Leaning on the pandemic as an excuse to not send broadcasters on the road in 2021 is looking more like papier mâché than concrete as we get deeper into the summer. White Sox TV play-by-play man Jason Benetti is fed up with it.
The 2020 Illinois Sportscaster of the Year appeared on 670 The Score’s Parkins and Spiegel and described how he feels about RSNs using Covid as a cop-out.
“It’s cover, it’s ridiculous,” Benetti said in response to Danny Parkins. “We, in order to do the job properly, need to be around the team because if we’re not… Ok, here’s what people need to realize, over the course of say a 16-game NFL season, if you’re not spending a ton of time with the players you can do 16 games. You can cover it. There’s not a lot of time for storytelling.”
Benetti has experience across multiple sports, including Major League Baseball, college basketball, and college football. He noted how different sports call for different styles in creating the best broadcasts.
“Over 162 [games], somedays you gotta have new stuff,” Benetti continued. “That’s not going to come from reading the same article about Andrew Vaughn again. It’s not because that’s by definition, not new stuff.”
“I don’t want to hear anybody say ‘well then just adapt to it,’ we did better than anybody in baseball last year, so bring it on,” Benetti said to wrap up his take. “You both know me well enough to know that I hate saying that on a radio program, but I’ve had somebody say to me ‘well, you know if we put you in separate booths,’ and I had to fight for Steve [Stone] and I to be in the same place doing these games at the NBC Tower and I was accused of not adapting well. I think that’s absolute hot garbage.”