Back when John Schriffen was hired by the White Sox in January 2024, he told reporters that he was dedicating himself to White Sox summers. Whether it was purposeful or inadvertent, it looked like an attempt to distinguish himself from Jason Benetti, whose other in-season commitments were supposedly a point of contention between Jason Benetti and Brooks Boyer, or Jerry Reinsdorf by proxy.
“I am all in,” Schriffen said. “That was something I talked with Jerry about early on, whoever he hired, he wanted to make sure that person, this was going to be their main priority. I said, 'I am very clear on that.' That was the agreement we had very early on in this process and that's the understanding that we have.”
Given this beginning, it was more than a little ironic that Schriffen exited under similar criticism, as he missed a comparable amount of broadcasts over his final year, and called a UFC Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu event instead of the White Sox's postseason clincher on Sept. 24.
The flak was undeserved in both cases, albeit for different reasons. For Benetti, it was a reflection of the demand for a high-quality broadcaster who could produce a quality network broadcast no matter the sport or partner. For Schriffen, if the writing was on the wall, then it didn't make much sense to pass up opportunities with the entities who are going to provide future work out of loyalty to a team that was going to can him no matter what.
Either way, with the White Sox confirming what all signs indicated by announcing they're moving on from Schriffen, it's a quiet close to a broadcaster who attempted to make his mark with bombast, but landed with the White Sox at the worst possible time to try pulling it off.
Had Schriffen joined the White Sox in 2026 instead of 2024, perhaps there's a path to picking up his fourth-season option. For all his flaws as a baseball broadcaster, the frustration was amplified by the on-field product, and his quixotic attempts to spin it. Sure, his blind spots would still have to reckoned with -- the mispronunciation of "Veeck," his surprise toward White Sox fans booing Javier Báez, to pull two from his first month -- but give him a team worth hyping and an honest-to-goodness manager to lean on, and being the guy on the microphone for so many memorable moments couldn't help but soften the blowback.
Instead, he was saddled with a team that lost the most games in modern MLB history and an untrustworthy authority in Pedro Grifol, and that quickly exposed the holes in Schriffen's résumé, at least as it applied to play-by-play duties for a Major League Baseball franchise.
It boils down to Schriffen never having worked for a single team in a single market. That he never exuded "baseball guy" made it even harder, but the confusing choices he made tactically and stylistically struck me mostly as being unaccustomed to spending his time with the same people regardless of sport, meaning the same managers, the same players, the same colleagues, the same viewers.
Perhaps the guy who gets a bit over his skis with "South Side Stand Up" and calling out "haters" in his first month could have spun that into a desperate-but-understandable desire to call big moments for a team that is resolute in not providing them, and it turns into a somewhat endearing quirk. Instead, his defensive, standoffish response to local media made it difficult to square the ever-the-optimist persona as authentic.
By the time he finally was given a team worthy of praise and hype, the attempts fell flat on my ears due to all the time gassing up those who ran on wet coal. It turns out there's a photo-negative version of "The Boy Who Cried Wolf," and it's "The Man Who Cried 'Yeah, Buddy.'"
That's where not being a "baseball guy" comes in, but even if that's your first and only complaint, it's worth treating it as a secondary factor. There's the idea that searching for what are thought of as "baseball guys" risks running counter to the need to expand baseball's appeal to younger audiences and less traditional forms of media. This is my sense of what the White Sox were going for when they hired Schriffen, somebody whose reactions would grab you by the ears over 10-second TikTok highlights, somebody who shouts "let's go" to people who shout "let's go." The reluctant warming among said haters to some of his calls in 2026, as well as the incorporation of Connor McKnight and Brooke Fletcher as sideline reporters who improved the quality and variety of information, suggest a chance of it working had Schriffen been introduced as a new cog of a well-oiled machine.
But nothing about the White Sox organization received proper maintenance in 2024, making Schriffen an incredibly risky decision after a 101-loss season that the Benetti-Steve Stone booth barely made watchable. The 121-loss season that followed turned Schriffen's debut into a baggage-generating disaster. The drumbeat of awful games exposed a lack of conversance, and how NBC Sports Chicago took for granted the ease with which Benetti and Stone filled three hours of airtime every night. The only person who sounded prepared was Stone, but he could do the job in his sleep, and very well might have at points. He didn't really mesh with Schriffen's attempts to relax the broadcast, and Schriffen's attempts to stick to baseball led to him calling Lenyn Sosa a "young star" and repeating the same bit about Miguel Vargas' hand positioning adjustment for four solid months. Then again, when Schriffen did find a partner who would indulge his tangents in Dan Plesac, the conversations ended up in cul-de-sacs about golf and poor hygiene.
Whether you consider the decision to hire Schriffen a bad bet or an outright mistake, the silver lining is that Boyer picked the right three years to make such a poor calculation. Between the abysmal baseball and the team's struggles to launch the Chicago Sports Network, it would've been difficult for a good baseball play-by-play person to make much of a mark. Likewise, the negative consequences are similarly restrained, because we're all familiar with that thought experiment: If a broadcaster makes a wrong choice and nobody's listening, is it tone-deaf?
Going back to Grifol, it made sense to delay his firing until he crossed the halfway point of his three-year deal because there wasn't a point in exposing a more promising managerial candidate to such toxic baseball. Schriffen might've been similarly doomed after Year One, but there wasn't any real harm in riding out the contract while resolving CHSN's growing pains and waiting for light at the end of the tunnel on the baseball front, and that part has arrived.
I've spent enough time around minor league broadcasters to know that every major league job is enviable, but the position the White Sox are posting now is a lot more attractive than the one Schriffen took, and the hope is that Boyer and Co. have learned some other some lessons from baseball operations. Rick Hahn and Kenny Williams twice saw their rebuilds bogged down by focusing too much on the end of games, rather than reinforcing what went into the first seven innings that made late leads possible. It's similarly unwise to zero in on the capacity for exciting calls at the expense of the remaining 99 percent of a 162-game season, which is far more mundane, requires a far softer touch, and either a lot more knowledge or a lot more curiosity to generate six months of material.
