Major League Baseball is back! Assuming you woke up very early to hear Karl Ravech rant about pig’s liver during the Dodgers-Padres game on ESPN.
The Los Angeles Dodgers and San Diego Padres kicked off the MLB regular season Wednesday in South Korea at 7:05 p.m. Seoul local time. This means that if you are a Dodgers or Padres fan who wants to watch their season opener from California, you’d need to set your alarm for 3:05 a.m. And the reward for doing so was listening to ESPN’s lead MLB play-by-play voice cringe at the idea of eating pig’s liver.
As the game returned from a commercial break for the sixth inning, the broadcast showed ESPN MLB analyst Eduardo Pérez tasting some of the city’s local food. In the clip, Pérez went to Gwangjang Market with Tiffany Park and Daniel Kim for some authentic Korean street food, which included pig’s liver.
Karl Ravech is not a pig’s liver guy pic.twitter.com/QNtKV95nFB
— Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing) March 20, 2024
“What was that thing they were slicing,” Ravech asked after watching the video. “Did she say liver? Pig’s liver?”
Ravech then went to Kim, a Korean Baseball Organization analyst who joined Ravech and Pérez on the broadcast for Wednesday’s MLB opener. Baseball fans might remember Kim when ESPN started broadcasting KBO games during the height of the pandemic.
“Is that an acquired taste, those things?” Ravech asked about the pig’s liver. “They like them? Dan, do you like that stuff…Did you enjoy it the first time you tried it?”
Kim aptly stated that he doesn’t remember the first time he tried pig’s liver because he grew up eating it. Imagine asking an adult who grew up in the United States to recall what they thought the first time they ate a hot dog. Who remembers their first hot dog? Who remembers their first any type of food that they grew up eating?
“You ate pig’s liver,” Ravech continued. “I’m going back to like, who came up with the idea to think – way, way, way back when like, ‘let’s try that?’”
Again, who thought to take meat trimmings, that otherwise would be considered garbage, and emulsify them into a hot dog? Who thought to tug on a cow’s utter for milk? Who thought to pop a corn? A pig’s liver is far from the strangest thing people eat. But just in case Ravech was about to overcome his preconceptions of pig’s liver to consider tasting the food for himself, Pérez quickly squashed that.
“It actually was very potent. Very strong. Grainy. Dry…Grainy like sand,” Pérez said while lamenting the fact that there was no ketchup before noting the sliced liver could have benefitted from some sauteed onions.
Not exactly a ringing endorsement.
[ESPN]
