Once Jason Benetti was officially hired as a play-by-play announcer for television broadcasts of Chicago White Sox baseball, he received a phone call from the longtime voice of the organization. Ken “Hawk” Harrelson, the idiomatic, energetic broadcast touchstone for generations of fans, spoke to Benetti before they started splitting the regular-season television slate of games. Benetti was told to be himself, and he evinced that the dichotomy between he and Harrelson provided consumers with a balance of what they wanted. After all, he had entered the prestigious role after working across Minor League Baseball for a decade and felt somewhat naïve about the pressure inextricably tied to the job.
Once Harrelson retired after the 2018 season, Benetti became the full-time voice of the team while also balancing national broadcast work with ESPN. Despite arriving at the major-league level, Benetti still listened to his tape every day and identified both strengths and weaknesses to foster improvement. These sessions containing scrutiny and subsequent deliberation oftentimes represented the best part of his day.
“It’s not that I blocked out the pressure – I didn’t see it like that,” Benetti said. “I saw it as an opportunity finally for me to say, ‘Yeah, what you have worked on; what your life’s work is can play.’”
The White Sox organization is in the midst of its worst season in franchise history, accumulating over 115 losses and on pace to finish with the most single season defeats in Major League Baseball. Benetti, however, did not leave his role on the television broadcasts because of the on-field play of the team, nor did it pertain to the craft itself. After all, he grew up in the Chicago metropolitan area, and being able to broadcast for his hometown team was a distinction he treasured, but he recognized the need to make a change.
“The decision wasn’t as difficult as you might think because it’s about where you’re going and not where you’re coming from,” Benetti said, “and all I’ve ever wanted since college is to have that collaborative environment and to have a place where getting better is paramount and really progressing and making sure that the work is better and better. That’s what I wanted.”
In the end, the decision came down to quality of life and happiness, leading him to hear the Detroit Tigers out as to why the franchise wanted him to fill the same role. The process was, in part, catalyzed during a speaking engagement for a corporation in Chicago when Benetti was asked about the best team on which he has ever worked. In thinking about his previous experiences in large-scale operations, he recognized that the answer was WAER-FM, the student-run radio station at Syracuse University, a disconcerting reality in that the endeavor had been long complete.
Throughout his inaugural season in the broadcast booth with the Tigers, Benetti has been behind the microphone for several flourishes and marquee moments as the team battles for a postseason spot. Amid the season, the regional broadcast team is still growing accustomed to one another, and Benetti evinces that it still has strides to make, but he is appreciative of the warm welcome and feels that everyone has meshed well.
“It’s not about showing what I can do – it really isn’t,” Benetti said. “It’s about creating an atmosphere where the people next to me and the people in the truck and everybody can go do what’s on their mind and what is of their take, and do it well and not have pushback because you hire people for a reason.”
Benetti views play-by-play announcing as a role partially prefaced on natural improvisation, and he attempts to emit a free-wheeling, collaborative spirit during the game. On top of that, he implements pop culture references and will often draw connections between baseball and other genres. Benetti hopes that in addition to keeping people informed and aware about the Tigers, his broadcasts elicit sentiments of curiosity and inquisitiveness.
“Play-by-play, for me, is a test of all your knowledge you’ve gathered until that day about the subject matter and about anything else in the world that might come up because you never know,” Benetti said. “You could cut to somebody in the crowd who’s wearing any T-shirt, and if you don’t know what it is, then you just go by it, but if you know exactly what it is, it might create a conversation, and having interests that are beyond the scope of the sport can create relationships with players and conversation with players.”
In addition to announcing Tigers games regionally, Benetti is part of the MLB on FOX broadcast property and calls various regular-season and postseason matchups throughout the year. No matter who he is working with in the broadcast booth, traveling around the league to see different teams assists in broadening his perspective and enhances his work elsewhere. Benetti grew up watching national baseball broadcasts and can extrapolate consumer affinity to when the hometown teams are featured to the national audience.
“One of the best things that comes from doing those games is the opportunity we have for a one-on-one, two-on-one [meeting] with the manager of each team,” Benetti said. “And because I watch baseball over the course of the season and I’m doing it every day, to have that access to talk about the game and the issues of the game, I feel like I’m more knowledgeable, even when I come back to the Tigers, about the way baseball is and the current state in 2024.”
Benetti has been able to craft a broadcast career despite being diagnosed with cerebral palsy at a young age, a neurological disorder affecting mobility and balance. Reflecting on his case, he is fortunate to have few physical limitations and that he is able to function. Nonetheless, Benetti has grown accustomed to the perception it cultivates to the point where he is indifferent whether or not observations about his condition are disseminated.
