A strange thing happened during Saturday’s Giants-Dodgers telecast on Fox Sports.
After coming back from commercial break, the broadcast showed a clip of NASCAR driver Kurt Busch throwing out the first pitch. The problem? Busch didn’t throw out the first pitch on Saturday, but rather on Thursday, a game in which Fox did not broadcast.
Saturday was Pride Day at Oracle Park, and saw Jeopardy! champion Amy Schneider — the first transgender Jeopardy contestant to compete in the Tournament of Champions — throw out the first pitch. Though Fox was likely showing Busch to promote the upcoming NASCAR race they’d be broadcasting that weekend, it’s pretty clear they wanted to make it seem like he threw the pitch out on Saturday. You be the judge.
Fox’s handling of this led many to speculate that the network was intentionally trying not to promote that Schneider threw the first pitch, preferring to promote a race car driver instead of a trans woman.
Whether or not that’s the case, the inaccurate reporting annoyed Giants broadcaster Duane Kuiper, who set the record straight during the local telecast on Sunday.
“Want to make a correction from what I watched yesterday on the Fox broadcast,” Kuip said. “The broadcast implied that Kurt Busch threw out the first pitch yesterday, which was not true. Kurt Busch threw out the first pitch on Thursday. It was Amy Schneider from Jeopardy! fame who threw out the first pitch on Pride Day yesterday. I just wanted to make sure she got her due.”
Schneider also called out the network on Twitter Sunday evening.
Had Fox simply acknowledged that Busch threw out the pitch on Thursday, nobody would have thought twice about this. Pretending that he threw the pitch out on Saturday, however, was a curious move, and put the network in a position where they lost benefit of the doubt among some viewers.