Baseball announcer struggles to find the participle

Sport commentary is largely innocuous fluff, easy to ignore, or completely tune-out.  How many of us can keep a game running on the television while engaged in something else?  Last week during Game Two of the NLDS (between the Washington Nationals and Los Angeles Dodgers), I happened to be paying a bit more attention and noticed something peculiar. Something grammarians, speech pathologists, and linguistics will find amusing.

Have a listen to the sound file and see if you can spot the error in linguistic processing.

The announcer is discussing an event in which a baseball catcher has to swing his arm approximately 45 degrees to tag a runner approaching from his left.  As the description is happening in review, that is, being discussed as a past event while looking at a video replay, the announcer deploys the third conditional to describe what might have happened if the catcher had performed differently.  His problem is that his mind can’t retrieve the past participle for swing.  He appears to be attempting to deploy the conjugation pattern i-a-u, as found in swim-swam-swum, drink-drank-drunk, sing-sang-sung, ring-rang-rung.  The conjugation for swing is swing-swung-swung (though swang as the past form seems to be used just often enough to be noted in some dictionaries as one now rarely used).  The announcer’s mind catches itself in what it believes to be an error (swinged), but the correction suggested (swang) seems unequally unacceptable.  He recovers by switching verbs.  The completed statement turns out to be a mixed conditional:

If he could have swi – swa - brought that glove around without touching the dirt, I think he’s got a play.

Keen grammarians will note that he need only have said “If he had swung...”

Here’s an Oxford Dictionary entry from 1919 with a number of examples for swang:

 http://www.oed.com/viewdictionaryentry/Entry/195888?print

And here’s video clip of the play in question.  I tried embedding, but alas, it requires more time than I wish to devote.

http://m.mlb.com/video/topic/94951848/v1204527483/ladwsh-gm2-reddick-plates-turner-on-single-to-right

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