“I have had some weird experiences whereby someone will try to talk very slowly to me and try to help me with something, and then three minutes later, I’ll get recognized for being a sports announcer, and somebody will, way too much, be like, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m so excited to meet you!,’ which is awesome and the best part of the job,” Benetti explained. “But there is substantial whiplash from the moment when people are talking to you like you’re 5, and then somebody’s talking to you like you’re Taylor Swift for that moment.”
Over the years, Benetti has grown more comfortable on camera after beginning his career commentating on the radio. Preceding his arrival to ESPN in 2011, he had limited television experience working for the Syracuse Chiefs because of a deal the team had with Time Warner Cable in which 20 live game broadcasts would be available on the outlet. Benetti remembers attending a seminar at ESPN with an image consultant who suggested to a room of media professionals to wear more mundane ties so viewers’ attention would be fixated on what they were saying. When he met with the image consultant individually, she suggested that he should do the opposite.
“I was like, ‘What? You just told the whole room that bright ties take attention away from – oh, I get it. I get it. You think that it’s better for people to pay a little more attention to my tie than my eyes,’ which like, you know, [she was] just doing her job, I don’t begrudge anybody for it, but it’s a hilarious story,” Benetti said. “And again, I’ve had some great producers, great analysts [and] people who taught me, ‘Just be you, and it’ll kind of work out.’”
Benetti recognizes that ESPN helped him grow, frequently calling college football and baseball games for the media company. The partnership he had with the late Bill Walton is something he will treasure forever, along with his appearances on Statcast-focused presentations of Sunday Night Baseball. In addition to establishing himself on television, Benetti also equipped his penchant for rigorous academia and legal education to assist in formulating questions and his overall approach. Benetti took the LSAT examination and proceeded to attend Wake Forest University, where he learned more about trials and how to communicate the facts of a case to the jury.
“I can’t control what people hear or don’t hear, and it’s not to say you should accept falsity, but if I don’t say it with enough clarity that they go into the jury room and say, ‘Well, he said this,’ then that’s on me,” Benetti conveyed. “The law school piece of this taught me it’s kind of always on us as communicators. If we don’t pass something along successfully to make it land for 100% of the audience, we probably could have been more clear.”
Throughout the year, Benetti is balancing a variety of different sports that requires him to follow players and leagues and always remain prepared. Whenever he is in the midst of working on one sport, however, he tries to focus on the task at hand and eliminate any distractions.
“I don’t know that it matters in terms of what you are in the business, but it is nice to be able to comprehend multiple sports just as an intellectual exercise for me,” Benetti said. “I get bored when I don’t have something to dive into, and so a lot of it is just, ‘Hey, I loved watching sports as a kid all the way through the year,’ and so I had a storehouse of knowledge of a lot of sports, and I enjoy the challenge of picking up a rule book and understanding it and everything that goes into that.”
Benetti remains motivated to collaborate with the best people in the industry, focusing on his teammates rather than attaining coveted assignments such as the Super Bowl or World Series. Moreover, he hopes to serve as an example of how the force of will and good work can help change the perception of people who think that he is incapable of doing things or does not belong. That being said, he is not going to judge the success of his career based on whether or not he calls the championship rounds within the leagues.
“We have no idea if somebody would put a person with a disability that’s so open and obvious on the biggest game in the world,” Benetti said. “We don’t know that; I don’t know that. Nobody’s tried, so it would be a little far-fetched for me to say that that’s what I’d want to do and my career’s a failure if I don’t get to do that.”
In the moments when he reflects on his career and the job he performs, Benetti recognizes that there are people who have much more difficult occupations that get paid less than he does who just want to watch the game and have a good time. Earning the opportunities he has to communicate with the audience as a credible, trusted voice in the sports media ecosystem is a distinct responsibility he recognizes at which he safeguards against failure. Benetti ultimately wants the audience to enjoy the game and impart the elements of drama, comedy, tragedy and victory embedded therein through vivid, compendious prose.
“I’ve been afforded the opportunity to get to do this even as somebody who doesn’t look the same as everybody else,” Benetti said. “The more I do it and the more I get to put creativity out in the world, the better of a chance it is that this industry keeps thriving and the more joy you can put out in the world. Everybody says, ‘Put out in the world what you want the world to look like,’ and I get a chance to do that every night, and that’s not something I take lightly at all.”
Derek Futterman is a contributing editor and sports media reporter for Barrett Media. Additionally, he has worked in a broad array of roles in multimedia production – including on live game broadcasts and audiovisual platforms – and in digital content development and management. He previously interned for Paramount within Showtime Networks, wrote for the Long Island Herald and served as lead sports producer at NY2C. To get in touch, find him on X @derekfutterman.
