With the MLB season in the home stretch, we may have gotten our best broadcasting moment of the year thanks to the Detroit Tigers and Jason Benetti.
While Benetti has seen his star rise on the national scene through his role on Sunday Night Baseball on NBC, his day job remains with the Detroit Tigers.
And during Monday night’s game against the Washington Nationals, we saw the humor and insight that have made him one of the sport’s most popular voices when he unleashed one of the most obscure, remarkable stats you’ll ever see… and laughed at his own expense.
Jason Benetti gets absolutely roasted by his own production crew with the camera cut after his Austro-Turkish War reference. 🤣 pic.twitter.com/nXPsCi4LE7
— Rob Friedman (@PitchingNinja) September 21, 2026
“So here’s Riley Greene with his 1.663 OPS in the City Connect jerseys. And when your OPS in any category is the same as the year when the Austro-Turkish War started, you’re doing well,” Benetti said.
After dropping that humdinger of a stat, the Tigers broadcast did the only thing it could: zoom in on the “Geek” in SeatGeek. Even Benetti appreciated the production’s genius, calling it the “cut of the year.” Truly, if there was a broadcasting cut award in the Sports Emmys, that should win hands down.
But the entire moment is deserving of appreciation.
First of all, OPS numbers while wearing a specific type of jersey are the kind of super-nerd stat that can only thrive in baseball. All we’re missing is Greene’s OPS when the wind is blowing out to left-center field, and Mercury is in retrograde. That’s what makes baseball unique compared with any other sport. If you’re going to go there with stats, metrics, and all the like, then lean all the way in.
Second, it would be great to know whether Jason Benetti knows offhand what year the Austro-Turkish War started or if he looked up what world events happened in 1663 just to add an Ernie Johnson Neat-O-Stat-Of-The-Night to the broadcast. It is fun to imagine that he has all the major dates of the centuries-long conflict between the Habsburg monarchy and the Ottoman Empire memorized.
Unfortunately, Greene went 0-for-3 in Monday’s game. So his OPS in the City Connect jerseys has likely fallen into the range of the German Peasants’ War.
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