Niagara IceDogs TV analyst commits funny verbal slip-up (VIDEO)

It's not the messenger, it's the medium. Do enough live television, where there is no backspace key and sooner or later one will say something that just comes out wrong and gets passed out across the Internet.

For Ed Burkholder, the always incisive analyst on TV Cogeco Ontario's telecasts of Niagara IceDogs home games, that moment of dream came early Sunday evening. The IceDogs' Dougie Hamilton, the Boston Bruins first-round pick, opened the scoring with a wrist shot from just inside the blueline that seemed to knuckle through the air on its path to the net. That conjured up memories of a member of the Baseball Hall of Fame who had a somewhat unfortunate first name.

Burkholder: "Ryan Strome wins this draw. Look at this, a little bit of a gaylord knuckleball and that goes in the top shelf."

Play-by-play man Steve Clark came in for the save: "That is, of course, the veteran pitcher Gaylord Perry you're referring to. It's after all, spring training in baseball."

No one was hurt by it and no one could possibly think it was meant in any other way. Burkholder might have even inadvertently furnished a dirty fantasy baseball team name to someone who was stuck for one before her/his league's draft. Maybe a more contemporary knuckleballer's name would have worked better there, although it could have also been tough to clearly name-drop the New York Mets' R.A. Dickey. Gaylord Perry threw his last major-league pitch in 1983.

One comes not to bury Burkholder, but to praise him and ideally laugh with him. Plymouth Whalers play-by-play man Peter Krupsky lived down and laughed off the time he said, "We have the Whalers covered like a bloody blanket" on air, leaving people thinking there was such as a thing as a bloody blanket. It happens to everyone who makes a living talking.

Neate Sager is a writer for Yahoo! Canada Sports. Contact him at neatesager@yahoo.ca and follow him on Twitter @neatebuzzthenet (video: TV Cogeco Ontario).