Tim Kurkjian has spent decades as one of baseball’s most knowledgeable voices. But even the best get caught up in the moment sometimes, and this week on Stugotz and Co., producer Mikey A. dug up proof of exactly that.

Appearing on Jon “Stugotz” Weiner’s show, the ESPN MLB analyst was confronted with a ranking he’d apparently made years ago when people were debating the best pitches in baseball. Ahead of Rivera’s cutter — arguably the most dominant single pitch of the modern era — Kurkjian had placed the heavy fastball that Ubaldo Jiménez threw during his remarkable 2010 first half with the Colorado Rockies, when he went 15-1 with a 2.20 ERA before the All-Star break.

“Oh my god,” Kurkjian said when reminded of the take. “Well, I must have been drunk when I said that.”

The comment drew immediate pushback from Stugotz, who pointed out that Kurkjian is never drunk. That left the longtime ESPNer with no choice but to own up to a bad take.

“If I said that, I was wrong by a hundred miles,” Kurkjian offered.

To be fair to Kurkjian, there was a brief moment in time when Jiménez looked like he might be throwing something nobody had ever seen before. During that electric first half of 2010, the right-hander was touching 100 mph regularly. He threw the first no-hitter in Rockies history in April, won back-to-back NL Pitcher of the Month awards, and had people genuinely wondering if his heavy fastball represented some new frontier in pitch design.

Kurkjian said he was sitting with Orel Hershiser at the time people were making these claims about Jiménez, and the former Dodgers ace set him straight. “Tim, there is no pitch that is being thrown today that has never been thrown before,” Hershiser told him.

The reality, of course, is that Jiménez had great stuff but struggled with command his entire career. After that remarkable first half of 2010, he went 4-7 with a 3.80 ERA in the second half and was never quite the same pitcher again. By 2011, the Rockies had traded him to Cleveland.

Before completely absolving himself, though, Kurkjian offered one caveat. He said Paul Richards, the legendary baseball executive who worked with the Rangers in the early 1980s, once told him that Hoyt Wilhelm’s knuckleball was the greatest pitch in the history of baseball, because “The umpire couldn’t call it, the catcher couldn’t catch it, and the hitter couldn’t hit it.”

Kurkjian never saw Wilhelm pitch, though, so he’s sticking with Rivera’s cutter as the best pitch in baseball history.

“I stand corrected,” he said. “I don’t ever remember saying that, but if I did, I apologize.”

The good news for Kurkjian is that he’s not alone. Everyone who watched Ubaldo Jiménez throw 100 mph with movement in April 2010 thought they were seeing something nobody had ever seen before. The bad news is that most people didn’t rank it ahead of Mariano Rivera’s cutter on the record. Allegedly.