Mute Button

Clare and I had a little taste of déjà vu courtesy of yesterday’s The Athletic. Sometimes, you forget about what you don’t miss until you get a reminder of what, or who, has left the premises. The what/who in this case is “sportscaster” Chris Rongey, who anchored the White Sox postgame show from 2006-2015 on The Score. If you were listening to the game on the radio back then, it was always a good idea to change stations before Rongey started taking calls from listeners. The man would’ve insulted the Pope and George Washington on a conference call if he could. Not that you got any of that in the story by Jon Greenberg. No, for Greenberg it was all a jolly stroll down memory lane, complete with eight audio excerpts to show what fools Rongey suffered. Maybe The Score didn’t have the funds to pop for a mute button on Rongey’s console. Maybe Rongey didn’t know how to use one. Funny—or not—how none of the excerpts sounded like the callers Clare and I heard on our way home from games, mostly frustrated White Sox fans like us wanting the team to do something other than sign Adam Dunn or trade for Todd Frazier. You’d be at wit’s end, too, if your team kept making one bone-headed move after another. Yes, there were fans who sounded like they were on a different plane of existence, along with clalers who thought Paul Konerko was dumb and Matt Thornton an abomination. But guess what? You can mute or disconnect those people. What Rongey did—just like David Kaplan before him working a similar gig after Cubs’ games on WGN—was to treat everyone with contempt, except for those times he went with patronizing contempt. Two things here, starting with people in glass houses. Ever wonder why so many coaches and managers hate the media? Listen to a full postgame press conference, and you’ll get a good idea: Coach, looking back, do you think it was smart to bring in Jones, who gave up that walk-off grand slam? There’s no intelligent answer to a stupid question, but reporters keep asking them. Coach… I try to punch up, not down like Rongey and Kaplan did. Otherwise, you’re just a jerk on one end of the phone.