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.
Yankees announcers Michael Kay and Paul O'Neill with a mid-game discussion on One Piece lore is an iconic baseball broadcasting moment 😂
— MLB (@MLB) April 2, 2025
"I know you were asking about this, Paul ... Monkey D. Luffy has the properties of rubber after accidentally eating one of the Devil Fruits." pic.twitter.com/KtWh14Aedp
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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This article was originally published on www.si.com as Michael Kay Pauses Yankees Broadcast to Explain Anime Plot Beats.
