SI

Michael Kay Pauses Yankees Broadcast to Explain Anime Plot Beats

Baseball is so back.

Tyler Lauletta

Jazz Chisholm Jr. and Monkey D. Luffy.
Jazz Chisholm Jr. and Monkey D. Luffy. / Elsa/Getty Images // Crunchyroll/YouTube
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Baseball commentary is no easy task.

Given the pace of the sport, there is plenty of time for soliloquies on a wide range of topics should the muse strike a play-by-play announcer or color commentator at any given moment. Further, when the bases are clear and the game isn’t exactly a barnburner, there’s a lot of air to fill with whatever could possibly grab the attention of your audience. Oftentimes, the results are delightful.

Take Tuesday night’s game between the New York Yankees and Arizona Diamondbacks as an example. In the second inning, YES color commentator Paul O’Neill got a look at the cleats of Jazz Chisholm Jr. while he was at the plate, and couldn’t help himself.

“What do we got going here, Michael?” O’Neill said as the broadcast took a close-up of Jazz’s cleats, which featured characters and images from the anime series One Piece.

A lesser broadcaster might have just said, “Beats me, Paul,” laughed, and moved on. But Michael Kay is no lesser broadcaster.

“He wears a lot of things from an anime series called One Piece,” said Kay. “On his arm band, you see Monkey D. Luffy, also known as Straw Hat Luffy. He’s the captain and founder of the Straw Hat Pirates.”

Kay did his best from there to further describe the plot points of the popular anime and manga series to his fellow man in the booth. Clubhouse reporter Meredith Marakovits jumped into the conversation a bit later to provide further context.

Any anime fan who has attempted to explain their most recent watch to their friend and subsequently heard the strangest sequence of words they’ve ever spoken escape their mouths knows this feeling. To do it on television is an art.

Much credit to whoever wrote out Kay’s One Piece notes—thank you for providing the platform for this delightful moment to play out. Or who knows, maybe Kay himself is a fan of the series.

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Tyler Lauletta
TYLER LAULETTA

Tyler Lauletta is a staff writer for the Breaking and Trending News Team/team at Sports Illustrated. Before joining SI, he covered sports for nearly a decade at Business Insider, and helped design and launch the OffBall newsletter. He is a graduate of Temple University in Philadelphia, and remains an Eagles and Phillies sicko. When not watching or blogging about sports, Tyler can be found scratching his dog behind the ears.

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