Joe Davis and John Smoltz may have had the best intro to a Major League Baseball playoff game ever, but no one would know it.
Everything seemed to be operating fine during the pregame show with Kevin Burkhardt, Alex Rodriguez, David Ortiz and Derek Jeter. But when Burkhardt threw it to Seattle for Game 4 of the ALCS between the Mariners and Toronto Blue Jays Thursday night, Davis and Smoltz were rendered speechless.
It was a rough start to Game 4 of the ALCS for Fox pic.twitter.com/jTNW6liQnB
— Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing) October 17, 2025
It wasn’t the negative side effects from eating a pink turkey, it wasn’t a raucous crowd drowning them out, it was technical difficulties.
The audience at home could see Davis and Smoltz moving their mouths, but nothing was coming through the speaker. And while technical issues like this might happen sometimes for a few seconds, Game 4 of the ALCS on FS1 opened with dead mics for nearly 90 seconds. Which had to feel like an eternity for the producers and technicians scrambling to get the issue rectified. Let this kind of issue happen in the regular season, but if you’re Fox, you definitely don’t want 90 seconds of dead mics leading into an ALCS game.
The 2025 ALCS has been a good series from the standpoint that it’s tied 2-2. But it’s been a weird series with three games being blowouts, and the home team has yet to grab a win. And unfortunately, we’ll never know how Davis and Smoltz went about setting up Thursday night’s Game 4 broadcast. So we’ll just assume Davis and Smoltz crushed it in their open.