kba

One of many times that Bill Veeck put promotional value ahead of baseball sense. He brought Chappas up to the majors at 20-years-old directly from single A, had Harry Caray measure him on TV, and made him pose for publicity photos stuffed inside a trunk. Great stunt; got him on the cover of Sports Illustrated. But you wonder if he would have had a better career if he went through a normal development process: https://vault.si.com/vault/1979/03/19/its-not-only-a-game-of-inches-whether-rookie-shortstop-harry-chappas-is-or-isnt-the-smallest-big-leaguer-is-of-little-concern-the-really-big-question-is-can-he-help-chicago-pull-up-its-sox-and-win

At the moment, the White Sox are the only team in the AL Central that has a TV deal for the 2025 season. Broadcaster Diamond says it will no longer carry 11 MLB teams in surprise move

WJYS simply sells airtime to anybody who wants it. (You can even pay by credit card on their website!) So it looks like CHSN outbid the home-shopping networks that are currently on 62.2 and 62.3. Now CHSN has to sell enough advertising to recoup its investment in airtime, production costs, salaries, etc. I assume they'll also try to extract carriage fees from cable and satellite companies and other distributors. And maybe try to farm out some of the games to WGN, WCIU, or other more prominent stations. I'm guessing this will be mean a pretty substantial drop in TV revenue compared to the NBCSC deal, but it's hard to say since this is the first time in the regional-sports-network era that an MLB team has tried anything like this. For the old-timers, it's a throwback to the arrangement that the Sox had in the mid-1970s, when the team bought time from channel 44 and sold the commercials themselves.

Bob Lemon, Don Kessinger, Gene Lamont, Tony LaRussa (the first time).

There are other options besides "doom and gloom" and self-indulgent silliness. Of course, it's challenging to make a broadcast interesting when the team isn't, but unless you're lucky enough to work for a perennial contender, it's part of a baseball announcer's job. This year, Len and DJ are doing pretty well with the radio broadcasts. I've heard them call guys out for bad plays, get mildly excited for good ones, and spend a lot of time talking about more interesting things - like other games around the league, good players on other teams, baseball history, insider strategy, etc. I think one of Schriffen's problems is that he doesn't seem to bring much to the broadcasts other than the silliness and some notes from the previous day's post-game interviews. He relies a lot on repeating press conference pablum: "Pedro says Andrew is starting to see the ball better," "Jordan is happy to be back in the big leagues," etc. You might get away with that if you're calling a couple games a month for ESPN, but it's not enough to carry 160 broadcasts a year. He lacks Benetti's connection to Chicago, lacks Kasper's knowledge of baseball history, can't spin old yarns like Hawk, and doesn't seem to have any special access or insight into what's going on with the team. The silliness and funny noises will appeal to some viewers, but he'll need more than that to endear himself to a bigger audience.

The news stories that portray Standard as a small-town TV station owner are missing the point. Their parent company is a $100 billion hedge fund that owns Bally's casinos and has been trying to expand in television and media. At one point, they owned the 71-station Media General group before selling it to NexStar. They then tried to buy the 68-station Tenga group, but the deal fell apart last year after the FCC raised concerns. Starting a new RSN goes against industry trends, to put it mildly. But if Standard for some reason is willing to pay the teams a rights fee and take on all the burden of working out carriage agreements and selling advertising, I can see why the teams would prefer that to owning their own RSN and taking the risk themselves. I'm not sure whether NBCSC is a factor in these negotiations. NBC-Universal shut down NBC Sports Northwest and sold NBC Sports Washington, so they seem to be getting out of the RSN business.

NexStar owns both WGN and the national CW network - though the Chicago CW affiliate, WCIU, is owned by Weigel. They all have a recent history of local sports programming, so it seems like there would be some opportunities here. There's no way that a free over-the-air station will pay the teams anywhere near the money that NBCSports pays in rights fees. But with RSNs failing all over the country, it makes sense for teams to pursue a multi-platform strategy for their telecasts - cable, streaming, and over-the-air TV. Make the games available as widely as possible and try to make more money on advertising.

Interesting. Wonder if WGN wants to start airing games again.

The Richmond book has the original 1986 HOK rendering for Camden Yards (below), which looks strikingly like New Comiskey - symmetric dimensions, steep upper deck, bleachers between the foul poles, decorative latticework in the outfield, and an exterior that's nothing but ramps. Maybe they showed the Sox this version, because it's pretty much what they built in Chicago. There's also a revised 1987 CY rendering that's essentially the same thing, but the warehouse is preserved in right field. It wasn't until 1988 that HOK began to add the retro features to Camden Yards. But New Comiskey was already under construction by then, so I'm not sure how Reinsdorf could have seen it and rejected it. I'll be curious to hear what your source says.

Lip, do you have the name of that book? Because I've been reading Peter Richmond's book Ballpark: Camden Yards and the Building of an American Dream, and he has a completely different story. Richmond portrays HOK at the time as specialists in generic stadiums such as Joe Robbie, Giants Stadium, and New Comiskey. He writes a couple chapters about how HOK was pushing the Orioles toward a Comiskey-like plan that demolished the warehouse. He says it was the Orioles and some local consultants who came up with the idea for the retro-design and had to persuade HOK to do it. He quotes Orioles president Larry Lucchino saying of HOK, "Comiskey would have been the stadium they'd have built, given free reign." You can read excerpts of Richmond's book here. I guess Richmond's take could be revisionist history, but I'm wondering where the story comes from that says HOK ever had a Camden Yards design for Chicago.

This is from 1986. Wonder if they've gotten past it: "Stadium insiders acknowledge that hard feelings exist between the owners of the Bears and the Sox. Some of those feelings stem from the $1.5 billion antitrust lawsuit filed by the U.S. Football League against the National Football League. Sox president Eddie Einhorn, who hopes to start a USFL team here, is among the plaintiffs and McCaskey among the defendants." https://www.chicagotribune.com/1986/06/16/bears-sack-mayors-stadium/

A drawing of the 1980's stadium plan at the 78 site is posted toward the top of this thread. It was the mayor's plan for a multipurpose domed stadium that looked like the Metrodome, not Camden Yards. The Sox actually were open to it, but the Bears said no, and the plan died.

Looks like the White Sox still haven't improved their baserunning fundamentals.

Not sure about the radio contract, but the Sox paid WSNS-TV to televise the games from 1973-1976. The Sox paid production costs and sold the advertising themselves. (WSNS had similar deals with the Bulls and the old Chicago Cougars hockey team.) That was a big drop-off from the Sox previous contract with WFLD, which had paid more than a million dollars a year to lure the Sox away from WGN in 1968.

Schriffen's baseball play-by-play: 2021 Little League World Series on ESPN: