AMERICA’S NEW PASTIME

San Francisco Giants Announcers Ignore Game in Progress to Do Their Wordle Play-by-Play

“I should actually call the game,” Dave Flemming said, before talking about Wordle some more.

Two Major League Baseball sportscasters demonstrated their love of America’s pastime by completely ignoring the game in front of them to talk at incredible length about Wordle. As the San Francisco Giants opened up a 2-1 lead in their five-game series against the Arizona Diamondbacks Wednesday night, local NBC broadcasters doing the play-by-play got distracted talking about The New York Times linguistic puzzle game for a full half-inning. Jon Miller was apparently late to the addictive word game—which quickly went viral after launching in October 2021—but thankfully Dave Flemming was on hand to explain the simple game in excruciating detail to his flummoxed colleague. “You start it off,” Flemming tells Miller, who is playing Wordle while supposedly commentating on the game, “You pick any five-letter word, and then hit enter and it tells you which letters you got right.” As Tommy Lastella batted, Miller asked: “Is it a good start, getting two of the letters?” “It’s a good start, yeah,” Flemming says, “Many times, you get none. A lot of days I get zero.” The pair even received complaints about their lengthy Wordle chat in real-time—but not because they were ignoring the baseball. “I’ve been getting text messages now from friends saying, ‘Well don’t mention what the word is, I haven’t done mine yet for today!’” Miller said.

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Dan Ladden-HallBreaking News Editor

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