i’ve always loved baseball. when i was a lad my hero was luis tiant of the boston red sox. el tiante, was a charismatic, Cuban hurler, who smoked fat cigars, and had this crazy, twisty motion. he’d pause at the top of his windup, then roll his eyes to the heavens, or over to a hot dog vendor in the bleachers.

hey, the man had needs. tiant got his start pitching for the Havana sugar kings. by the time he pitched for the sox he was fat, and long past his prime. but he was still the man. he had the nerve and guile to win 18 games in ‘75, and lead the sox to the world series.

even communists followed el tiante. i clipped this from the national review

Fidel Castro himself was a pitcher with a fairly good breaking ball, before he overthrew Fulgencio Batista. Secretly, Castro still follows American baseball. He can recite Tiant’s statistics with Boston; he knows them so well that he’s even been heard to argue how the shape of last year’s Red Sox season provides the clearest model for the imperial destiny of the United States: the early brilliance, the promising middle, and the inevitable decline .

i don’t know if castro’s reworked that theory since the fall of the soviet union, and now that the sox have finally won the world series, but beisbol’s (baseball’s) huge in latin american countries. and you need to know the lingo if you’re going to fully enjoy the game.

recently i got a chance to catch up with the media rojas (red sox) and guest commentator louis tiant via local cable. now i don’t get to see all the sox games in panama. but i see enough. this weekend cable onda featured 2 of the 3 games between the sox and los yankees. cable onda loves the yankees, thanks to mariano rivera, one of the best players to come out of panama since rod carew.

anyway, listening to my girlfriend cheer as the sox launched 3 balls over el monstro verde (the green monster), i couldn’t help but notice that a few of her spanish expressions are Anglicisms. for example: fanatico (a fan), bateador (batter), and batear ( to bat, or hit). alex is always yelling “bataso” (hit it!) whenever the sox are at the plate.

base, accent over the e, sounds different, but it’s the same in english (base). un error is an error of course. a curva is a curve ball. a lanzador (pitcher), will pichar (pitch), or sometimes a pitch is simply called “el play”. a quadrangular is spanish for home run, but more often it’s a jonron instead.

my favorites are pure spanish. apanala (catch it), for when a jugador (player) moves to catch a ball, linea brava, or hard line drive, ponchalo (strike him out). and after a strike out, alex will yell “vete!” (get out), or “pierdete!” (get lost), to the batter as he returns to the dugout.

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