New lineup a good fit for White Sox in TV, radio booths

On the one hand, sure, the White Sox' four TV and radio announcers are veteran pros who should have no trouble shifting roles. Yet on the other, as every baseball general manager well knows, even moves that make complete sense can go horribly wrong.

So there's no reason the Sox announcer swap moving Steve Stone into the TV booth alongside Ken "Hawk" Harrelson and Darrin Jackson into the WSCR 670-AM radio booth alongside Ed Farmer should have gone as smoothly as it has. Yet, a month into the season, it should be stated that the Sox' TV and radio teams sound even better than last year, when Stone first came in full time alongside Farmer and greatly elevated the Sox' overall broadcast quality.

"Putting these pairings together, certainly there are risks when you change up any broadcast team," said Brooks Boyer, the Sox' vice president and chief marketing officer. "But all four of these guys understand what we're ultimately trying to do is put the best broadcasts together for our fans."

It's an unconventional approach, in that the Sox are the only team with nothing but ex-players in their broadcast booths. Yet Boyer believes that yields certain advantages.

"Instead of it being a defined play-by-play and analyst role, you've got two guys in there talking about the game," he said. "It's a conversation. I think that's ultimately what our fans like."

While Hawk and Stone tend more toward set roles, Stone said during last week's homestand that "one of the things I appreciate with Hawk is he likes to do a conversational play-by-play." Everyone knew they would work well together from the delightful week of games they did two years ago, when Stone first came to the South Side to fill in during Jackson's paternity leave.

Yet the ear-opening thing has been how good Jackson sounds with Farmer doing radio. As it turns out, considering their relationship, it shouldn't have been a surprise at all.

"Ed and I are friends away from the field and have been," Jackson said. "So the conversation's pretty smooth. The transition's been simple for me, because for two guys who spend as much time together as he and I away from the ballpark, it makes it kind of easy to know how each other reacts to things."

"We're just having a conversation with the game going on," Farmer said.

This is Farmer's third partner in three years, and his fourth in five years, but what sometimes gets forgotten is it's also his second role. He was the color man alongside John Rooney going back to the 2005 championship season and beyond, and only accepted the play-by-play role in 2006, and that under difficult circumstances with a novice partner.

"When Chris Singleton came in with me, I was moving over from being an analyst to play-by-play," Farmer said. "So I had to learn how to do that, and Chris was learning how to be a broadcaster and didn't know how to keep score when he first started.

"With Darrin and I, and Steve last year, my job's easier because they know the game," Farmer added. "All I have to do is play-by-play, or we have a conversation. You know, 'What do you think about this?' I'm trying to ask him questions maybe you're thinking at home."

Given their friendship, Farmer hasn't even had to prompt D.J. that much. He allows space for D.J., and D.J. fills it, even more smoothly than Stone did last year, when as two ex-pitchers they were sometimes making the same points.

That was the main common-sense reason behind the swap, to blend the teams with a hitter and a pitcher on each, and it has paid immediate dividends.

"On the surface, this is a fairly simplistic game that comes down to a constant battle between the pitcher and the hitter," Stone said. "And we have both sides of the equation in both booths now."

"If you've got a pitcher and a hitter in the booth," Harrelson said, "that, to me, is the ideal combination."

"I love the dynamic of a pitcher and a player," Jackson said. "I think it's great."

That natural source of conflict and conversation has freed Stone and Jackson to concentrate on the fine points of their different media. For Stone, it's simply returning to what he did for so many years with the Cubs alongside Chip and Harry Caray. "I like the analysis of replay," he said. "I think that's the biggest difference in TV and radio."

Jackson, however, has had to learn from scratch how not to rely on the images. "This is more difficult than TV, obviously," he said. "We've got to paint the picture. We're speaking at least two times as much as the TV broadcast because we don't have any dead time. It's not allowed. We don't have any pictures to do our talking for us. So it's a lot more work.

"In television, you work off the pictures," he added. "Now, it's what (Farmer) is saying that I'm playing off of. Because he's giving the picture, and I've got to break down the picture he's just described. The teamwork in that sense has just been really smooth."

Give Jackson credit for smoothing it all over as well. When the club moved Stone to TV at the end of last season and offered Jackson the radio job - at a reported cut in pay and an obvious cut in prestige - he could have gone off in a snit. He did consider other offers before returning.

"It was one of these things for me," he said. "Is it worth leaving here? Because this has been home for a long time.

"Staturewise, in all honesty, it doesn't mean that much to me," he added. "I don't have that big of an ego that I need to be seen on television. I'm more of an unassuming person. I don't need to walk down the street and have people know my face."

"It was all up to him," Boyer said. "It was our hope it would play out the way it ultimately played out.

"We really have both broadcast teams exactly where (the fans) want them," he added, "and I'll put both our broadcast teams up against anybody's."