"Oh, this is business, son - no time, for you, no time."
A sports broadcast move made me think a lot about The Way Things Work.
This week’s soundtrack: Oozing Wound - “Midlife Crisis Actor”
I was laid off from a job of 16 years over the summer. You probably already know that if you’re a longtime reader or if you know me personally. It’s sorta weird to write it here. It sucked, but I know enough about the current economic and labor environment to know that layoffs are part of The Way Things Work. In the end, it worked out for me, as I started a new job seven weeks later and have been there since. It’s a good job and I like it. My coworkers are good, the work is good and I’m proud of it. I don’t think about having been laid off much anymore. Jason Benetti’s recent move from my beloved Chicago White Sox to the Detroit Tigers reminded me of my summer, said labor enviornment and the relationship between bosses and workers.
(It goes without saying that Benetti and I are very different cases, largely in that Benetti left the Sox on his own accord and, you know, Benetti is legitimately one of the three or four best people at his job in the world. I am pretty good at my job, but I’m not that.)
Mostly, the ways that the Sox treated Benetti during his time there, as well as the things he’s said – and not said – about the Sox organization reminded me of my experience. The word “loyalty” kept coming back to my mind and the various conversations I had over the summer with people about The Way Things Work in employment, as well as my own relationship with work.
I, like many people, was told to “do what you love” when I was growing up and such, but I found that doing so in my early career was not particularly satisfying. I interned in commercial radio, I worked in sports journalism and I even had a monthly column in my 20s. In each case, I started to hate doing the thing I loved; seeing the proverbial sausage being made ruined my loves for me. I work hard and I take pride in the work I do, but I don’t need it to be all of me. I found my way to a job in which I excelled, but I didn’t need to make it all of me.
When I was laid off in May, I was reminded why this is important: Putting all of yourself into a job at the expense of other things won’t bring you much, save disappointment.
Sarah Jaffe’s second book – the one that covers the failed relationship between Americans and work – is the one that I kept in mind. I quoted the title a lot in the endless conversations I had over the summer: Work Won’t Love You Back. Jaffe writes in the introduction:
Like so many things about late capitalism, the admonishment of a thousand inspirational social media posts to “do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life” has become folk wisdom, its truthiness presumably everlasting…
The reality is that we work longer hours than ever, and we’re expected to be available even when technically off the clock. All this creates stress, anxiety, and loneliness. The labor of love, in short, is a con.
Ultimately, my theory is that the Sox organization thought it could underpay or disrespect the best play-by-play announcer in MLB because that job is a labor of love and it’s Benetti’s childhood team. The “hometown discount” was assumed, loyalty was supposed to be a one-way street and, ultimately, work will not love you back.
(This is less about the news media than it is about sports media and broadcasting, so I get that lots of people aren’t going to keep reading or will scroll to the Lulu photos. As you’ve certainly gathered, I cannot bring myself to write about the coverage of bombardment of Gaza right now and I’m a little bit tired of writing about Trump. This Benetti thing has been near the top of my mind recently, as the Sox are my favorite team.)
A little background: Benetti was hired in 2016 to be the play-by-play announcer for the Sox after working in various announcing jobs nationwide. He was to be eased into replacing ownership favorite Ken “Hawk” Harrelson, an ex-player and former GM – certainly the worst GM in franchise history – who had somehow become both beloved in Chicago and a punchline nationwide. Harrelson is folksy, he’s a homer and he’s very “old school.” As you can certainly intuite by the previous sentences, I think Harrelson sucks and did while I watched him for the vast majority of my Sox fandom.
Benetti came in part-time as Harrelson phased himself out of the job, pairing with longtime analyst (with the Cubs and with national broadcasts) and former Cy Young winner Steve Stone. They immediately clicked. As a viewer, it was easy to notice that Stone had a better relationship with Benetti than Harrelson, despite the juxtapositions between Stone and Benetti (ex-ballplayer and nerd, old and young, analytical and “gut”-based, etc.).
Stone, I suspect, could see the thing that all viewers can plainly see: Benetti is one of the best play-by-play people in America. Once he came into the job full-time in 2019, it was plainly evident that Benetti was great. ESPN had already put him sporadically on high school and college football games years, but his role expanded to the point that he was getting prime time games, paired with people like Bill Walton.
His star was rising.
All along, Benetti said that the Sox broadcast job was his dream job. During the game broadcasts, he would regale viewers with his memories of his first games at Comiskey Park or his love of the ice cream at the stadium; he grew up in the south suburbs and went to Sox games frequently.
Anyway… Benetti recently left the Sox and will be the Tigers’ main play-by-play announcer, as mentioned above. The Tigers are one of the Sox’ main division rivals, a smaller market and a worse team. I won’t speculate about money, except to say that Benetti leaving the Sox booth is indicative of the broader labor world. His story is not exclusively about the White Sox broadcast booth nor is it about baseball. It speaks to the very nature of power in the workplace and how organizations see the labor force.
A series of rumors and bits of speculation came out about the Homewood-Flossmoor HS grad, many of which have been confirmed since the announcement. It was speculated that Sox owner Jerry Reisndorf didn’t like Benetti’s analytics-based analysis in the booth and Reinsdorf does play favorites quite a bit (see: Harrelson and the Tony La Russa experiment). It’s hard to argue with that particular rumor, but it is one of the few that hasn’t had legs like others.
