Pitching Lost in the Translation

This week, there was a curious flap about, of all things, translators on the pitchers mound during baseball games.

The incident took place in Tuesday night's game between the Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees in New York.  Masahiro Tanaka, the Yankee pitcher, was getting a visit on the mound after being beaten around by Red Sox hitters.  The visit was by two Yankee staff, the pitching coach and the translator.

Jerry Remy, the color man on the Red Sox television broadcast, made a comment about how they should not allow the translator (presumably as a "third person" on the mound).  He expanded a little bit by noting that, in so many words, there were a fairly narrow set of things the pitching coach could say, and pitchers ought to be able to understand them without a third party.

Now, we need to note the rules on mound visits from anyone in the dugout.  Teams are allowed exactly one visit from someone in the dugout per inning per pitcher.  If someone goes out a second time, the pitcher has to be removed, period, and replaced.  The rule doesn't get detailed about a second person, although it has always been allowed for a manager or coach to come out and bring a trainer if an injury may be involved, and if the pitcher is OK, he doesn't have to be removed even if it is the second visit in the inning.  And translators are covered, too; it is legal to bring one.

Translators have been allowed for a long time, certainly since we have been seeing more foreign-born pitchers in the past few decades, and particularly with the influx of Asian players going right to the majors from the Japanese and Korean leagues without a few years in the minors during which they can master enough English.

And we need to note that a number of such players, including Latin players but particularly Asian ones, do their interviews with translators.  They do so even if they do speak English, to make sure they are quoted as saying the right thing, given the press's talent for inaccuracy and fake news.  And I am fine with that -- and presumably Remy is as well.

But Remy took a lot of heat for his comments.  The Red Sox themselves felt obliged to tweet out that they distanced themselves from Remy's comments, presumably lest in Massachusetts they be accused of xenophobia.  God forbid we have an actual discussion.

So here is an actual discussion.  First, I don't care who plays or what language they speak or where they were born.  If they can play, Baseball will find a position for them.  It is wonderful that the best players in Japan are coming over to try to play here (although we need to have a draft, not an auction, to keep competitive honesty).

That said, I'm with Jerry Remy on this, and not just because I like Jerry Remy, and he waved to me once when I showed up to sing the national anthem at Camden Yards in Baltimore wearing one of his RemDawg T-shirts.

This is a very nuanced answer, but ... Jerry Remy had the right to raise the question without the team distancing themselves from his words.  And I believe that he was asking us to raise the question and debate it like civilized adults.  He should be applauded for doing so, not given a knee-jerk verbal assault.

There are certainly good reasons to do so, two I can think of off the top of my head:
(1) Baseball is trying to quicken the pace of the games, and it's a needless drag when pitchers need translators to tell them what they'd already know, if they learned the basics in the language of their employ.
(2) If two people came out of the dugout to talk to the opposing pitcher, Drew Pomeranz, he would have had to have been taken out of the game.  Unless the umpire is monitoring the conversation and speaks fluent Japanese, he couldn't have known if Tanaka were getting double the advice that the rules allow.

I mean, if I went over to Germany to play on one of their soccer teams, I'd expect to have to improve my soccer-specific German if I wanted to understand the coach, you know?

But I think this whole dust-up is an exemplar of our nation's apparent inability to have a civil discussion about an issue without one side -- the left-more of the two, if such applies as it does here -- going all PC and crying racism or xenophobia-ism or whatever ism makes sense (or not) to them.

We have lost our ability to debate reasonably, and I don't know why.  It may go back to our inability to communicate, as in this piece you will love (please read the link).

But gee, let's learn how.  Won't need a translator for that.

Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
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