John Rooney
During the 2005 season, a year that would serve up the first championship for the Chicago White Sox in 88 years, I was able to catch around 120 games on MLB’s Gameday Audio Internet broadcasts.
The yearly cost of Gameday Audio was the best $15 my friend ever spent. As it turned out, it would be the last season that John Rooney would provide for me the voice of the White Sox.
Rooney, the Pale Hose’s play-by-play broadcaster for the last 17 years, will return to his home state of Missouri to partner up with Mike Shannon in the St. Louis Cardinals’ broadcast booth.
While money was the sticking point in his negotiations with the Sox, Rooney might have returned to the Show-Me State even if the Sox met his financial requests. He was born in Missouri. He graduated from Mizzou, where he also called basketball games for 20 years. He broke into baseball calling games for the Cardinals’ AAA team in the early ‘80s.
Having lived in both Chicago and Missouri, I won’t be able to fully understand why anybody would leave the former for the latter unless you have to have your fireworks, but it’s obvious that home is where the heart is for him.
It’s going to be strange to tune into Sox broadcasts next year and not hear his partner of 15 years, Ed Farmer, start the game by saying, “And now with the first pitch, my partner John Rooney.” That’s the only way I know that White Sox games start on the radio. Ed introduces John, John thanks Ed, the first pitch hits the catcher’s mitt, and away we go. In the bottom of the first, Ed reads the legal disclaimer for MLB broadcasts and allows John to say the word “disseminated.”
In my mind, my experience, that’s how White Sox games are supposed to begin. But for a reason that’s beyond my comprehension, that is not how it’s going to be next year. Farmer will still be there, predicting the outcome, talking about his kidney, California, movies, Jesus, ESPN and God knows what else, but Rooney won’t be there to right the ship, or, in blowouts, tag along. They won’t be finishing each other’s sentences, a phenomenon which led me to refer to the team as “Roomer” when I couldn’t remember who said what.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m a Farmio fan (Will the next play-by-play guy even call Ed “Farmio?”). A lot of people don’t like him, but he can see the action unfolding before it happens nearly as well as another ex-Chicago broadcaster, Steve Stone. He’s intelligent, well-spoken and hard to excite, which I consider a plus when you have to listen to someone talk for three hours.
Sure, he sounds depressed, and he often treads into “Too Much Information” territory, but that’s Uncle Ed. Uncle Ed will get cranky about the TV coverage, bad hotel beds and 44,000 fans misspelling the word “rowdy,” but would your family be the same without him?
He won’t be able to fill Rooney’s shoes, though. Nobody will, as far as I’m concerned. That’s not saying he’s the best – just the first, which is often one and the same for die-hards. My dad swears by Bob Elson, who called Sox games for the first 25 years of his life. The half-insane, half-plastered pairing of Jimmy Piersall and Harry Caray set the entertainment standard for the next generation of South Siders.
Rooney is my Elson, my Caray, even though he has yet to become as nationally recognized as those two. Thanks to freeloading on my friend’s Gameday Audio, this season I was able to fully understand and absorb why Rooney is the best, so I have evidence when I’m setting the record straight with the next generation of Sox fans. In no particular order:
*The voice: You’ll be hard-pressed to find a smoother broadcast than the one Rooney provides on a nightly basis. Many will complain that his voice is too consistent, but on the flip side, when he raises his voice, you know something important is happening – not just a medium-range can of corn that sounded decent off the bat.
*The voices: Where else could you hear Caray, Vin Scully, Milo Hamilton, Jack Buck and other legendary broadcasters calling the same game? Rooney wouldn’t be confused with a professional impersonator, but he does it with respect and good humor.
*The home run call: “It’s…a…goner!” Simple, straightforward, and best of all, he didn’t use it every time. Unlike TV play-by-play man Hawk Harrelson, who proclaims, “You can put it on the boarrrrd, yes!” for all homers – big, small, significant, meaningless – Rooney deployed “It’s a goner!” for ones that counted. For the record, the last time he used it was during Geoff Blum’s game-winning shot off Ezequiel Astacio in the top of the 14 th in Game 3 of the World Series.
*The rapport: “Roomer” was often criticized for taking tangents too far, but an entire season can turn the annoying into the endearing. The aforementioned “disseminated,” the needling of Rangers manager Buck William Nathaniel Showalter, the thanking of Ross Porter, the groan-inducing puns (you try making a Nathan Hale joke); all these became a regular part of the listening experience. What I might miss most, as strange as it sounds, is the Kennedy Homes commercial featuring the broadcasting duo. Paraphrased, if not verbatim:
"Ed Farmer here with John Rooney at Kennedy Homes to talk about something big."
"The big game?"
"Bigger. "
"The big series?"
"Even bigger."
"Nothing’s bigger!"
"John, you gotta get out of the booth more!"
The pitch ended with Farmer saying, “Think big, John. Think Kennedy!” Cheesy? Of course, but it also summed up the easy back-and-forth that filled three hours every night, even when housing communities took the place of baseball as the subject.
*The close-out: “And that’s a White Sox Winner!” If Rooney said those six words, it couldn’t be that bad of a night. Just like with his home run call, it summed up everything in a pithy package, and he shaped it to fit the situation.
ALCS, Game 5: “Here’s a swing, and a ground ball to first! Konerko has it! He steps on the bag! The White Sox have won the pennant! They’ve won the pennant! A White Sox Winner, and they’re going to the World Series!”
World Series, Game 4: “A ground ball past Jenks, up the middle of the infield. Uribe has it! He throws…OUT! OUT! A White Sox Winner, and a World Championship! The White Sox have won the World Series, and they’re mobbing each other on the field!”
The only thing that dampened that victory on October 26 was knowing that Rooney would never call a White Sox game again. I didn’t turn off the broadcast until well into the postgame show, when Rooney gave his official signoff. In it, he thanked the organization and the fans in his trademark graceful and articulate style.
He made his decision official on Friday to join the Cardinals, effectively extinguishing any hope I had of him joining Farmer in the booth for yet another season. Listening to baseball probably won’t be as fun anymore, no matter who the Sox sign up to replace him, whether it’s the always-informative Stone or the bulldozer known as Mike North. It’s not melodrama; it’s just how it seems to be.
When one broadcaster lasts throughout your childhood, the voice sticks, even if the specific games fade from memory. It’s the voice that teaches you about the game to which you eventually get hooked, the voice that describes the actions of your larger-than-life childhood heroes. It’s also the voice that provides the soundtrack during Saturday afternoons when you’re trying to teach yourself a knuckler, or cruising around solo after getting your license on summer nights.
The next Sox broadcaster could have the broadcaster’s equivalent of Pavarotti’s pipes and Shakespeare’s sentences in his arsenal and it wouldn’t matter, because you don’t rely on the replacement in the same way. I understand the game a whole lot more now than I did when I was eight. Now I can decide how I want to take in the game, and for how long, but back in the day, when my bedtime came before the game was over, John Rooney let me know what was going on quietly enough so my parents wouldn’t hear.
It had to end someday though, and as far as exits go, a World Series victory is second to none. For all the “White Sox Winners” that Rooney called over the years, the last one was the sweetest. Here’s hoping his final call leaves an indelible mark on baseball broadcast history, just like it did on my memory.
Thanks, John.