Cubs broadcaster Kasper helps Benetti land Sox gig
With a big assist from the Chicago Cubs, the Chicago White Sox got better last week.
The Cubs and Sox didn't make a trade, and the South Siders did not raid the front office of their major-league neighbors on the North Side.
But thanks to Len Kasper, the Cubs' stellar TV play-by-play man, the White Sox landed Jason Benetti.
With longtime broadcaster Ken "Hawk" Harrelson cutting back his schedule to mostly road games this season, Benetti will team with TV analyst Steve Stone on Sox home games.
Benetti, a native of south suburban Homewood and lifelong White Sox fan, contacted marketing and sales director Brooks Boyer about replacing Harrelson in the home TV booth in September.
In October, Boyer contacted Kasper.
"When Brooks called, he asked me, 'Who would you target if you were in my position?'" Kasper said. "Jason was one of the names at the top of the list. I'm just thrilled he got the job. I think it's just a perfect fit."
Benetti got to know Kasper when he was broadcasting baseball games for five years with Class AAA Syracuse, and the Cubs' TV voice quickly became a friend and role model.
"Len is one of the first people I called after I got the job and I said, "Thank you for everything.' Len said, 'That's fine, but if you weren't who you were I wouldn't have done whatever I did,'" Benetti said. "In terms of what he has meant to me, he wrote that piece a couple of years ago (in the Daily Herald) about having anxiety. I thought that was open and honest and lovely. I wrote him a letter about it and I sent him a tape and he's written me back with specific feedback and encouraged me to aim higher in terms of intelligence and using advanced statistics and things like that.
"He, for me, is somebody that I can say, in other sports like a Sean McDonough or an Ian Eagle, who have been really, really good to me as well, or Bob Costas, they're aim-higher people. Like, do better. We want to do better and so should you.
"So for me, those people in that group, and Len spearheads that for me in baseball, he is somebody that has basically said, 'Be you and do great work and here is how I would like to help.' So I owe him more than he even knows."
There are very few jobs for TV play-by-play announcers in major-league baseball, and they are very difficult to land.
Had Harrelson decided to continue on with a full schedule, Benetti might have been relegated to broadcasting college sports for ESPN for the foreseeable future. He might have eventually landed a big-league job outside of Chicago.
"I think the one thing that just about every broadcaster can tell you, and I can speak from personal experience, we all chase," said Kasper, who has been calling Cubs games since 2005. "Any opening that happens, they're so rare, you go after it no matter what. We all just want to be in the big leagues. Once you get there, you look back on the opportunities that maybe you didn't get, you missed, and it kind of starts to make sense. I think in Jason's case, I don't even know if he even got really close to any of these openings that have occurred the last few years. But the bottom line is the right opening happened at the right time and he got the right job.
"If he had been in one of the other situations, his dream job might not even had been available to him. I don't know if I believe things happen for a reason, but when you look back on everything that led up to this, I just think it's the perfect situation for him and for the team because I don't envision him ever leaving here.
"I think it's going to be a great match. I think he's going to be with the White Sox for as long as he wants. It's just a goosebump thing to think about broadcasting games for the team you grew up rooting for."
While Benetti grew up listening to Harrelson, he is not going to try duplicating his rah-rah style.
"He'll be himself," Kasper said of Benetti. "The last thing you ever want to do, at this level especially, is try to be somebody you're not, try to be something you're not. Over the course of time, you're on the air so much and your true personality is going to shine through. If it comes off as fake or you're trying too hard, that's not going to play in the long run, especially in Chicago. I think the one great thing about sports fans in this city is they want their broadcasters to be real human beings. Jason is a very real human being, he's got a great sense of humor. He's really, really smart and I think he'll soak up a lot of knowledge from Stoney and Hawk. I think he'll fit right in. He'll be very respectful of the situation and I think he'll just bludgeon people over the course of time with his consistency, his fairness and his really good game calling. He's very, very good at what he does."