Benetti Gets Olympic Call, Will Broadcast Baseball In Tokyo

CHICAGO — Jason Benetti’s ability to seamlessly shift sports broadcasting gears, moving from one sport to another, seems to know no bounds.

This summer, the Homewood native who is the TV voice of the Chicago White Sox, will add to his vast experience behind the microphone when he will call Olympic baseball games at the Tokyo Summer Games for NBC, Benetti announced on Twitter Thursday.

The assignment is the latest addition of varied duties for Benetti, who has worked for ESPN calling college football and basketball games before he replaced Ken “Hawk” Harrelson as the play-by-play voice of the White Sox. Benetti was named as one of the Olympic broadcasters on Thursday and will focus on baseball, which returns to the Olympics for the first time since 2008.

A message left for Benetti on Thursday was not immediately returned to Patch.

Benetti has grown in popularity in Chicago since taking over for Harrelson, whom he emulated while growing up in the city’s south suburbs. As a youngster, Benetti — who was diagnosed with cerebral palsy as a toddler — wrote in an essay that he wanted to one day call White Sox games for a living.

He has never allowed the condition he lives with to get in his way.

I walk with sort of a halting gait," Benetti said in an interview with WBUR. "When people see it, they don't really know what to make of it at first. I mean I, in first grade at points, was at school in a wheelchair and then had, like, the 'Forrest Gump' leg braces."

After graduating from Homewood-Flossmoor High School in 2001, Benetti graduated from Syracuse University, where he ran the school’s radio station. While completing a law degree from Wake Forrest, Benetti called minor league baseball games for the Syracuse Chiefs, which began him on a journey that would eventually lead him back to Chicago. But while his cerebral palsy never got in his way, Benetti lived with the reality that others would perhaps judge him based on his condition.

"There was a level of, 'I can't make a mistake,” he said in the WBUR interview. “Because if I make a mistake, people are going to then go back to what they saw and think that I'm just incapable of doing not only this job, but any job,' " he says.

After the White Sox announced in 2015 that Harrelson would be cutting back on his broadcasting duties, Benetti interviewed for the job in limited role, which he landed starting with the season opener in 2016. By 2018, Benetti found himself with his dream job and hasn’t looked back ever since.

He has continued to work for ESPN since that time and has never shied away from the travel or the busy schedule that his job entails. Now, will come a work assignment to Tokyo as part of the Olympic assignment. The announcement of the assignment was first reported by The Athletic.

Like everything else along the way, Benetti will take the international broadcasting gig in stride, celebrating how he got here without losing sight of what got him to this place.

"Embrace the fact that you're weird or strange," Benetti told WBUR in 2019. "That thing that is weird about you is probably the thing that's most fiery and most cared for deep inside of you. And if you follow that weird thing, you're probably going to be a pioneer."