Why did Len Kasper leave the Cubs for the White Sox?: Dollars and sense

Dollars and sense is a column about Chicago sports media and business

You know it’s a bad offseason when your TV guy designates himself for another assignment.

But that’s the state of affairs for the Cubs, who already lost Theo Epstein and Kyle Schwarber before The Athletic’s Sahadev Sharma broke the news Thursday night that Len Kasper, who has been calling Cubs games on TV since 2005, was leaving to be the radio voice of the White Sox.

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What’s next, the Wrigley Field Starbucks closes?

No matter how good the White Sox look on the field and how dicey things seem for the Cubs right now, Kasper to the Sox is a shocking move that had people in the broadcast industry buzzing Thursday night. Cubs fans were aghast when the #SharmaBomb dropped at 10:54 p.m. in Chicagoland.

Kasper had to wait until the morning to address the news, though I’m sure his phone took a beating Thursday night.

“This is an exciting day,” he said in an interview with David Kaplan and Jonathan Hood on ESPN 1000, his new radio home. “My head is spinning. I think a lot of peoples’ heads are spinning.”

We knew Epstein’s contract was up after the 2021 season and he all but assured us he was leaving. We knew there was a good chance Schwarber would be non-tendered with the Cubs counting pennies and Schwarber’s underwhelming season.

But who expected Kasper to go from Cubs TV to White Sox radio?

“This wouldn’t really make any sense to anybody unless you were familiar with Len,” said Mike McCarthy, the general manager of the Marquee Sports Network. “Len’s dream was to pursue this purist version of baseball radio and he’s going to do that. And he doesn’t even have to move to do it.”

Yes, Steve Stone did the same crosstown move, but under wildly different circumstances. Stone left the Cubs after an acrimonious 2004 season and joined Ed Farmer in the radio booth on the South Side in 2008 before jumping to the TV side the next season.

Harry Caray famously left the White Sox for the Cubs in 1981 when Eddie Einhorn and Jerry Reinsdorf talked about their plan to put games on pay TV. Jack Brickhouse did games on both sides of town.

But Kasper, who turns 50 soon, was in his prime and was popular among Cubs fans. He and Jim Deshaies were the most popular part of the first season of the Marquee Sports Network. They were familiar. As Kasper knows, baseball fans like familiar. They crave familiarity.

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“We know our fans love change,” said Cubs president of business operations Crane Kenney, tongue firmly in cheek. “And in the mix of thoughts was how will this be received and how hard will it be for people to understand — especially Cubs fans. Going from the Cubs to the White Sox and going from TV to radio, for people who don’t know Len well, this will just seem incongruous. This doesn’t make any sense, there must be something sinister behind it.”

Kasper, too, is a creature of habit. He’s a fastidious broadcaster and someone who lives the game. While his partners, like Deshaies and Bob Brenly, weren’t about to show up to work on their off days, Kasper was almost always buzzing around the park for nationally televised games and playoff series, working overtime doing radio. He simply couldn’t bear to be away from the team when it was playing these meaningful games.

So why make the move at this stage of his career, after 16 seasons on the North Side? Well, again, he’s turning 50. He already plays the guitar (Editor’s note: Actually, the bass), so this is his midlife crisis, er, reinvention.

“Jon,” he said when I asked this question during his Zoom call, “I don’t want to put you on the spot, but we might be of similar age and as you get older, as you go through a lot of experiences, you make a decision that if there’s something you want, you have to be active about it. So, if you have something in the back of your mind that you’re thinking might be fun to do, nobody’s just going to reach out and read your mind and hand it to you. You have to be aggressive.”

(For the record, I’m about eight years younger than Kasper. I just look older because most of my aggressive life decisions involve ordering wings.)

“I think the big picture thing is it’s always been in the back of my mind,” Kasper continued. “If I don’t do this now, I might not ever get the opportunity to do it. I’m not the young kid anymore. I acknowledge that. I’m a kid at heart, but we only have one shot at this thing called life and I don’t know what the future’s going to bring. But there are mountains to conquer and this is a mountain I really want to climb and that’s it.”

Kasper said he contacted McCarthy and Kenney on Monday to lay out “this crazy idea.”

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“Len sent me a text and said, do you have the time to talk,” Kenney said. “We talk a lot so I didn’t really expect anything significant. But when the first words out of his mouth were, ‘Are you sitting down?’ I immediately went to his health. He’s got something significant going on with his family. So I was relieved when all he said was, ‘Hey, I think I want to go chase my dream.’”

White Sox senior vice president of sales and marketing Brooks Boyer called them to get permission to discuss the job because Kasper was signed to a multi-year contract last year as the Cubs moved to Marquee.

“We happily did because you don’t ever want your legacy to be you stood in the way of somebody and their dream,” McCarthy said. “And this is, by no means, anything other than him chasing his dream.”

