and then pick which way to go.
Schriffen did flatter the blogosphere, which he's welcome to do anytime:
“They are passionate,” Schriffen said of White Sox fans. “I’ve done my homework on the White Sox fans, and I’ve learned there are so many different blogs. There are so many different podcasts. There are so many different shows and reports, because fans just can’t get enough information, which is what I love.
“No matter how well the team is doing, everyone always wants to know what’s going on with the organization -- whether it be the Major League team, the farm system or who they are potentially drafting. They always want more information, which tells me they have some of the best fans in the world, because it’s not whether they are winning or losing. It’s just, ‘I’m a White Sox fan for life.’”
But he also had to flatter the guy who was in charge of hiring him.
A meeting with Chairman Jerry Reinsdorf and Stone last weekend in Scottsdale, Ariz., sealed the deal, with Schriffen and Stone hitting it off “off the bat.” A half-hour meeting turned into a three-hour dinner, Schriffen said.
“The White Sox, specifically, is very exciting for me just because of what the organization is,” he said Thursday on a video conference. “When you look at what Jerry has done for this organization ... he just lives, breathes, sleeps baseball. And when I met with Jerry this past weekend, it was exciting to learn and just feel his passion for the team and just the history of baseball and how much he loves it and our shared passion for it."
And in answering questions from reporters on a Zoom call, he also (probably inadvertently) reminded everybody of what and who he wasn't.
Schriffen isn't nearly as high profile as Benetti and he's open to working most or all Sox games this season and beyond.
“I am all in,” Schriffen said. “That was something I talked with Jerry about early on, whoever he hired, he wanted to make sure that person, this was going to be their main priority. I said, 'I am very clear on that.' That was the agreement we had very early on in this process and that's the understanding that we have."
This only bolsters the thought that Reinsdorf's loyalty is actually a form of control, but it's impossible to take the rest of it at face value. Even if Schriffen ends up being a fantastic result of a high-quality search, it only shows that Reinsdorf cares more about who's broadcasting the game instead of who's building the roster. The White Sox took multiple months and combed through scores of candidates, rounded it down to finalists, and picked somebody entirely from the outside...
... but when it came to replacing Kenny Williams and Rick Hahn, Reinsdorf couldn't be bothered to consider anybody besides Chris Getz.
Getz had to humor Reinsdorf's absurd comments that the new GM needed to be able to hit the ground running to put the disaster of 2023 behind the White Sox as quickly as possible, and then he distanced himself from that notion over the next few months because he sees the same thing everybody besides Reinsdorf does. Likewise, I'm not going to hold it against Schriffen for being effusive about the guy who provided his big break on the day it became official. He's on a multi-year deal, so we'll have plenty of time to see what he's actually all about.
