Ozzie goes off, again.

Screw the translators. All of them should learn English. Period.

You wanna play in Japan, learn Japanese. You wanna play in the US and Canada, learn English. Millions of other people do it.

 

Your stance, while suitably patriotic, is unfeasible on a couple levels.

In a business sense, the foreign talent is within its rights not to sign for any team that says "screw the translators" and instead pick a team that is willing to make such accomodations. Would you want your team to miss out on an Ichiro or Vlad Guerrero in favor of proving its nationalist credentials?

Also, moving city to city in the same country is stressful enough. Packing up your life and moving to a country with a different culture and a language you don't speak is on a whole other level (I can speak to this first-hand). You want to throw athletes -- not usually the most cerebral of people -- into that deep end with no assistance and expect them to wrap their heads around a foreign language while performing at a high level at the same time?

I agree that, ideally, athletes moving to a foreign country should make an honest effort to learn about their new culture and its language, even if they will only be there for a short time. However, it is these translators whom you would so casually toss aside that help them take their first steps on that journey while away from the field, not just serve as an interpreter during games and practice. To expect players -- who likely reached the status of professional athlete by focusing more on training and lifting than reading and writing-- to navigate their new surroundings on and off the field with no assistance is, at best, misguided.

 

John Kruk said that Ozzie is dead on with his opinion.

 

And until they do, they shouldn't be allowed to communicate with anyone!

Here's a look at Ozzie's rant from someone who doesn't slobber down his shirt when talking:

http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/news/story?id=5430700

 

but the 17 players wouldn't be exactly lonesome for people who speak the same language.

 

True dat, but unless they are all going to the grocery store together, there's still going to be a lot of fear and awkwardness for a 17-year-old kid. And as those players work their way up the system and become the subject of more media attention, they will be asked to converse in a language they don't know. Then they will be quoted in their cute little broken English and roundly mocked for their attempts -- how many ballplayers, Sammy Sosa for one, have been thought of as the real-life Chico Escuela with the "bazeball been beddy beddy good to me" comparison?

Considering the grumbling that has always gone on beneath the surface regarding Ichiro, how do you think he might have fared in that situation if he didn't have a translator to clean up and flower up all his quotes? Which brings up another point -- I have read/heard that Ichiro is actually pretty good with his English, which would be consistent with having grown up in an educational system that teaches the language to everyone, yet he still opts for the translator so he can operate in Japanese. That's something Sosa, Vlad et al. never even had the option to do.

 

They don't teach usable English in Japan, just the English that shows up on standardized tests.

 

OK ... still probably more than they teach in the Dominican, though.

 

I feel that way about ATM machines. Just give me English. I don't want to have to designate a language to get my dinero.