Longtime St. Louis Cardinals radio announcer Mike Shannon turned 82 years old in July, and he’s nearing the end of his final season in the booth after 49 years.
In that time, Shannon had probably seen it all when it comes to a baseball broadcast. But this week, the crew managed to throw him a curveball that had Shannon incomprehensibly confused for three-plus minutes.
During the broadcast, Shannon was given a promo card to read about an upcoming bidding opportunity to purchase a Busch Stadium NFT. As we explained when NBA Top Shot first launched, NFTs are non-fungible tokens — essentially digital assets that utilize blockchain technology.
Now, Shannon was seeing these words for the first time live on the air and could not figure out what any of it meant.
Mike Shannon gets to the bottom of this NFT business 2/2 #stlfly pic.twitter.com/vPeAxiGwDW
— VHS (@VanHicklestein) August 26, 2021
Even as Shannon tried to decipher words like Ethereum, Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, the best part of the sequence was when he said, “There’s strikeout number 5,” following a hit by pitch. That NFT promo completely threw off his rhythm.
A producer really should’ve shown Shannon this video ahead of time.
I now totally get NFTs https://t.co/w9lrmh8ki5
— Andy Nesbitt (@anezbitt) August 23, 2021
It would have cleared everything up.