As Amanda Rykoff writes at Awful Announcing today, TBS messed up royally last night.

Rather than show the insane excitement of the PNC Park crowd and give us the player introductions, the national anthem — which was sung by Andrew McCutchen’s mom! — and all of the other pomp and circumstance of the long-awaited return of the playoffs to Pittsburgh, we got studio filler and chatter. Go read her indictment of the proceedings and get mad. And you should be mad, because you missed great stuff.

I’ve been around TV studios a bit in the past couple of years and I understand that it’s hard for that kind of operation to be nimble at times. There are so many moving parts and people to answer to that you can’t just cut away without warning. But here they had warning. Ever since it was known that there would be a playoff game in Pittsburgh, people have been talking about how crazy the scene would be. And TBS thought we’d rather watch people in the studio talking about that crazy scene than actually showing it to us.

Here’s part of it, though. It’s McCutchen’s mom singing “The Star Spangled Banner.”

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