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Maybe the fans should learn Spanish.
That being said, if the Angels were composed entirely of non-English-speaking players, it's hard to imagine they would have many English-speaking fans. There's not much chance that will happen, though.
this is a joke, right?
I assume that these guys are also insisting that US players on the Blue Jays or US NHL players learn to speak French, right?
I had never heard this about either LaFleur or Lemieux, and I have a hard time believing it for Mario. After all, Lemieux was born in Montreal, which is a heavily bilingual city. I suppose it's possible for LaFleur, as I know absolutely nothing about Thurso.
If they want to be able to interact with the fans, they would be advised to do so, if they play in a place where most people are fluent in French but not English. In other words, Montreal. Although most people there speak some English.
Anyway, do you honestly think Arte doesn't see the advantage in having Latino players when he's trying to push into a media market with a huge Latino population?
As for the rest of the article, Physioc = lame, Hudler = goofer but entertaining. If you pair Hudler with a competent play-by-play man who actually knows something about baseball, you'd have an adequate broadcast team.
It is something of a career limiting move to not know English in the USA, and that's not going to change any time soon.
The excerpt from the article represents a stupid mentality but if you can't communicate with most of your fans you're damaging your prospects as an entertainment commodity.
I'm sorry; I thought Toronto was in English-speaking Ontario. Now if you had made the point about the Expo's, I might feel differently. US NHL players who play for Montreal learning French-yes, not a bad idea.
I'm not sure why American players on the Blue Jays need to learn to speak French. Toronto is in Ontario, not Quebec, and English is by far the predominant language in Ontario.
But yes, I think that if any person is going to spend years of his life living and working in another country, it's courteous to make an effort to try to learn how to communicate the way most people in the country do. I apply that to Americans going somewhere else as much as anyone coming here.
Because no one speaks Spanish in the Los Angeles area.
Look guys, do you know how hard of a language English is to learn? Think about it--it's a mongrel language, combining Romance and Germanic influences, filled with non-sensical rules that have huge exceptions that nearly make such rules useless. Think about how hard it would be to be a full-time baseball player, with all the time commitment that entails, and have to learn such a particularly difficult language.
I agree, as a Latino, in an ideal world, Latino baseball players would learn English. A large number of them do. But acknowledge the difficulties involved. Also, acknowledge the fact that it doesn't seem to make that big of a difference. Vlad hasn't done an interview in English in an incredibly long time, but the fans still got nuts at the Big A when he comes up to the plate.
Maybe he did, maybe he didn't, who cares? Not everybody has a great ability to learn new languages. One of my friends' parents have lived in the US for 30 years, yet speak English in such a broken and heavily accented manner that it is almost impossible to decipher what they are saying. Does that make them bad people? It's not like they have sort of anti-English bias.
I could get behind that.
The US players on the Blue Jays should learn to speak Canadian, eh?
"Being a good idea to" is not the same as "We should be disgusted by your not".
One would think it would also be courteous for a sportswriter who deals largely with Spanish-speaking players to learn Spanish.
BINGO BINGO BINGO!
If there is almost nothing stopping your bosses from reassigning you to a city where hardly anyone speaks Spanish (there aren't a ton of them big enough to have MLB franchises but they exist) that doesn't matter a whole lot.
Vlad Guerrero should feel lucky _any_ team was willing to sign him.
And in fact he only mentions it for a couple paragraphs.
Most of the article is about how bad Steve Physioc is, anyway.
No, of course not. But 2 things. First, there is a lot of room between "Your a bad person if you do not", and second "It would be a good idea if..."
Second, I don't know your friends parents' or their occupation, but there are several occupations where learning the language would have been of significant advantage to them from a career perspective. Now maybe they chose not to go into one of those careers, and if they did not, that is fine, too. But the point of this article is that baseball is one of those careers where learning the language helps. If you believe that MLB baseball is pure sport, where all that matters is skill, then you really don't need to learn any language; you can grunt mono-syllabically and still hit .300, and yes, that is all that matters. If you believe that baseball is an entertainment enterprise fighting other businesses for the consumer dollar, and that the players ultimately want to be paid well for their skill, and that payment is a product of tickets sold and ratings on the televisions, then maybe players that can speak to the largest component of the ticket-buying public is a good idea. Whether you agree or not, I find the notion that raising that idea is xenophobic is just wrong.
