New White Sox play-by-play announcer John Schriffen makes pitch to Chicago fans

John Schriffen is making no bones about being the new guy in town.

“I don’t want to come off as a phony,” he said during a Thursday media session. “I don’t know Chicago as well as a lot of people do. So what I want to do, in terms of my broadcast style, is let people know I want to get ingrained in the community, I want to learn more about Chicago.

“I know what I know, and I know what I don’t know. And I want people to teach me about the city so I can become a local Chicago person, because I’m going to be here for a while, that’s the plan. We’ve signed a multiyear deal. This isn’t like some stepping stone place. I am the Chicago White Sox’ play-by-play (announcer).”

It seems Schriffen, who joins Steve Stone in the White Sox’ broadcast booth after beloved play-by-play man Jason Benetti departed for the division-rival Tigers late last year, probably had practice making that point during his interview process with the team, which he said included meeting with chairman Jerry Reinsdorf last weekend in Arizona.

The White Sox landed Benetti, a lifelong fan and South Suburban native, in the play-by-play chair with the exit of Hall of Fame announcer Hawk Harrelson, and during his tenure with the team, he blossomed into one of the industry’s top voices through national work for ESPN and Fox. Benetti’s profile kept growing, and that meant more frequent absences from the South Side when national broadcasts demanded his attention.

Schriffen, like Benetti before him, still works for ESPN and will be wrapping up a schedule of college basketball games before heading back to Arizona for spring training. And while the exact details of his duties are still to be determined – he hopes he can still call nationally televised football and basketball games during the offseason – he made it clear to Reinsdorf and the White Sox that his priority is what’s happening at 35th and Shields.

“They wanted to know, first off, my commitment. That was a big thing off the bat,” he said. “Obviously, I have a national platform with ESPN. They wanted to know what kind of commitment I was willing to make to the White Sox. And I said, ‘I am all in. If I’m the guy, I’m going to be all in.’

“Right now, I plan on calling the majority of the games. We don’t have an exact number, but I want to be the voice and face of the Chicago White Sox’ broadcast. And the goal is to be there throughout September. It was very clear – and that’s something I talked with Jerry about very early on – whoever he hired, he wanted to make sure that person, this was going to be their main priority. And I said, ‘I am very clear on that.’ That’s the agreement we had very early on in this process, and that’s the understanding that we have.”

Schriffen’s childhood dreams were about taking the field as a major leaguer rather than sitting in the booth, and he played college baseball at Dartmouth before becoming a broadcaster. He worked in broadcast news, in addition to sports coverage, and he utilizes lessons from those days when it comes to establishing relationships with players and preparing himself by ingesting a ton of information before sitting down behind the microphone.

He called Korean baseball games when sports shut down in the U.S. during the COVID-19 pandemic, and he has major league experience calling big league games on the radio for ESPN. He’s an excited and energetic guy, even past the thrill of talking about getting his dream job.

Of course, for all the excitement Schriffen has about assuming the role of the nightly voice and face of the franchise, a relationship between announcers and fans watching at home is a two-way street. White Sox fans aren’t terribly receptive to anything the team has for them at this point in time. The last two seasons have been massive disappointments, the 2023 campaign ending as one of the worst in franchise history with its 101 losses and startling change atop the baseball department with the firing of Rick Hahn and Kenny Williams and Reinsdorf’s subsequent promotion of Chris Getz without conducting a wide-ranging search.

Schriffen won’t have anything to do with what happens on the field, with the exception of presenting it on a nightly basis, but plenty of fans view Benetti’s departure in an extremely negative light, seeing it as the White Sox refusing to commit to keeping their homegrown voice. Benetti was adored not only because he was and remains ridiculously good at his job but because he was one of the gang, a White Sox fan who scored the best seat in the house. Now he has left, not for a team in a bigger market or for the long-expected rise to national exclusivity, but for a division rival experiencing no more current success than the White Sox themselves.

Schriffen, obviously, had nothing to do with all that. But it defines his task of winning over a fan base in a city that champions its own, which he, admittedly, is not. Not yet, anyway.

But he attempts to win folks over with his excitement about this new opportunity, his obvious love for the game and his self-billed emotional style, which we’ll have to wait and see how it compares to that of Benetti or, perhaps more appropriately, Harrelson.

“I approach my broadcasting like a fan,” Schriffen said, likely music to the ears of folks pining for Harrelson’s style. “So you’re going to feel (through the broadcast) the way you probably feel at home. I don’t hide my emotions. I wear my emotions on my sleeve. I’m an emotional guy. So when there’s a big play, you’re going to feel it. You’re going to hear it in my voice. If something goes bad, you’re going to know. And I think that’s what my style has been, people can always recognize the energy and the passion.

“The thing that I’ve noticed (about White Sox fans) is the passion, and that’s all you can ask for when you have a job like this. … All you can ask for as a broadcaster is for the interest to be there, is for the passion to be there. And what I can tell fans is that I’m going to match that passion.”

It will undoubtedly take folks some time to get used to Schriffen. Sports fans in general aren’t famous for that sort of patience, and frustrated White Sox fans who have seen little in the way of success since a World Series title that’s about to turn 20 years old are perhaps even less interested in waiting. But any lingering sting over losing Benetti to the Tigers has nothing to do with Schriffen and how he plans to deliver White Sox baseball each and every night throughout the summer.

Indeed, White Sox fans need to give the guy a chance. Even hearing him talk for a few minutes, there’s no doubt he’s energized by the opportunity to live out a personal dream as well as rise to the occasion for this fan base.

“Give some time,” he said, “and I think you guys are going to enjoy what you see on TV.”