All this is a long-winded way of saying Kasper and the Cubs were very persistent that he isn’t leaving the Cubs because he hates the Marquee experience and wearing dress shirts and ties on air. That doesn’t stop people in the industry from talking about it, and given how Marquee tried so many things that complicated an already challenging broadcast in 2020, I wouldn’t blame Kasper for wanting to try something else. But I’ll take Kasper at his word this was just about a rare opportunity to call games on the radio without moving cities.

“If there’s criticism of anyone not named Len Kasper involved in this, who are taking some heat that heat should come to me,” he said. “This is my decision. The Cubs and Marquee did everything they could to keep me with the club. I can’t thank them enough for how they handled it. At the end of the day I’m living out my dream.”

In case you couldn’t tell from those quotes, doing radio is a dream job for Kasper. He wanted to emulate his idol Ernie Harwell, the late, great radio broadcaster for the Detroit Tigers.

“I wanted to paint the picture of the great game of baseball on the radio like he did for me growing up,” Kasper said. “I want to call postseason games. I want to be behind the microphone to call a World Series.”

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But Kasper will still get to do some TV. Boyer said he will work with Jason Benetti, Kasper’s close friend, when Steve Stone takes games off. And when Benetti is gone doing national games in a variety of sports, Kasper will work with Stone. Benetti and Kasper are also doing a podcast together. All this makes me wonder if after he scratches this itch, Kasper returns to the TV booth full-time, with Benetti, whenever Stone retires. Yes, that would be an unusual pairing, but it would also make some sense.

But that’s down the road. Kasper said Boyer called him years ago when he was looking for a replacement for Hawk Harrelson to see if Len had any suggestions. When Kasper first contacted Boyer about this job — which Andy Masur did last season on WGN with Darrin Jackson after the passing of Ed Farmer — he figured it was for the same reason.

Kasper’s interest was so out of the blue, the Sox were still contacting possible play-by-play hosts as of last week. Two names I’ve heard that were being considered for the job were Laurence Holmes and Wayne Randazzo.

And that’s where we’ll segue into the Cubs’ open job.

Sharma was also first to report that Chris Myers, the longtime national TV host and reporter, was the favorite to replace Kasper. Myers was brought in as a special contributor when the Marquee Sports Network was launched this season and he was expected to fill in for Kasper when he did national TV work. Because of the pandemic, Myers only made a few appearances on the network.

But in their Zoom call, McCarthy and Kenney denied another local report that stated Myers had the job. If they gauged the social media reaction, they’ll shelve the idea completely.

“We’re actually going to announce a new show with Chris in the next couple of days, a talk show,” McCarthy said. “If we had done the roughly 155-game season last year, Chris would’ve been involved in the booth a little bit, modestly, in terms of the schedule. But we have made no decisions on anything with who would replace Len.”

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McCarthy and Kenney said they’ve been “bombarded” with names and interest from big-name broadcasters, and presumably their agents.

“This is a plum job,” McCarthy said. “It should not surprise you the amount of interest people are expressing. Some are waiting their turn and some are less patient. Very provocative, interesting names. But we’re going to go through a process here. It’s a little late in terms of a perfect world but we have plenty of time to do this right and that’s our plan. We anticipate doing this in a way that will very much please Cubs viewers and the fans of the team and we’ve begun the process.”

Kenney has been around for a number of these moves and he understands Cubs fans better than some people think. But that doesn’t mean they’ll make the right decision.

As one national broadcaster remarked to The Athletic, if the Cubs pick Myers, “it really makes you question if they have any idea what makes a successful broadcast.”

They need to find someone who espouses a passion for baseball and for the Cubs. True baseball fans become personally invested with the broadcasters, which is now Kasper’s challenge on the South Side. They also need to find someone who meshes with Deshaies.

Years ago, Boyer asked Kasper to find “the next Len Kasper” for their Sox job and he recommended Benetti, among others. Kasper said that kind of formal inquiry didn’t come from McCarthy and Kenney, but if it did, I bet I know of one name he’d suggest: Wayne Randazzo.

McCarthy said he values baseball play-by-play experience, so that’s a plus for Randazzo, the suburban Chicago native who is the radio play-by-play voice of the Mets. McCarthy is a Mets fan, so that should help.

Randazzo, who graduated from North Central College in 2007, was an update anchor on The Score and WBBM while he was the play-by-play voice of the Kane County Cougars before leaving in 2015 to work for the Mets.

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It doesn’t have to be Randazzo, of course, and the drumbeat would be louder for Adam Amin, had he not already moved to Fox Sports and taken the full-time Bulls play-by-play job. But McCarthy should forget about getting the biggest name and find someone who fits with the Cubs. Kenney seems to understand the importance of connection. Kenney referenced how this is similar to finding someone to replace Kaplan as the pre and postgame host. They picked Cole Wright, a Chicagoland native who had been working at the NFL Network.

“It needs to be someone who fits with our culture and I mean the Cubs culture, not ownership culture,” Kenney said. “Because the Cubs culture is very special and something we cherish. So we got a lot of work ahead of us.”

(Photo: Jose M. Osorio / Chicago Tribune / Tribune News Service via Getty Images)

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