Also, is MLB's attendance really crashing like he asserts? I'm assuming it's down because of the recession, but is it going in the tank?
And Ann Jillian.
It's not, but he opened himself up to that charge when he raised the idea in a rather rude and ill-considered manner. He's not being thoughtful, he's just ranting.
Vlad Guerrero (one of the players the writer cites by name as a player who doesn't "know" English) is widely viewed as one of the best players of his era and has made a billion kajillion dollars in his career.
It's courteous to do so. It's not rude not to.
"Being a good idea to" is not the same as "We should be disgusted by your not".
One would think it would also be courteous for a sportswriter who deals largely with Spanish-speaking players to learn Spanish.
That hits all the right notes, Larry, especially that second line.
If I were an agent, I'd advise any player to learn English, because it would likely help him in many ways. But given that cliches dominate all player interviews anyway, it's always easy to get a translator for the Spanish equivalent of "I was just looking for a good pitch to hit" and "I'm just glad we won."
If you go by the official tickets sold numbers that teams release to the public, it's down, but not dramatically.
But if you go by the numbers of people actually going to the games, from what I have seen in television and in person, the gap between the "official" numbers and the numbers of people who are really there is bigger than I've ever seen it this at this point of the season.
It's down about 1600 per game compared to last season, but about a third of that can be attributed to the smaller stadiums in New York, and another 200 of that to the generally terrible state of the Nats (and another 250 to the Tigers, who are down over 8000 a game from last year).
Toronto is also down significantly (-3600), which isn't surprising given that the Jays were talking about this season as a rebuilding year and with the tanking of the auto sector.
But you've made a much better argument than "This Kendry Morales ignoring our language...is outrageous. This is an American team with American fans paying them American millions."
Americans get beat up for not knowing other languages when we travel internationally and then beat up because we won't learn visitor's languages when they come here. Which is it? Are the people in a foreign land required to learn English when I visit or do they have to learn it to come here?
Although it would be nice, we're not all going to know the same languages. Getting mad at people for that is silly.
Maybe, I haven't noticed that, but I haven't really been looking. Anecdotally, the one game I went to in person in St. Louis looked to be sold out or nearly so. It certainly wouldn't surprise me if it was quite a bit down, given that the economy sucks so much, but I don't think Kendry Morales learning English is going to help that much. But hey, if he can learn English and then fix the economy, I'm on board. Let's go, Kendry.
But so what if the Angels have a lot of Spanish speakers? Los Angeles is, and always has been, a multicultural town -- even from 1885 to about 1950, an era when the Times and others tried to convert it into a refuge for white midwestern Protestant emigres. If folks in Orange County (many of whom may be descendants of said ex-midwesterners) haven't gotten the hint from all the Asian restaurants they frequent, times have changed.
OC's got it fine, it's just a handful of fools like this guy who makes us look bad.
Albanian baseball players are a distinct market inefficiency.
I like Ozzie Guillen's knowledge of English. But I enjoy Ichiro's translated quotes even more.
This explains Jerry Coleman's 50-year broadcasting career.
I prefer the quotes which Ichiro provides without translator assistance.
They only look empty. They're really filled with the presence of Matt Wieters.
Esperanto estas imponega!
"From now on, they're the The Angels Angels.
Use the full name, please: The Angels Angels of the Home by the Saint Anne River.
Most fans could care less if their star players could only communicate in Klingon. As long as they can hit the ball and play winning baseball, the fans are happy and will fill the stadium.
LAA hasn't exactly seen any attendance drops since they signed Vladimir.
Don't forget Mike Keane, who was basically run out of town by the press for having the audacity to be appointed team captain while not knowing how to speak French.
That also depends on the area. In the downtown area, either is fine, and neither is favored (as in old Montreal). In a lot of the suburbs, French is heavily favored.
I actually caught a bit of The New Generation last night. My god, that show is much dorkier than I remember.
True story. When I was a student in Prague I once asked a waiter if I could go down on him. I thought I was asking him if I could smoke in the restaurant. Turns out the verb "to smoke" in Czech can be conjugated in funny ways!
I hope he at least considered that his tip.
