Giving White Sox announcers short Schriff(en)

Hey, his is a rough gig, folks

Drat that Paul Sullivan, anyway. The Tribune columnist used the occasion of some celebration of Harry Caray by That Other Team in Town to comment on fledgling White Sox announcer John Schriffen and how a little more Caray-like honesty might be in order. That’s just fine, and it was a good piece, but I’d been thinking about that very thing for a couple of weeks and don’t much care for being beaten to it just because I procrastinated a bunch. But, what the heck, let’s march on.

Older Sox fans can just hear the growl of, “Ah, that wouldn’t be a home run in a phone booth.” Instead, the new guy is more apt to say, “he just missed that” on a pop-up barely beyond the infield dirt. Is it because he’s wishy-washy? Or does he really not have a clue?

Consider the new guy

Quinn Harris/Getty Images

It’s easy to see John Schriffen as just some guy who wandered into a broadcast booth and is getting paid for it. Fact is, though, he’s got a really tough situation, taking on a job he wasn’t at all prepared for.

That’s not in the general announcing sense. As someone who has listened to literally thousands of broadcasting auditions, I can safely say with his voice and delivery, I would have hired him. Of course, that was for small- or medium-market radio, not as the face of a major league team in the third largest market, but still ...

But unless his bio is leaving things out, not only is Schriffen’s only baseball announcing background doing Korean games remotely back during Covid (which Jason Benetti also did), but he has no experience at all at working for a team, which is way, way different from the neutral posture you have to assume doing games here or there for ESPN. That’s not like being a small animal vet being asked to check a horse, it’s like a horse being asked to check a small animal vet.

And what a team he’s stuck with.

It’s not hard to understand Schriffen sending in a tape when the White Sox job came open after the departure of Benetti. He’d made it to ESPN, the pinnacle of sports broadcasting, at a pretty young age. But from the games he was getting after he’d been there a few years, it sure didn’t look like he was moving up the ladder as the big 4-0 loomed. (It wouldn’t be surprising if his mom was subtly suggesting it was about time to get a steady job, but that’s only conjecture, because I didn’t ask his mom.)

Still, chances are Schriffen didn’t fully appreciate how dramatic a shift announcing for a specific team would be until he’d actually wandered into it — even had it been a decent team. Benetti had made a similar switch, but he was a lifelong White Sox fan, so cheering for them came naturally. Schriffen is a New Yorker.

So here he is, trying to be enthusiastic as all get-out about a team that has nothing to be enthusiastic about, working for an organization that he probably didn’t realize is despised by almost the entirety of its own fan base. Thus, you end up with a lot of sucking up to management early on, and the inanity of things like that “to the haters” b.s. on Andrew Benintendi’s walk-off homer.

Schriffen seems to have lowered the tendency to rave about every routine play a Sox player makes as if it was a major accomplishment, like calling fielding a two-hopper “a great play.” Would be nice if he could notice really bad play, though.

Yes, he’s bland and appears to have neglected to unpack his sense of humor, if he has one, but he’s perfectly adequate. And it has to be really, really hard to drum up enthusiasm, even fake enthusiasm, for a team that’s historically awful. So I, for one, am willing to give him a break, at least for a while.

It wouldn’t hurt Schriffen, though, to consider the famous George Burns quote: “The key to success is sincerity. If you can fake it, you’ve got it made.”

But wouldn’t the old guy be great today!

Other than a couple very brief stints, the White Sox have only had three other play-by-play announcers in the past half-century ... Benetti for eight years, almost all of them coping beautifully with a bad team; Ken Harrelson for 33 (and 65,874,392 Carl Yastrzemski stories); and Caray for a decade leading up to the Jerry Reinsdorf era. It’s sad that Benetti and his humor and rapport with Steve Stone is gone and it’s not time now for Hawk and his absurd homerism, but, boy, oh, boy would it be nice to have Harry back in the booth (and back in the center field bleachers, where I once had the duty of taking him extra Falstaffs when he ran out, which naturally makes me think of us as close buddies).

Caray may have been channeling Burns and faking White Sox fandom — after all, he came from a quarter-century with the Cardinals — but what he definitely was not faking was baseball fandom. He was the consummate enthusiast, and since the Sox were his team for that decade, he was their fan, too.

What Harry did was tell it like it is, from the perspective of a fan. He had no qualms about calling out bad plays or criticizing the then-young Tony La Russa’s management (which apparently got him fired by Reinsdorf, whose man-crush on La Russa goes way back). Sullivan says Harry got softer when he went to the Cubs, but as I wouldn’t ever listen to a Cubs broadcast, I wouldn’t know.

How would Harry be doing Sox games now? He’d be going nuts. He wouldn’t say, for example, that Andrew Vaughn is bound to pop up with the bases loaded, but he’d sure scream when it happened. He’d have plenty of darts for Sox fielders and the lack of fundamentals, and, boy, would Pedro Grifol get hammered. And we’d all be with him, every word of the way.

So?

So we may need to cut Schriffen some slack for a while. He may or may not ever be actually good, but he’s trying in a trying situation. But that doesn’t mean we can’t wish we had an announcer who is a real fan, just like us.

Oh, to hear again that growl, “Ah, that wouldn’t be a home run in a phone booth.”