The White Sox are headed to the Division Series, but the voice who narrated their unlikely climb back to relevance on local television may not return to call next season.

John Schriffen’s contract as the team’s TV play-by-play announcer expires at the end of the year, and according to Front Office Sports’ Ryan Glasspiegel, there have been no recent talks about an extension, while Chicago Sports Network president and CEO Mike McCarthy has reportedly begun exploring potential replacements.

If Schriffen is on his way out, he’ll exit just as the product on the field finally caught up to the job. His first season in the booth coincided with a historically wretched 121-loss campaign, and the 2025 team wasn’t much better, stumbling to 102 defeats. This year’s club turned all of that on its head, spending much of the summer atop the AL Central before securing a Wild Card berth and sweeping the Astros to reach the ALDS.

The White Sox hired Schriffen away from ESPN in January 2024 after letting Jason Benetti walk to the division-rival Tigers, and replacing one of the most popular local voices in baseball proved every bit as thankless as expected.

Barely two months into a season that would end with a record 121 losses, Schriffen put his foot in his mouth by suggesting the 15-43 White Sox were merely running into opponents at the wrong time. Schriffen also became entangled in a bitter feud with 670 The Score, Chicago’s dominant sports talk station. By late June, he conceded on air that his first year in the majors had been a struggle and thanked Stone for backing him through it.

Fans weren’t nearly as forgiving, and the White Sox booth finished dead last in Awful Announcing’s 2024 local MLB announcer rankings. Still, the White Sox never wavered in Schriffen — at least publicly — as team executive Brooks Boyer made clear that September that the 41-year-old announcer would be back for 2025, crediting him with knowing when to bring Stone into the conversation and when to let the veteran analyst take over. Days later, Schriffen used the final White Sox home broadcast on NBC Sports Chicago to announce that Stone had signed a multiyear extension, keeping the pair together as the team moved to CHSN.

The 2025 season brought far fewer headlines for Schriffen, with no on-air flare-ups to rival his debut year, though viewers still weren’t sold, and the White Sox booth finished 27th out of 30 in AA’s rankings as the team trudged through another 100-loss campaign. This year brought a more meaningful jump, with the White Sox climbing to 21st, a rise AA’s Sean Keeley credited to Schriffen winning over at least some of his detractors. Even so, voters made clear he still has plenty of skeptics. Many described his style as forced and over the top, found his catchphrases grating and accused him of trying too hard to make fans forget Benetti, while Stone remained the broadcast’s saving grace. Others acknowledged Schriffen had improved as the team around him did.

Schriffen entered 2026 insisting he wasn’t preoccupied with his contract status, telling MLB.com in March that looking too far ahead “is where you get in trouble.” He declined to comment to FOS this week, and a White Sox spokesperson told the outlet that the team understands questions like these surface this time of year but is focused on the postseason.

A decision on Schriffen’s future likely won’t come until the White Sox’s season ends, which, for the first time in his tenure, won’t happen in September.