Yet Another 'Burtation'? TX Broadcaster Devolves into Nonsensical Talk During Game

Here at The Blaze, we've made a habit out of covering burtations. What is a burtation? It's a term Glenn Beck and his radio team has coined to describe when a broadcaster descends into seemingly unexplainable gibberish or nonsensical talk. The first one we covered was when a severe migraine caused an LA reporter to actually utter the word "burtation" on air. Then there were Canadian and Minnesota reporters. Then there was Al Sharpton. And now there is Texas Rangers baseball broadcaster Dave Barnett.

While calling Monday night's game between the Rangers and the Padres, Barnett had an odd moment where he seemed to forget what he was doing and inserted commentary on "fifth" base and a "botched robbery":

"A 2-1 game, the tying run on second -- a lead-off single by Chase Headley. Go-ahead run is at [pause] fifth on what Adams is insisting on calling it a botched robbery. What actually happened was his henchman [pause] took piece literally out of my, his--."

His mic seemed to go silent mid-sentence. Listen to it below, but you'll have to turn up your volume (or you can find a better quality version here):

"While announcers spewing nonsense is pretty common place these days, Barnett's spiel had many thinking it was the effect of some type of medical condition," the blog Awful Announcing writes. "Reviewing the footage, it seems hard to come up with another explanation as 'fifth base', 'botched robbery', and 'henchmen' usually don't enter into the baseball lexicon that often."

Deadspin raises the idea that it could be a failed "stretched analogy" but also says it could be that "he suffered a brief medical condition."

We looked at as many reports from the game we could find, and we didn't see any reference to a stolen base at that time in the game or even a botched amazing play, which might have been described as a "botched robbery." In fact, a written play-by-play from that inning on the Rangers website doesn't seem to show anything out of the ordinary:

Barnett reportedly finished the game without incident. But there's been no explanation.

What do you think?

UPDATE: The Dallas CBS station reports Barnett later told a local radio station that he suffered a migraine. The team has since announced he will miss the last two games of the current series to undergo medical observation.