Dave Barnett's ... Erm ... Klan Moment

In BBTiA's fine, time-honored tradition of highlighting those very special "wait, what did he just say?" moments from the Rangers' telecasts, I'd like to wind the clock back to Friday night, at some point late in the 9:00 hour.

Before I do that, though, a little anecdote: Many years ago, years before the notions ever struck me to write about sports or study accounting or listen to house music or deliver hand-crafted snark on Twitter, I lived in Tyler. And back in the day, some of the Rangers telecasts used to run through KDFI/My27 in the Metroplex. Our cable company had it all worked out so that the non-FSNSW games on KDFI were broadcasted on an unused station in Tyler, such as, say, Ch. 66 or 72 or 96.

On many an occasion, though, our cable company cut to the KDFI feed well before the KDFI feed went on the air, which led to a number of instances where I turned the broadcast on 15-20 minutes before first pitch, and was greeted by Josh Lewin and Tom Grieve sitting there in front of the camera, rehearsing their lines, working on the lead-in for the intro video package, straightening their ties, cracking small talk, and so on. It was fascinating stuff to anyone not intimately acquainted with the inner workings of a baseball telecast, but it was also stuff that the viewer was never intended to see, and I'm certain that some poor production assistant got their ass kicked all the way out to Boyd once the network and the team found out what was going on. 

In those couple of years where this happened, though, I don't ever recall Lewin or Grieve going off the cuff and cracking a dirty joke or slinging a little profanity around or spouting anything that could be remotely construed as controversial. Maybe there wasn't such time for such frivolity during the pre-game work schedule, though. Maybe Lewin and Grieve saved all of that up for the downtime between innings. They had to do 162 games of work for some truly godawful teams, so it wouldn't surprise me at all if they worked blue a lot in there between innings just to, you know, preserve their sanity.

Anyway, that's my borderline relevant story. Maybe it doesn't serve any direct purpose, but what we do know is that back in 2009, Tom Grieve got caught remarking "I don't give a s---" right as one of the telecasts resumed after commercials, and that on Friday night, Dave Barnett got caught saying something a little more uncomfortable:

But before anyone rushes to villify Barnett for what could obviously be considered to be a poor/offensive choice of words, I present a shot from the MLB.tv feed that captured what Barnett commented on -- a shot we didn't see, as TXA 21 didn't cut back to the game until several seconds later:

Yikes.

Now, the four (or maybe five) questions I have are:

1. Why don't we end up with more moments like this? Was TXA 21's production team in disarray on Friday night, or did Barnett commit the rare folly of turning his mic on too early, or ... ?!?

2. Why is the guy so damn worried about getting rained on? And why is the top of his hoodie so disturbingly pointy?

3. Why does the black guy sitting behind him look so disinterested?

4. What is so interesting to the little kid sitting behind the black guy that has left his mouth agape in amazement?

So, yeah. That was the most fun I've had watching a Rangers game in a long time, and the wheels-off telecast probably helped make it even a bit more fun. I could go for a little more of that, I think ... though obviously with fewer references to white supremacist organizations.