Jason Benetti — with 6 screens and pizza — will do ESPN Plus Statcast streams for the postseason from his living room: ‘I’m thinking I might do thin crust’
With six screens — two iPads, two monitors and two computers — and a long ethernet cord to his modem, Chicago White Sox TV announcer Jason Benetti will announce playoff baseball from his living room this week.
His season with the Sox alongside Steve Stone on NBC Sports Chicago, which was especially strong, ended Sunday with a 10-8 loss to the Cubs.
The White Sox’s best-of-three wild-card series versus the Oakland Athletics will be on ESPN beginning at 2 p.m. CT Tuesday. Should the Sox advance, ALDS and ALCS games from Southern California will be on TBS, with the World Series in Texas on Fox.
Benetti has been enlisted to work on a daily special Statcast-driven feed for ESPN Plus, the subscription streaming service, with Kyle Peterson and Mike Petriello.
They plan to do a live alternative call of the Yankees-Indians opener Tuesday, which will be available in regular format on ESPN at 6 p.m. CT.
On Wednesday and Thursday beginning at 1 p.m. CT, the three will do live whip-around “Squeeze Play” coverage toggling between games, a la NFL RedZone on a football Sunday.
“I’m just going to have both games in the window up at the same time, then Statcast, some other research tools and my notes up, and off we go,” Benetti said.
And on Friday, assuming at least one first-round series still is in play, they’ll do another alternative Statcast-driven stream of a game to be determined.
Benetti’s refrigerator is a few steps away — “I can just go grab something to drink while everyone else is talking” — and he figures he’ll order a pizza just before starting each day.
“Pepperoni and garlic,” he said. “Normally I do deep dish, but I’m thinking I might do thin crust because of the heft of the pizza over a nine-hour day. … A food coma is not ideal while doing television.”
Here are four insights from calling baseball in 2020 so far.
1. Even socially distancing this season, Jason Benetti feels he and Steve Stone grew closer.
MLB’s COVID-19 protocols meant he and Stone, like all team announcers, had to call road games from the booth at Guaranteed Rate Field.
“We had a great time,” Benetti said of working with Stone. “It was sort of a bonding thing to not have anyone around on the road games.”
2. Benetti has grown accustomed to calling games off of monitors.
Before play resumed in the United States, Benetti got a head start working KBO telecasts of games from South Korea remotely from his home. He was teamed with analyst Jessica Mendoza, who was working from her residence. It was good preparation, he said.
“With those games, we had no idea where the director was going to go, we didn’t have any of the cameras there,” Benetti said. “So you just kind of have to follow along and tell the story you want to tell.”
3. Yes, it was strange to call games without fans in the ballpark — but even weirder to call road games without players.
“I kind of felt like a psycho at points because I did forget that there was no crowd,” Benetti said. “You have to be in the moment, so I was trying to remind myself of the people at home while also locking in on the players, because if I thought about how surreal it was, I think I would have been kind of creeped out.”
4. Sometimes Benetti had to call a game with sunshine on a stormy day.
“There was one game when the derecho rolled through,” Benetti said. "The Sox were on the road and I didn’t get to the park until about an hour before the game because, when I was about to leave two hours before, the derecho was going through.
“It was sunny in Detroit, where the game was, and it was disgusting to the point of not drivable here.”
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