Chip Caray and Brian Jordan were on the call for the Atlanta Braves Tuesday night on Bally Sports South, but if you were watching live, you heard a third voice unexpectedly interrupt.
A very frowned-upon error in sports broadcasting is to jump the play-by-play announcer during an important moment, although sometimes analysts just can’t contain their excitement. But Tuesday night’s repeated interruptions didn’t come from Jordan or any analyst on the call, and they were never supposed to make it to the airwaves.
For the Braves’ first three home runs against the Washington Nationals in DC on Tuesday, Caray’s calls were oddly jumped by what sounded like a producer or statistician on the broadcast.
Atlanta Braves' statistician kept jumping Chip Caray's home run call last night pic.twitter.com/jUnyEyNCW4
— Brandon Contes (@BrandonContes) June 15, 2022
That voice saying “d’Arnaud, home run number eight on the season, it came on a 2-1 pitch” and “home run number 12 on the season for Ozuna comes on an 0-1 pitch,” clearly wasn’t Caray or Jordan and clearly wasn’t meant to be heard on the TV broadcast considering its lack of inflection.
Occasionally, the voice of a producer or statistician will bleed into a broadcast if they’re sitting too close to a mic or the announcers’ headsets are up too high. But the third voice heard during the back-to-back home runs by Travis d’Arnaud and Marcell Ozuna was loud and clear enough that it must have interrupted the broadcast by way of a hot mic.
The blunder also occurred during the first inning on Dansby Swanson’s homer, but the voice did not reemerge during Atlanta’s second round of back-to-back homers which came in the sixth inning. It’s a harmless mistake, but one that shouldn’t have taken Bally Sports South at least three innings to correct. This was the second hot mic incident to occur during Tuesday night’s Braves broadcast, with Jordan’s apparent criticism of Leo Mazzone getting picked up by the MLB.TV feed.
