The Major League Baseball Playoffs are here. For the teams involved, there’s no more room for errors.
The ESPN MLB graphics crew seemingly had to scramble Tuesday to deal with some errors in the graphics during Tuesday’s Wild Card game between the Detroit Tigers and Houston Astros.
Detroit took a 3-0 lead on the Astros in the 2nd inning (eventually winning 3-1). Sometime around the 4th inning, many viewers started noticing that just about every stat box shown during a player’s at-bat was incorrect.
These ESPN stats in the Tigers-Astros game are wrong.
Yordan with a .788 OPS and 8 HR for the season? pic.twitter.com/1LcnAgjULC— Euan Leith (@F1EuanFPL) October 1, 2024
@espn has put the wrong stats up for every single player today. Good work.
— Anthony Hughey (@hughey24) October 1, 2024
Sure enough, when you look at some of the graphics that went up on ESPN during at-bats, you can see that they bear no resemblance to that player’s actual 2024 MLB season stats.
Houston sports broadcaster posited a theory that ESPN was using player stats versus the other team in place of 2024 season stats.
Apparently ESPN has using career stats vs. DET for Astros players’ 2024 season stats, I think. @KHOU
— Jason Bristol (@JBristolKHOU) October 1, 2024
It appears that the hiccup was due to a technical glitch that started pulling stats from players other than the one who was at bat at the time. The issue was fixed quickly, within the next inning or so.
Ultimately, this was a pretty weird one that we can chalk up to an anomaly ESPN will likely have sorted out moving forward. We’re guessing most viewers didn’t even take notice.
As for those who did, they outed themselves as the most hardcore fans out there. So you get a pat on the back if that was you.
[ESPN, Jason Bristol]
