When the 2024 regular-season slate for the Chicago White Sox came to a conclusion after the arduous 162-game schedule, the franchise found itself in the history books for the wrong reasons. The team accrued a record-breaking 121 losses during the campaign, marking the most single-season defeats registered in Major League Baseball history. Through all of the agonizing defeats and three separate losing streaks spanning more than 12 games each, radio play-by-play announcer Len Kasper felt it represented the best season of radio broadcasts since his arrival three years earlier.
Rather than adopting the approach of sports or news television, Kasper recognizes that his job pertains to discussing what took place and why it occurred surrounding the game action. Within his tenure thus far alongside analyst Darrin Jackson, he has been able to thrive by staying immersed in the action while understanding how to resonate with the listening audience. Kasper has drawn inspiration from former Detroit Tigers broadcaster Ernie Harwell and how he executed the job.
“When you would turn on a game he was calling, you never knew what the records were,” Kasper said. “He’ll tell you what the score was, but the point is he had a consistency of tone and energy and he treated every moment the same, and that really matters to me.”
Throughout his broadcasting endeavors, Kasper has not calculated how to go about different hypothetical scenarios, instead relying on a combination of his broadcast expertise and passion for the craft to carry him through. Earlier in his career, he called a walk-off home run by third baseman Aramis Ramírez that propelled the team to victory in a June game against the Milwaukee Brewers. While the call has endured for almost two decades, Kasper contends that he did not sound like a broadcaster.
“I think the more you think about trying to craft a big moment, the more not genuine I guess it sounds,” Kasper explained. “I’m not averse to a home-run call per se, but I don’t want to create something that sounds like I created it and thought about it. I just like to react to every moment as it comes.”
Ramírez never played for the White Sox, but rather was a longtime infielder for the rival Chicago Cubs. Kasper occupied the Wrigley Field television booth for 15 seasons and followed the team as it built a formidable contender and snapped a 108-year championship drought.
Leaving the North Side for the South Side
A few years later as the pandemic surfaced around the world, the Cubs and Sinclair Broadcast Group formally launched Marquee Sports Network, a joint venture between the companies that would be the new television home for the team. When the season concluded, he began to pursue his aspiration to work in radio, wherefore he asked the Cubs to grant him permission to speak with the White Sox to gauge potential interest.
“Radio as an art form is amazing to me,” Kasper said. “I had never worked in the American League, they’re in the same division as the Tigers, I get a chance to see my parents a little more often. They’re in the same city – I wouldn’t have to move, right? So there were 10 or 12 factors that kind of led me to want to do this.”
Kasper reached a deal to join White Sox radio broadcasts and called four postseason contests in his first season. Understanding the rivalry between the two teams, Cubs fans were perturbed by his decision and expressed vitriol towards the longtime baseball broadcaster. Reflecting back on the proceedings, he also realized that there was a faction of consumers who conjectured that the overall competitive cycles of both teams could have been his rationale.
“Broadcasters don’t think that way,” Kasper said. “It’s just the timing worked out where they had an opening and it just so happened to be then, so that’s kind of how it happened, and yeah, five years later, I’m having a blast.”
As all of this took place, Kasper heard from play-by-play announcers Michael Kay and Gary Cohen, both of whom conveyed how such a transaction could never occur in the New York area. It was a sentiment with which Kasper concurred, but he acknowledged that there has been a history of the crosstown move being a reality in Chicago sports. Several other broadcasters have worked on both sides of the Windy City, some of whom include Harry Caray, Steve Stone and Jack Brickhouse, fostering rapport and acceptance from both fanbases.
“You have to live with your choices and your decisions, and you cannot let what people on social media say about your motives – you know more than anyone what those motives are,” Kasper explained. “So I knew that would happen to a degree, and I just realized that none of it really mattered that much.”
New Beginnings With the Chicago White Sox
When Kasper first started with the White Sox, there were several marquee moments that unfolded over the season, such as starting pitcher Carlos Rodón tossing a no-hitter and shortstop Tim Anderson hitting a dramatic walk-off home run in the cornfields where the award-winning movie “Field of Dreams” was filmed. Kasper also had to make subtle adjustments to his approach related to the audio medium, frequently recapitulating key information such as the score, inning and number of outs.
“I think there was probably a few moments of, ‘Wait a minute, I’m hearing a voice that I connect to the other team in town,’” Kasper said. “It’s probably a little strange for the listeners who know who you are because you’re in town but they don’t connect you to their team, and that’s where I think the White Sox having a really good ‘21 season probably helped.”
Concurrent with his inaugural season calling White Sox games on the radio, ESPN 1000 Chicago became the flagship home of the live game broadcasts. Kasper is complimentary of both the team and station for deciding to resume broadcaster travel for road games in 2021, especially since he loathed the remote presentations because of the limitations in portraying accurate descriptions of the action.
Kasper perceives the distinctive characteristics of radio and tries to offer a comfortable and leisurely style while also staying ready to adjust based on the game. Although there are instances where he will weave stories into the discourse, he tries not to diverge too far from what he is calling. Moreover, Kasper works to be judicious at how to communicate statistics and analytics commensurate with the proliferation of these metrics and aims to interweave them into stories.
“On television, you have graphics that show those numbers, and you supplement them by talking about them,” Kasper said. “On radio, the only numbers are the ones you mention, and I think that you just have to be careful not to overdo the math, and the best way to do the math is to make the math a narrative.”
Outside of his role with the White Sox, Kasper is a musician and plays bass for the Sonic45 new-wave quintet. Part of what he enjoys about the venture is a lack of connection to his day job, which he regards as more of a lifestyle, along with the elements of teamwork it engenders.
Adapting to Changes in the Game
Major League Baseball is currently within its third season utilizing the pitch clock, an innovation that has precipitously dropped the average length of a nine-inning game since its introduction. MLB has implemented other changes to the national pastime in recent years, some of which consist of limiting defensive shifts, augmenting the size of bases and universally effectuating the designated hitter. These changes have helped attenuate the risk of baseball rendering itself anachronistic, and the league has been accruing stellar attendance and drawing younger fans to the ballpark.
“I know some of the pushback was, ‘Well hey, this is your job, and you want shorter work hours,’” Kasper reminisced. “That’s not what it was. There was so much dead time and nothing happening. I like football, but there would be college football games that would go for hours and I started to lose interest, and I think our sport kind of felt like the last few innings dragged, so the pitch clock, all it’s done is removed a lot of that downtime.”
Kasper is encouraged by the broadened accessibility to discover radio broadcasts, pointing out how listeners can stream ESPN Chicago, listen via satellite radio on SiriusXM or through the MLB App. Even though the modes of distribution have changed, he recognizes a clear thread in his career and aims to maintain tunnel vision through all of the noise. When he considers his future, he thinks about longevity in the position and hopes to continue occupying his position in the broadcast booth at Rate Field as the White Sox organization strives to secure the Commissioner’s Trophy.
“The long-term goal is I want to call a World Series win,” Kasper said. “I’ve been fortunate to be with two teams that have won the World Series, and I want to be with the White Sox when they win the World Series, and I’d love to call the final out or the final walk-off home run.”
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Derek Futterman is an associate 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, email Derek@BarrettMedia.com or find him on X @derekfutterman.
