The International American Pastime

The typical major league baseball team has a full roster of players and a substantial staff of coaches who work with players on specific skills. There’s the general manager, a bullpen coach, a batting coach, a bench coach, and strength and conditioning coaches. There’s a bevy of trainers and coordinators. And, sometimes, there’s a language coach.

In 2012, more than a quarter of the players in Major League Baseball (MLB) were foreign-born (Associated Press, 2013). Many of them arrive in American locker rooms with much fanfare but with few or no English skills. In order to succeed as part of a team, however, it’s crucial that they be able to communicate with their teammates and coaches, both on and off the field. The finite rules and language of the game, along with the formal nonverbal signals teams develop to communicate on the field, help to create a clear code of communication. For Asian players, most of whom are drafted straight out of the Japanese leagues, like Yu Darvish, Hiroki Kuroda, and Wei-Yin Chen, translators are essential. They have long accompanied players on the field during practices and assisted them in interviews, and in 2014, new MLB rules solidified translators’ roles in their organizations by allowing them to accompany coaches onto the field during games for on-field conferences (Associated Press, 2014).

But the new rule may have limited impact on the many Latino players in the league. Because most Spanish speakers have at least a few bilingual teammates who can translate for them, and because most spend some time in the farm system, where they can pick up a somewhat functional, if limited, English vocabulary (what one reporter called “Baseball English”), most Spanish speakers do not have team-provided translators (Andriesen, 2007; Associated Press, 2014). It’s unclear whether this less formal mode of communication is sufficient. Yankees closer Mariano Rivera admits that, early in his career, there were times when he was completely lost when “talking” with his coaches. “You nod your head yes, but you have no idea what they are saying” (Riviera, in Associated Press, 2014, para. 2).

The answer may be for the game to become more bilingual. The San Diego Padres, like many other organizations, offer English language classes to help players who are not fluent in English. But the team also takes the opposite approach: they teach basic Spanish to their staff. “It’s something I thought was important to make us efficient when dealing with players when we’re going to the Dominican [Republic] or with our players who are just coming here and don’t have command of the English language yet,” said Padres Director of Player Development Randy Smith (Brock, 2010). The next step might be targeting players long before they get to the big leagues: in 2013, Major League Baseball announced a pilot program that will provide English language classes and other educational support for prospects in the Dominican Republic (Sanchez, 2013).