Chris "Mad Dog" Russo joins the KayRod cast.

There are plenty of cases of MLB announcers misjudging whether a particular hit will be a home run or be caught as a fly ball, and that gets harder still when it comes to remote announcing or to remote interviews. The latter was the case with the alternate “KayRod” (helicopter-hopping Michael Kay and Alex Rodriguez) broadcast of Sunday Night Baseball on ESPN2 Sunday night. That broadcast, like many recent alternate feeds, involves quite a few interviews of guests in addition to straightforward discussion of the game (Braves-Padres, in this case), and one of those guests was SiriusXM/MLB Network/current ESPN guest personality Chris “Mad Dog” Russo. And during an interview where he was commenting about pitching, Russo thought he was about to get Castellanosed, but the hit in question wound up being just a fly ball that was caught in front of the warning track in center field:

“Someone’s going to hit a home run here! Is this Springer in the World Series? No, it’s out in center field!”

That clip is also great for Kay and Rodriguez cracking up, and for Russo recognizing “I know you have to get to a commercial! I know you have to go to commercial! I’ll be back in a minute.” That’s a good catch, with that being the end of the half-inning.

This is all understandable. It’s of course difficult for Russo to judge how that hit’s going to turn out; not only is he not at the ballpark, he probably doesn’t even have a fullscreen feed of the game up thanks to the focus here being on his interview with Kay and Rodriguez. But this does show the perils of conducting interviews during live game action. Sometimes, you get interrupted by a home run. Sometimes, you just think that you’re going to get interrupted by a home run.

[Ben Koo on Clippit]

About Andrew Bucholtz

Andrew Bucholtz has been covering sports media for Awful Announcing since 2012. He is also a staff writer for The Comeback. His previous work includes time at Yahoo! Sports Canada and Black Press.