Basketball Hall of Famer Bill Walton took to a baseball broadcasting booth Friday night, using his signature enthusiasm and weirdness to elevate a game in desperate need of it
Former NBA star Bill Walton once again reminded viewers he’s a goddamned broadcasting legend Friday night as he took to the booth with partner—and rising star in his own right—Jason Benetti to call a White Sox-Angels game.
First, let’s be painfully honest about something: regular season baseball is generally tedious and boring, particularly between a pair of sub-.500 teams who have no actual shot at making the postseason.
With 162 games to play each season, one would be hard-pressed, even for die-hard fans, to slog through broadcast after broadcast when their team is 18.5 games behind first place in their respective divisions, as both the White Sox and Angels happened to be.
Enter Walton.
As a seasoned color commentator with decades of experience calling both NBA and NCAA basketball games, at one point something switched off (or on) in Walton’s brain, telling him to throw caution to the wind and just be entertaining.
Walton’s gift is his ability to disarm audiences with his extremely eccentric and affable charm, something baseball, almost more than any other sport, desperately needs.
Of course, those who take their sports way too seriously are often turned off by Walton’s “turn on, tune in, drop out” approach to calling games, but one could also argue that each time he refers to the Pac-12 as the “Conference of Champions” in his trademark wizened stoner drawl, viewers are in for something special as Walton treats each game as a warm acid flashback full of ridiculousness and, well, love.
Going into Friday night’s game, Walton wasted no time showing his inexperience as a baseball color commentator, but in that, the magic came alive like the first wave of a particularly potent magic mushroom trip.
Side-by-side with Benetti, the pair were clad in tie-dye White Sox shirts, a clear departure from whatever standard dress polo or shirt and tie baseball commentators keep in their standard wardrobe; right on schedule, Walton dove into a verbal tapestry of cosmic nonsense that made no sense yet managed to make perfect sense as he brought an almost childlike wonder to a game he grew up with and yet was brand new.
In his more recent career, ESPN paired Walton with a number of straight-man play-by-play broadcasters including Boog Schambi, Dave Pasch and now Benetti, each bringing stoic reverence to the game they’re calling, while also being present enough to know when to let Walton spread his technicolor wings to cropdust viewers with his trademark brand of weird.
While some might (and they have) argued that Walton’s schtick can be tedious and even wearing on his partners, Pasch explained in a 2018 article how Walton actually helped him in his craft:
“I’ve enjoyed the challenge,” said Pasch. “It’s definitely stretched me as a broadcaster. Jim Gray, who has been around a long time, said to me a few years ago, ‘Bill has done a lot for a lot of people’s careers.’ And I believe that.”
Benetti, first paired with Walton during last November’s Maui Jim Maui Invitational, certainly has a level of comfort with Walton by now, easing his transition into calling a game unfamiliar to him from inside the broadcast booth, which is fine, since you don’t bring Walton into the booth to be an expert on the game, or any game for that matter.
As the night unfolded, Walton did the thing he was expected to do with a level of stoner panache that is now his sole trademark. Part of his Magical Mystery Tour included references to Viagra, asides concerning geopolitics and even calling a grand slam before it happened, which, let’s be honest, was awesome.
Part of the delight of Walton’s very existence is the idea that it doesn’t matter what game he’s calling, his approach is always the same: joy and wonder. For far too long we’ve looked at sports through a very narrow lens of erudition and stodginess.
What’s tantamount to a child’s game is given way too much reverence by largely humorless fans, but Walton’s gift is his ability to disarm audiences with his extremely eccentric and affable charm, something baseball, almost more than any other sport, desperately needs.
When the smoke cleared from the night’s shenanigans, the final score was 7-2 in favor of the Sox, but at the end of a season that’s going nowhere for either team, no one will remember who won or lost, and frankly it doesn’t matter. However what does matter is that Bill Walton stormed the gates of the hallowed halls of America’s Pastime and came out the clear winner.
Baseball needed Bill Walton last night as a reminder that the game used to be silly and it used to be fun to watch from home. It reminded us of the loopy calls from the late Harry Caray and some of the in-booth banter only alluded to in passing.
One can only hope that this seemingly one-off event raised enough of the right eyebrows of those who pull the levels of baseball broadcasts to recognize when a season is in its dog days, they should look to Walton to inject his signature disorganized madness, bringing true color into a game that lacks it.
Love him or hate him, Bill Walton is a precious resource in the broadcast booth, and we should enjoy him for as long as we can, so we can remember what it’s like to love a game for what it is—just a game.
Hashim R. Hathaway (Shimbo) is the host of the Never Daunted Radio Network, and proud father to NeverDaunted.Net. You can reach him on Twitter @NeverDauntedNet