Soccer players manage it all over Europe and they only get 1-2 months off a year not 5-6. Infact the clubs will very often enroll them in language classes.
I do believe this is a story I would choose to finish, were I telling it.
Looking at a side issue: The excerpt, above, is all true but misses a point about the English language. Though exceptionally difficult to master, it's also fairly easy (or so I've read from folks who would know more than this WASP born/living in the Northeast) to acquire enough to get by. One of the finest outcomes of the "mongrelization" was the elimination of noun gender and the differing articles and adjective endings needed as a result - many, many potentially embarrassing errors in usage are avoided due to this. Of course, this doesn't change the excellent point made by the poster whose 10 years of Russian wouldn't make one comfy giving interviews in Moscow.
Back to the entertainment/fan connection issue: Would Papi be so beloved by Bosox fans if he had very limited English? I think not, even with his 2004 PS?
I've watched some of the first season on DVD recently, and man, the writing is terrible. I feel like the only thing that held it together is the fact the Patrick Stewart and Brent Spiner are very good actors who were way better than the material deserved. I think it got better, but I don't know. I was pretty young when I first saw most of it.
Okay, I will. Basically, I asked him something like "Mozou vykourit tady?" when I should have said "Mouzou kourit tady?" if my memory is right. Czech speakers might want to correct me if there are any here. This was at ski resort restaurant on the Czech/German border. The waiter, who also ran the lodge and the one person doing everything that weekend, gave me quite a confused look and walked away. I noticed and then went to a table filled with Czechs inlcuing one of my professors who had come along on the trip. When I told them what I said, everyone at the table was in hysterics. I learned of my hilarious mistake. For the rest of the weekend, I avoided eye contact with the waiter. He also avoided me. I did not blow him or smoke his penis.
Hell, you could argue that most of the people from where I'm from (rural Middle Tennessee) don't really master the language but just get by with a mongrel form of it.
No. The Knicks drafted him. And then traded him away. For nothing.
Sigh. ####### Knicks.
Also, make sure you don't call his daughter a whore. Very similar words.
The most flawless, grammatically correct English I've heard spoken in the last few years was when I was watching a TV broadcast originating from India.
I feel like native speakers tend to honor the rules of a language mostly in the breaking of them.
True dat.
It's absolutely true though. He really couldn't communicate en anglais when he first came up.
I'm pretty sure Marcel Dionne helped Luc Robitaille through some really awkward times when he first came up. Couldn't speak English well enough to order food in a restaurant and couldn't cook for himself.
I think I've mentioned this before, but I had a friend in the same boat in Quebec City( unilingual English ). He'd just point at a menu item and eat what they brought him.
Huh. You learn something new every day.
I'm also surprised by this, since Quebec City is such a heavy tourist spot. I guess it might be a matter of things being very different in terms of anglo tolerance inside and outside the old Quebec City areas. Or it could have just been a matter of waiters ####### with your friend.
The first season is by far the weakest. The second season is better and the show really hit its stride starting with the third season.
This is the pattern with most sci-fi shows, and indeed TV series in general (Season One of Seinfeld is definitely sub-par).
Ah. That makes more sense. Thanks for clarifying.
Also, you're right about them giving full credit for attempts at French. It's still very much that way - as long as you're willing to give it a decent shot, the locals will generally cut you some slack about the specifics.
First Season Wesley Crusher has to be one of the most absurd characters of all time.
"You don't hit the ball wit your tongue, do ya?"
"Needless to say, I got the job"
yadda yadda yadda dinner was free!
Hey, you left out the best part! (/straight line)
Wesley Crusher concurs.
Honestly, why is this #### being linked?
Because it has garnered 93 comments so far.
It's all about the page views.
Because the author is a primate (in every sense of the word.)
I know this is sarcasm, but maybe he should feel lucky to get another contract. I hadn't noticed his stats until just now. Uuuugly. I guess this is just what happens when a guy with his approach loses his power.
spot on
If he's healthy, he's still Vlad. The only question is if he can stay healthy long enough to do it.
I hated him to. But then I saw In Bruges, and I stopped hating him. Brilliant film, and he's brilliant in it.
I believe what you are trying to say is that he's "on great actor."
And nobody bothered to read the article so it's not like the trolling got page views for the host site.
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