Relive Fox's World Series Broadcast As Everything Went To Hell

Right as Joe Buck was in the middle of reading a promo for a new show on Fox, the network’s World Series broadcast cut out Tuesday night, depriving audiences at home of a complete description of The Grinder.

The technical difficulty, which happened in the middle of the fourth inning and was attributed to generator failures, forced Fox to go back to the studio, where Dan O’Toole, Eric Karros, and Dontrelle Willis broke down the beginning of Game 1.

The outage lasted four minutes before the broadcast returned to a frazzled Joe Torre talking to both team’s managers. Fox’s feed hadn’t been fixed, however; viewers were listening to Matt Vasgerian and John Smoltz on the international feed. After Kansas City’s Kendrys Morales struck out—a World Series at-bat missed by everyone in the United States except for the crowd at Kauffman Stadium—someone had caught wind of what was going on, and stopped the game. MLB’s video-replay system depended on the TV feed, and with that unavailable, a manager couldn’t challenge a play.

When Fox grabbed the international feed, the game resumed. Meanwhile, the crew worked to bring back the voices of Joe Buck, Harold Reynolds, and Tom Verducci. The entire fiasco lasted 38 minutes, but it was all worth it for an extra minute of analysis from Dontrelle Willis.

[Fox | New York Times]

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