I’m an unapologetic shill for Jason Benetti, who has been leading the NBC/Peacock Sunday Night Baseball team this year that will fully segue to the mothership linear platform tonight now that their NBA basketball coverage has come to its seasonal end. AP’s Joe Reddy considers this enough of a significant news event to have dropped these dimes yesterday:
Beginning with Sunday night’s NL Central matchup between the Chicago Cubs and St. Louis Cardinals, there will be a game on NBC every week until Labor Day. The only exception is July 12 because of the start of the All-Star break…This is the first of a three-year deal for NBC to have Sunday night games along with the Wild Card rounds after ESPN opted out of its original rights deal with MLB.
The format of “Sunday Night Baseball,” where…Benetti is joined in the booth by analysts from both teams, has also proved to be a success. Benetti said at the beginning of the season that the aim was to have different conversations each week. That has been the case so far. “The wide range of topics that we have covered is vast and so I think it’s gone great. I think that starting the NBC stretch of it will be awesome for people who are inclined to watch on broadcast TV and the wide reach that provides,” Benetti said.
That booth construction where the hometown announcers get elevated to a national stage is a throwback to the days when NBC was the exclusive home of the World Series when Curt Gowdy and sidekicks like Tony Kubek would be joined by the Mets’ Lindsey Nelson, the Orioles’ Chuck Thompson, the Red Sox’ Dick Stockton and the Reds’ young upstart Al Michaels (whatever did happen to him anyhow?) It’s an especially apropos and doubtlessly recognizable framing for someone like Benetti, who has established himself as an old soul with remarkable awareness of multigenerational pop culture on his previous stints which have included local play-by-duties for the moribund Chicago White Sox and currently for the struggling Detroit Tigers as well as college football and basketball where he’s played the straight man for Bill Walton during some of his more pharmaceutically enhanced broadcasts of Thanksgiving week tournaments in Maui. A lengthy and revealing interview with the equally entertaining and detail oriented STARKVILLE officials Jayson Stark and Doug Glanville that dropped yesterday morning on the ATHLETIC’s RATES AND BARRELS field gave Benetti the floor to reveal more details about his NBC duties and himself. It’s a truly wonderful listen that for any baseball fan is an ideal companion for a weekend drive or even yard chores.
In his STARKVILLE sit down, Benetti liberally makes references to everything from his passion for MAD MEN to SOAP with a keen awareness of classic MATCH GAME. So I’m confident he’ll be able to fully appreciate what’s behind my dubbing him the Bill Cullen of sportscasting. No, it’s not for the seemingly obvious reason that like Cullen he’s overcome a significant physical handicap. Indeed, Benetti’s way more open about his struggles than Cullen typically was. In another intriguing podcast from February 2021, Benetti addressed those issues with candor and humility. The WE ARE UNSTOPPABLE platform that housed it offered these cliff notes:
Jason was born 10 weeks prematurely. During his three months in the hospital as a newborn, he suffered a respiratory illness that deprived his blood of oxygen and caused him to have Cerebral Palsy… Despite early childhood trauma and stigma related to his involuntary movements, Jason went on to become a lawyer and later the play-by- play announcer for the Chicago White Sox — the job of his dreams…“I first went into radio because people heard me before they could see me,” he explains. “I know what I look like. But I don’t want my condition to define me.”
That was the route that Cullen, arguably the most prolific and at one point the most popular emcee on television while helming the OG PRICE IS RIGHT, initially took after he endured polio as a child. When his career started, television was in its infancy. As opportunties opened up when the medium expanded, Cullen benefitted from sympathetic producers who designed sets and production so as to hide his significant limp. It was only well after he had established himself as the genre’s defining personality that he even opened up about his handicap at all, persistent in never letting it define nor limit him. At his career peak, Cullen had as busy and as varied a schedule as Benetti has today–in fact, for a brief period NBC used Cullen as a sportscaster on its short-lived answer to ABC’s WIDE WORLD OF SPORTS while he was hosting daytime game shows on the network. And as Benetti does now Cullen used humor and a remarkable knowledge base to establish his cred and push way to the side any focus on his sometimes awkward-looking on-camera look. 
I’ve yet to meet him face-to-face, but I know plenty of folks who have, and they’re to a person as complimentary about him as I am. He’s a Syracuse alumnus to boot, so we have that all of those upstate New York connections in common. And I feel in my bones that if anyone born in the 80s could appreciate a comparison to a personality who’s been dead since 1990 it’s likely to be Benetti.
NBC (and FOX) are going to be unveiling a whole slew of game shows this summer with plans for more on the horizon later this year. Lately, they’ve tended to lean in directions of funny and/or attractive women, lncluding PASSWORD’s Keke Palmer, WEAKEST LINK’s Jane Lynch and NAME THAT TUNE’s Jane Krakowski, with Savannah Guthrie on deck to helm an upcoming adaptation of WORDLE–perhaps my second favorite weekend passion to STARKVILLE. News flash to whomever may be calling those shots: I’m darn sure Jason Benetti could handle such a gig at least as well as any of them. Assuming you can work your schedule around his. Remember, you once did so for Bill Cullen–and it worked out pretty well for everybody then. History can repeat itself. And I bet Jason Benetti would remind you of that.
Until next time…