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Monday, June 18: The Syracuse Chiefs—already 12 1/2 games out of first place in the International League—take the field against the No. 1 Pawtucket Red Sox. As the players jog across the outfield warming up, Jason Benetti, the voice of the Chiefs, sits perched on a wooden stool in a small room high above home plate. Wearing a red Chiefs polo shirt and his thin-framed glasses, he pores over pages of notes and statistics in preparation for the evening’s broadcast.
“We’re on in Boston tonight, right? I guess I should refrain from using my Bah-stin axint,” he muses without looking up from his notes. The press booth—populated by sundry Time Warner Sports crew and Chiefs personnel—lets out a collective burst of laughter. Benetti smiles wryly, sets down his papers, and faces the camera. It’s show time.
For nearly three years Jason Benetti’s voice has been heard throughout Central New York and beyond as the play-by-play caller for the Syracuse Chiefs, the Triple-A affiliate of the Washington Nationals. Of the Chiefs’ 144 regular-season games, 124 are broadcast on WSKO-AM 1260 (The Score) radio with Benetti and 22-year-old Kevin Brown. When games are televised (like the June 18 contest) former major leaguer Steve Grilli provides color commentary alongside Benetti, while Brown runs the radio show solo. Unlike Grilli, who pitched for the Detroit Tigers and Toronto Blue Jays in the 1970s, Benetti never played pro ball. But when it comes to broadcasting, he’s nothing if not professional.
“He comes more prepared than anyone I’ve ever called games with,” says Grilli, who has provided color commentary for the Chiefs since 1982. “And I’ve had the most fun working with him.”
Benetti took the reins on Aug. 1, 2009, and has since become an integral part of the organization. In addition to broadcasting, he’s the Chiefs’ director of communications. He arranges and records player interviews, builds game notes and manages the team’s social media, including a riotous blog riddled with wit, memes, Chiefs history and Benetti’s diligent scouting reports. You can check out Benetti’s blog at http://syracusechiefs.mlblogs.com/.
On game days Benetti reaches the stadium by 11 a.m. The June 18 night game stretches past 10:30 p.m. Some crewmen take bets on how many trains will pass beyond the third-base line at Alliance Bank Stadium during the course of the game. The scorekeeper next to Benetti shakes his head in defeat as train No. 12 of the evening—the 10:15 Amtrak—rolls out of the station.
Benetti always sticks around after the game to finish his post-game wrap-up and tie up odds and ends. “I take sleep very seriously,” Benetti says. “I come in at 11 so I can go home and relax after a late night, maybe watch a West Wing rerun. Then I’m up at 9 and I’m recharged: I don’t get weekends off.”
Free time is a rare commodity for Benetti. He travels with the team
to every away game. He orchestrates and stars in many of the
between-inning videos playing on the Chiefs’ brand-new Jumbotron,
including his brainchild, “Teammates in a Glove,” where players pick
names from a glove and then give some gossip about each.
“There’s no question Jason is a big part of this team,” says Chiefs pitching coach Greg Booker, who occasionally gets airtime—and provides droll comic insights—during the TV broadcasts. “Everyone here feels that way.”
On air, Benetti’s resounding baritone reflects charisma and comfort. He cracks jokes with Grilli, which are alternately met with chuckles and groans. The two talk as if they’re old friends, old friends who happen to know everything there is to know about baseball.
“Jason makes me relaxed in the booth,” says Grilli, who lives in Baldwinsville and is the father of Jason Grilli, a relief pitcher for the Pittsburgh Pirates. “I’m an easygoing guy, but he and I really just work off each other.”
As the night wears on, Benetti and Grilli settle into a familiar routine, shifting gears from spewing jargon-laden ballgame talk to matching wits on baseball trivia to swapping stories about their personal lives. Their rapport, Grilli says, follows a piece of advice he received early in his career: Don’t broadcast to the fans. Rather, make them feel like they’re eavesdropping on a private conversation.
“It’s like we’re just two guys sitting in the stands talking about the game,” Grilli says.
But while the broadcast comes across as a casual chat between two hardball enthusiasts, Benetti is constantly aware that, first and foremost, he is working. His gears never stop turning: He keeps his own diligent stats during the game, and never misses a beat.
In the bottom of the seventh inning, as the Chiefs begin to pile up runs, the stadium scoreboard is incorrectly updated. Twice. As soon as the cameras cut for commercials, Benetti, agitated, whips off his headset and dashes into the next room where the scoreboard operators work. “What’s going on over here?” he asks with a smile and only a trace of annoyance. “There are seven runs, guys!”
The board is corrected and within a minute Benetti is laughing and joking with the same people he just corrected. Work may come first, but fun is unavoidable. After all, it’s a baseball game.
Incidentally, the Chiefs would top the Paw Sox to clinch the June 18 game, 11-7.
Child’s Play
A 2005 graduate of Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications’ famed broadcast journalism program, Benetti has been announcing sporting events in some capacity since he was a child. “I played a lot of video games and did play-by-play for them,” he says. “Then when I was in high school I decided to give broadcasting a try.”
His school in Homewood, Ill., had a radio station, which gave him an opportunity to call basketball, football and baseball games. At SU he covered local sports for WAER-FM 88.3. He went on to earn a law degree from Wake Forest University and spent his summers in Virginia doing play-by-play for the Salem Avalanche, the former Triple-A affiliate of the Houston Astros.
On May 7, 2010, less than a year after Benetti joined the Chiefs, a hot rookie named Stephen Strasburg made his debut in Syracuse—a brief detour before heading to The Show. The game Strasburg started sold out, a rare occurrence at the scarcely populated Alliance Bank Stadium. The Washington Nationals’ flagship television station picked up Time Warner’s broadcast to show off their latest acquisition.
“Steve {Grilli} and I walked the concourse around 6:15 and it was packed to the gills,” Benetti says. “I’ve never seen this stadium that full, and it was a little scary.” Seeing an opportunity for exposure, however, Benetti called friend and fellow SU grad Ian Eagle, an NFL announcer with CBS, for advice.
“He was smart not to take the opportunity for granted, because there would be more eyeballs on that game than usual,” Eagle says. “I just told him to stick to his fundamentals and don’t try to oversell the guy.”
Benetti kept this in mind until the fifth inning when Strasburg threw a pitch that broke from high in the strike zone to low out of the strike zone. Benetti described it as a “disgusting disappearing 12-to-6 curveball” to strike out the final batter of the inning. Benetti turned to Grilli and contextualized one of the best pitchers to ever take the mound in Syracuse: “He’s not that good,” Benetti said. “Mozart wrote his first symphony at age 8. This guy’s 20.”
To many of his colleagues, it was clear from the start that Benetti had a special talent for broadcasting. “I listen to a lot of young guys’ work,” says Eagle. “And he stood out from the start. He’s the real deal.”
Benetti has always had a penchant for sports, but never possessed the burning drive to be an athlete. He’s a walking encyclopedia of baseball history and current events, rattling off Bryce Harper’s current stats from memory and conversing with Grilli about pitchers from the 1960s and 1970s. (Harper is this year’s Chiefs phenom, now playing in Washington, D.C., after a brief stint in the Salt City.) Sports broadcasting, it seems, suits him well.
“With my frame I could maybe have played semipro badminton,” he says. “I never had any illusions of being {Yankees first baseman} Mark Teixeira.”
When he was 2 years old Benetti came down with an unknown sickness that brought him to the brink of death. He survived, but the disease left him with cerebral palsy, a condition affecting the motor controls in the brain. “I’m lucky,” Benetti says. “I made it through whatever that sickness was. And it didn’t affect my cognitive ability at all, it’s only affected how I walk.”
Today, Benetti strolls the concourse of Alliance Bank Stadium with a limp characteristic of the disease. But, he says, it has never altered the work he does or the life he leads.
“I don’t think I’ve gotten anywhere because of it or in spite of it,” he says. “I’m fortunate to be in an industry where the work speaks for itself. People always use the word ‘overcome’ when they talk about {me}. Well, I just chose to ‘overcome’ it by doing something that put me behind a microphone. It’s not like I chose to run the 500-meter dash. I’m not that upstanding of a human being.”
Moreover, Benetti is able to make light of his condition. The description on his Twitter handle (@jasonbentti) reads, “Two truths and a lie: play-by-play announcer, former law student and sprinter.”
Now, at 28 years old, Benetti spends more than 100 nights each summer doing what he loves: talking baseball. He fills the rest of his time chatting on the air about any sport he can. In the off-season he provides Time Warner Cable Sports’ play-by-play for local high school and college games and has spent time calling Big East basketball games for ESPN Regional. “I’ve always just wanted to do games,” he says.
And now he does. At least 144 of them a year.
