SI

Matt Vasgersian Goes Ballistic As Aaron Judge Blasts Go-Ahead Home Run

In Monday’s Hot Clicks: Matt Vasgersian’s ear-splitting call of Aaron Judge’s massive homer, a hockey buzzer beater and more.

Dan Gartland

Announcers losing their minds in an empty stadium will take some getting used to

Part of the reason sports are so weird to watch right now is that they’re just as weird to broadcast. Baseball announcers aren’t traveling to road games, instead calling away games from the broadcast booth of their empty home stadium, where they sit on opposite sides of the room. For the Yankees’ series in Baltimore last week, YES had Michael Kay and David Cone in the Bronx, and Paul O’Neill patched in from his basement in Ohio. The broadcasters watch the game on video monitors, basically seeing what you’re seeing at home. 

The awkwardness of the setup can sometimes come through on the broadcast, like when Luke Voit hit a grand slam and Kay wasn’t sure whether it was a homer or an easy out. 

Without being able to see the flight of the ball or the movement of the outfielders, that’s one of the hardest kinds of plays to call. Luckily for announcers, the Yankees have some other guys who hit some real no-doubt home runs. 

ESPN’s Sunday Night Baseball crew of Matt Vasgersian and Alex Rodriguez is calling all its games this season from a studio in Bristol, Conn. Yankee Stadium is less than two hours by car from the ESPN campus, but it’s just safest for them to stay put there even when the game of the week is nearby. And when Aaron Judge is playing at his best, you don’t need to be anywhere near the park to know when he’s hit one out. One upside of the empty stadiums is that the crack of the bat comes through clear as day. 

When Judge hit a 419-foot homer in the second inning that left the bat at 107.9 mph, Vasgersian and Rodriguez both started chuckling as soon as he made contact. 

That homer was Judge’s fifth in his last five games, but he wasn’t done yet. In the seventh, he broke a 7–7 tie with an even bigger blast. This one traveled 468 feet and sent Vasgersian into such a tizzy that he nearly blew his mic out. 

Especially by baseball standards, Vasgersian is a very excitable announcer. It’s not uncommon for you to hear his voice crack like it did on Judge’s second homer. In fact, you can listen to a full 11 minutes of him blowing his top on YouTube. But it’s pretty jarring to hear him—or any announcer, for that matter—get so worked up with canned or nonexistent crowd noise in the background. His excitement is no doubt genuine; it just feels like the drama isn’t fully earned without the tension built by the crowd. There’s no button on the soundboard operator’s machine that can accurately replicate the crowd during the eighth inning of a tied prime-time game between the sport’s two biggest rivals with two outs, a runner on and the most exciting hitter in baseball at the plate. But this is only the second week of baseball’s empty-stadium experiment, so maybe we’ll get used to it by October. 

The best of SI

A group of Pac-12 football players presented the conference with a series of demands regarding health, safety, racial injustice and economic inequality while threatening to sit out the upcoming season. ... After the Pac-12 news and a similar development in the SEC, it’s fair to wonder whether the whole NCAA model is crumbling. ... An outbreak of positive tests on the Cardinals showed Rob Manfred was just bluffing about shutting down the sport.

Around the sports world

Joe Burrow, like Rob Gronkowski, is planning to save all his NFL paychecks and live off his endorsement money. ... The Wild’s Matt Dumba began the NHL’s Western Conference playoffs by delivering an antiracism speech and kneeling during the national anthem. ... The Magic’s Jonathan Isaac declined to join everyone else in wearing a Black Lives Matter shirt and kneeling for the national anthem before his team’s first game. ... Bryson DeChambeau wants to live to be 130 or 140 years old.

A rare hockey buzzer beater!

Look who showed up in Seattle

Sadly, this is the last cool thing we’ll see from Christian Pulisic for a while (he got hurt later in the game)

I mean, how else are they supposed to spend their time?

Three minutes into the first NHL game back

It’s like a double-decker beard

Jets coach Paul Maurice went off on Matthew Tkachuk after this scary hit

Even Pierre McGuire grew a quarantine struggle beard

Not sports

Andrew Lloyd Webber was very much not pleased with the theatrical adaptation of his musical Cats. ... Obnoxious YouTuber Jake Paul isn’t sure he’s going to stop throwing house parties during the pandemic.

Mind. Blown. 

OK, but how’d they get on the stairs?

Ice T is so good at Twitter

A good song

Email dan.gartland@si.com with any feedback or follow me on Twitter for approximately one half-decent baseball joke per week. Bookmark this page to see previous editions of Hot Clicks and find the newest edition every day. By popular request I’ve made a Spotify playlist of the music featured here. Visit our Extra Mustard page throughout each day for more offbeat sports stories.

Published
Dan Gartland
DAN GARTLAND

Dan Gartland is the writer and editor of Sports Illustrated’s flagship daily newsletter, SI:AM, covering everything an educated sports fan needs to know. He joined the SI staff in 2014, having previously been published on Deadspin and Slate. Gartland, a graduate of Fordham University, is a former Sports Jeopardy! champion (Season 1, Episode 5).

Home/Extra Mustard