kba

The Phillies, Mets, and Rangers, but they're all trying to build entertainment districts on their parking lots. l can think of a few parks that aren't necessarily surrounded by parking lots, but still aren't really walkable to a downtown or to an entertainment district - Miami, Toronto, Yankee Stadium. Houston used to be like that, but it looks like that part of downtown has grown up since I was there last.

In August 2024, Paul Sullivan wrote that Schiffren had two years left on his deal. https://www.chicagotribune.com/2024/08/12/chicago-white-sox-john-schriffen-steve-stone/

Jeff Agrest is absolutely right about Schiffren's lack of preparation. Baseball is a slow sport, and an announcer has to come prepared each day with new things to fill the time - or be such a good communicator that they can just pull interesting things out of their head. Hawk could tell old-time stories, Benetti has his corny jokes and is fluent with advanced stats, Kasper seems to bring something novel to every broadcast, like a recent game when he and D.J. spent a half inning chatting about how today's players have dozens of pairs of spikes, while players in D.J.'s day wore the same couple of pairs for months. Kasper had talked with the clubhouse manager before the game to get some actual numbers on how many shoes the team had gone through. Schiffren has gotten better, but he still doesn't seem to bring much to the broadcast except some predictable quotes from the previous day's postgame press conference.

Looks like the immediate plan is just to build the Fire stadium and some surface parking lots. The other proposed buildings would come much later. https://x.com/BuildingChi/status/1968745733521092961 https:/https://x.com/BuildingChi/status/1968745733521092961/x.com/BuildingChi/status/1968745733521092961s://x.com/BuildingChi/status/1968745733521092961

According to media reports, Benetti's contract with the Tigers allows him to miss 35 games per season. I don't know how many games Schiffren has missed, but I'm guessing fewer than 10.

Fun fact: The TWIB theme - a piece of production music called "Gathering Crowds" - was also used as the ABC News theme in the 1970s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=un7Lp7ibwgo

Here's a fun TWIB segment about the banners. There was a group of fans who sat in left field every game who had a whole supply of them that they'd drape over the outfield walls- slogans for each batter, an eye chart after a bad call. etc. It certainly was more creative than all the ads that cover the walls of every ballpark now.

Whenever I hear this, I encourage people to read Peter Richmond's book Ballpark. He shows HOK's original 1986 and 1987 renderings for Camden Yards. The first looks like a generic stadium with no retro elements; the second resembles New Comiskey with a warehouse. He says it was the Orioles management who insisted on the total-retro-design and had to persuade HOK to do another redesign in 1988. He quotes Orioles president Larry Lucchino saying of HOK, "Comiskey would have been the stadium they'd have built, given free reign." According to Richmond, by the time HOK re-designed Camden Yards with what became the final plan, New Comiskey was already under construction. So it's not clear to me how Reinsdorf could have been offered that design.

WCIU to broadcast seven Sox games, including all three games of the Cubs series: https://www.wciu.com/articles/catch-chsn-live-simulcasts-of-seven-white-sox-home-games-on-the-u

This series features the last two MLB teams that don't have advertising patches on their uniforms. Enjoy the clean-sleeven look while you still can.

The developer has said in the past there's room for both stadiums at the 78. https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/possible-future-home-of-white-sox-could-have-a-second-stadium-developer-says/3578694/

Robert Channick in the Tribune has reported that one of Comcast's demands is that CHSN discontinue the free over-the-air broadcasts on channel 62: So what's the best option for fans and the teams? Should CHSN jettison the antenna viewers to potentially reach the million Comcast viewers in Chicago -- albeit on Comcast's more expensive Ultimate tier? Or should they forgo Comcast, which has been steadily losing customers nationally for years? Maybe there's some split of free games on WGN/WJYS and Comcast-exclusive games that would satisfy everyone? Given the performance of Bulls, Hawks, and Sox, it's hard to imagine that anyone but the most devout fans will be motivated to either fiddle around with an antenna or pay an extra $20/month to Comcast. So until the teams get better, I doubt their TV revenue numbers are going to get better.

As a reporter in Texas, he also witnessed the assassination of JFK.

If this is true, Comcast is being ridiculous.

With Comcast moving Marquee to a higher tier and Sinclair looking to exit as the Cubs' partner, Marquee's future is looking shaky. Wonder if a merger with CHSN is in the cards. A combined channel probably wouldn't be a huge money maker like RSNs used to be, but at least it would get the four Chicago teams on Comcast (albeit on a higher tier) and allow them to share production expenses.

"We are actively exploring the co-location of dual stadiums for the Chicago White Sox and Chicago Fire, two organizations whose presence at The 78 would align with our vision of creating Chicago’s next great neighborhood." https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/possible-future-home-of-white-sox-could-have-a-second-stadium-developer-says/3578694/

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.