Detroit Tigers: Five Closed Captioning Disasters

Closed captioning is a fantastic service. And often it’s hilariously wrong.

For many baseball fans, closed captioning is an essential part of the viewing experience. The subtitles help fill in baseball’s ample gaps when announcers banter, analyze plays, and tell stories. It’s great for our deaf or hard-of-hearing friends, or those who simply like to watch with no sound.

Closed captioning is typically done through a mix of human input and speech-to-text software. It’s a difficult job — game action can be quick and confusing, and there are more than a few mush-mouthed announcers with less-than-perfect diction — but they get it right most of the time.

But, when they get it wrong, the results can be unintentionally spectacular:

The MLB Closed Captioning Twitter account appeared in August to lovingly celebrate some of the more hilarious or mystifying CC mishaps, and we’ve stumbled across a few of our own while using MLB’s great new Film Room feature.

Nothing wreaks havoc on closed captioning quite like names, so we thought we’d present to you five of the silliest Tigers name errors we’ve found. Hit the jump to see who they are.

NOTE: You’ll need to turn on subtitles for this post to make any sense. If you don’t know how, here’s a guide for iPhone, Android, and just about everything.

Menace

We get two for the price of one here, as former Detroit Tigers closer Joe Jimenez gets called Joe Havanas and then, simply, MENACE. The shoe brand Havana Joe appears to be gone, but Joe Havanas is clearly the name of a low-level boxing promoter. On the other hand, Menace is a spectacular nickname for a closer. Unfortunately, these days Jimenez is more of a danger to the Tigers than other teams.

KC Mice

There’s some impressive pitching from Casey Mize in this clip, and some impressive names as well. Mize gets called Casey Meyers, which is a perfectly acceptable name for a pitcher, and the he gets the phonetic treatment. First he’s called KC Mice (there’s a solution for that), then the closed captioning decides KC Mei’s is better (Overwatch fans?), before calling him Casey Eyes in a clear nod to one of the country’s finest ophthalmic research facilities. The system is reeling now, and in a Rumpelstiltskin-eque fit of desperation it throws out the nonsensical moniker KC My’s.

Born Across Ohio

Closed captioning is an equal opportunity offender when it comes to names, but it does seem particularly flummoxed by Latin-American players. It’s an understandable flaw — the systems are trying to turn every utterance into English text — but it’s pretty embarrassing to see some of baseball’s brightest young stars have their names butchered. On the other hand, we do get some inspired nonsense, like Four Hey About A Facil, which is…almost Spanish? But then Jack Morris’ words are turned into a stunning insult: Born Across Ohio. Shudder.

Keryx Gooble

We finish with a closed captioning screw up that is somewhat understandable. Not many people knew how to properly announce Tarik Skubal’s name when he was first drafted, and if we asked non-fans to spell it we’d get some interesting results. Thus, Terek School, Terek Screwball, and Keryx Gooble. Research tells us that Terek School is a group of salmon racing for the Caspian, and Terek Screwball is a prop comedian working mostly in Branson, MO.

But Keryx Gooble is actually an interesting story. He’s the 19-year-old half brother of Google, and though he comes from a family of search engines, he’s still searching for himself. He’s done what you might expect from an overshadowed younger sibling with unlimited funds: trips to Burning Man, weekends in Ibiza, ayahuasca-fueled tortoise wrestling in the Galapagos. There was the failed electronic surfboard startup, the “fact-finding” mission to Thailand, and the bizarre, livestock-themed Twitter trolling of Dr. Temple Grandin.

These days he’s really into Ayn Rand. He nicknamed his Atherton home “The Fountainhead” and he recently bough a John Gant jersey, stating that it was “close enough.” His family looks forward to him growing out of this phase.