Aside from being farther away from Chicago, one of the biggest complaints about the Cubs moving their Midwest League affiliate from Kane County to South Bend was that the then-Silver Hawks had close to zero media presence. They did not broadcast all of their games nor did they even have a regular play-by-play radio announcer.
South Bend solved the first of those issues earlier by announcing that all of their games will be broadcast on WSBT, a South Bend news and sports channel that broadcasts on 960 AM and 96.1 FM. They will also be streamed live on WSBTRadio.com, SouthBendCubs.com and via the WSBT Radio App. But they had no one to call those games until today when they announced the hiring of Darin Pritchett as the 2015 voice of the South Bend Cubs.
Pritchett has worked at WSBT for the past 16 years and is currently the sports director and the play-by-play voice of Notre Dame hockey. He also hosts a Notre Dame football pre-game show.
Graduating from Southern Illinois University in 1994, Pritchett spent two seasons as an assistant producer of St. Louis Cardinals baseball on KMOX before moving to South Bend, so he does have some experience with baseball.
We would all like to welcome Pritchett to the Cubs family and congratulate him on his new job. I expect that we'll be hearing a lot of him over the summer of 2015. The SB Cubs 2015 season starts on April 9 at Four Winds Field against Bowling Green.