Watching Benetti’s introductory press conference, a lot of subtext is to be taken from what he says – and doesn’t say – about the Sox.
He praises Stone, the directors and production staff. He praises “the organization,” generally, but he doesn’t praise the ownership nor the people who hired him, outside of giving him the opportunity. He often praises the Tigers’ culture and environment with the unsaid notion that the rumors about the noxious Sox’ clubhouse also infected the marketing and the broadcast sides of the front office.
This was, not shockingly, basically confirmed by the now-infamous conversation that Benetti has shared between him and an unnamed Sox official (since confirmed to be Brooks Boyer):
“I had somebody say to me when I asked for more respect, and basically demanded more respect just in the way I was treated, they said, ‘Respect according to normal human beings, or respect according to Jason Benetti?’ That is one of those things that I say, that’s disqualifying and will be for a long time. I’ll have a relationship, but don’t want to do that long-term.”
Before this month, Benetti has relayed similar stories about other people seeing him as a charity case – Benetti has cerebal palsy – and that he has been infuriating to him and that he’s been underestimated because of it. The above quote can certainly be interpreted as part of the whole, but I’m sure Boyer could claim it’s just that Benetti thinks he deserves more respect than others or that Benetti expects to be treated better because he’s also doing work with Fox for their national broadcasts. If you squint, you can see how he thinks Benetti has a big ego (Benetti deserves to have a big ego!).
I include the quote from Jaffe because all of what happened involving Benetti is not exclusive to the Sox’ organization nor is it exclusive to broadcasting. It is a reflection on the power between companies and workers, a reflection between the people who do things and the people atop organizations who don’t. The Sox, in my estimation, expected Benetti to be loyal to them because he’s a local kid and because he’s somehow a charity case and such. They didn’t expect him to understand what he is worth, despite having a series of national contracts with ESPN, NBC and then Fox.
Upon the news breaking, I sent a message to a H-F grad (full disclosure: She’s a Cubs fan) and wrote:
The Sox are notoriously cheap and I’m sure the calculus was ‘hey, he's from here. He'll stay for less. It's his 'dream job.' " Then he started doing national games for ESPN and then Fox.
“He's from here. He'll stay for less. It's his 'dream job.’”
In conversations since, I’ve talked with friends and mentioned that at a lot of the Sox’ moves on the field – both with players and with the baseball ops staff – have been predicated on “loyalty” being a payment in lieu of actual money. It tracks that the broadcast booth would go the same way.
But, Reinsdorf is not alone in this. Yes, he’s a famously anti-labor owner (he’s one of the architects of the 1994 strike), but he is simply like most people in his social and business class. Labor, for all decently-sized organizations, is just a cost. The strikes that riled the entertainment industry over the last year were predicated on the idea that actors and writers could be replaced by computers or AI because computers are cheaper. At some point, the ownership class seemingly would like everyone to be a computer. As David Roth wrote of the entertainment industry strikes:
What all of these businesses—creative industries, social media platforms, online commerce—have in common is that they need people. They need people to make them, and they need other people to pay attention to them. The super-class that sits atop all this, gloating, does not like that very much…A rising tide of anti-human disgust lifts the gaudy yachts higher, and brings the smell of rot.”
Journalism is not far from that, nor is sports broadcasting. At my old job, I was in a load of meetings about automation and AI before it became a buzzword. I was in meetings about automating (translation: making computers do) different parts of editing, of creating newsletters and of other types of content creation.
I digress. This is mostly immaterial in Benetti’s case, but it speaks to the broader issue: The people who work in most large organizations are just line items. They – we – are costs and nothing more. We correspond with our direct bosses and they see us as people, but the people atop organizations – those who are calling the actual shots –almost certainly don’t care about us as human beings. We’re items in a budget like rent or fuel.
I don’t write any of this with anger, nor am I breaking any news. It is The Way Things Work. You probably know this. As Jaffe notes in her book, that reality is way different than the myth that we’ve mostly been sold about “loving what you do.” In Benetti’s case, loyalty wasn’t enough to replace the respect, creative environment and, perhaps, the money that he felt he deserved. His being among the best in his profession does not matter to the Sox organization if someone else can do a similar enough job; they’re the bosses and the bosses get to make decisions like this.
It is, after all, The Way Things Work.
Lulu Update
Fall is Lulu’s time!
A Recommendation: Charlie Clark’s Work
This is much an obituary as it is a recommendation. Charlie Clark, a former colleague and friend of mine, died last week after a sudden illness. Charlie was – it’s fucked up to think about him in the past tense – a dogged reporter, a terrific colleague, a one-of-a-kind person and a burst of energy to whoever came in contact with him. His laugh was infectious and he always had a great story of his reporting over decades.
While he covered government for much of his career, he also was a lifelong Northern Virginia resident, a columnist for a local newspaper and the author of multiple books on the subject of the region. As much as I crack on NoVa, Charlie always brought forward the most interesting aspects of it.
My former boss Tom Shoop wrote a lovely memorial to Charlie over at GovExec and I cannot recommend it enough. I just saw Charlie at an event a few weeks ago and he was as ~Charlie~ as ever. He was buoyant and he was lovely, as always. I still can’t believe he’s gone. He will be greatly missed.