When the White Sox put the finishing touches on their World Series championship in 2005, Jason Benetti was months out of college and getting ready for a career in broadcasting.
On that final night of the series, he was with his parents, Rob and Sue, at their new home in Mokena.
“It was just the three of us watching, like back in the old days,” he said.
They watched the game on a large flat screen, but every once in a while, Jason would head upstairs to his room to catch up on some work and kept an eye on the game on what he called “an old-school round-screen TV.”
He called the 1-0 win over Houston on Oct. 26 to complete a four-game sweep “a wild night.”
“Being a White Sox fan, even though it felt like this series was toast, until the final out was made there were high nerves,” he said.
At the time, the Homewood-Flossmoor graduate who cut his teeth at the high school’s WHFH radio station, had no idea about his future. He never imagined that the next time the Sox would be a serious contender for a World Series championship he would be paired with Steve Stone as the Sox regular season broadcasters.
The White Sox open their quest for a World Series title at 3:07 p.m. Thursday in Houston in the American League Division Series. The Astros moved to the American League in 2013.
The best-of-five American League Division Series stays in Houston on Friday and comes to Chicago Sunday for Game 3 and Monday if Game 4 is necessary.
So, will there be a World Series this year in Chicago?
“Punditry does not wear well on me,” Benetti said, but his gut is telling him there is a good possibility.
“Maybe I’m biased, but watching the way the Sox played the last week of the season, I think they are playing their best baseball of the year,” he said.
With the major injuries the Sox endured in 2021, a 93-win season and a division championship is a successful season, and Benetti points out that the postseason roster is powerful.
“The way that roster stacks up right now, being as reconstituted as they are and are as close to what they thought they were going to be in spring training, it’s going to be an interesting team. We have not seen the whole hog much of this season,” he said. “National people won’t call them a favorite but this is the roster that can make you say yes, this is a World Series team.”
Now that the Sox are in the playoffs, thee team’s local broadcasters must give way to the national announcers.
Benetti traveled early this week to Boston for ESPN2’s Statcast during Tuesday night’s American League Wild Card game.
He will be in Tempe, Arizona over the weekend to call the Stanford/Arizona State football game and plans on watching playoff baseball in the morning out West on Friday. He has tickets to Game 4 in Chicago, if there is a Game 4.
Covering a team all year and having the rug yanked from your feet during the playoffs is a fact of life for local TV broadcasters.
But he got a taste of it when the Fox network took over the famous Field of Dreams game on Aug. 12 between the White Sox and New York Yankees.
Benetti had COVID-19 at the time and couldn’t have called the game anyway. But he experienced a little sadness that he was not there behind the mic.
“You have Tim Anderson hit this ball in the cornfield and the fireworks go off,” he said. “It’s like ‘man, I kind of what to be there for that.’ I wanted to have lived that and convey that to Sox fans.
“In the end, it is about the team and where they are going. The team is going even if we’re not there to narrate it. I’m coping with it.”
If the Sox get by Houston (the Sox lost five out of seven games to the Astros in the regular season), Benetti is hoping to latch onto a pregame/postgame gig with a local station for subsequent rounds. But even if that doesn’t pan out, he’s not going to brood.
“I’m going to be a fan and I’m going to live it up,” he said. “It’s going to be fun.”
Jeff Vorva is a freelance reporter for the Daily Southtown.
