Bleachers substitute for desks at ballpark English class
A few hours before the Vancouver Canadians throw out the first pitch for any evening home game, a small group gathers in the Nat Bailey Stadium seats just past the left-field wall for English class.
The students are Latin American baseball players in their 20s, young men thousands of kilometres from where they grew up, pursuing the dream of becoming big-league ballplayers. Like about a quarter of the players in Major League Baseball, they come from Spanishspeaking countries such as Venezuela, Panama, Mexico and the Dominican Republic.
Some skipped high school to pursue a career in baseball, while others went to school but weren’t taught English. Some arrived in Canada in June having never spoken more than the most basic English.
Now immersed in a new country, they sometimes find themselves in situations where they must speak to baseball fans, restaurant servers, cabbies and others who speak no Spanish, sometimes without an Englishspeaking teammate nearby to act as interpreter. For the first time in their lives, they need to know English.
That’s why the Canadians, and all minor-league clubs affiliated with the parent Toronto Blue Jays, offer these classes to their players: to teach them enough of the language that it’s easier for them to operate on the field — to know whether to yell “I got it” or “you get it” to a teammate, for instance — and to move around in regular life, manoeuvring through a menu and making sure the pizza comes with pepperoni, not pineapple.
Jessica Lebowitz has taught English for 17 years, but never in a ballpark before this season. She stumbled into it, receiving an email circulated through one of the colleges she works at looking for someone to tutor Spanish-speaking ballplayers.
“I thought, ‘I speak Spanish and I speak English, my kids love baseball — it’s just kind of a perfect fit,’” Lebowitz said.
She said she knows her students could be doing other things and the classes aren’t mandatory, so she tries “to make it fun for them.”
C’s bench coach Jose Mayorga, who learned English at school in his native Panama, tells players that a big part of his career came because of his language skills, and that a lot of his breaks along the way came from just being able to hold a simple conversation in English.
“Every time there was a call needing a catcher, they told me you’re going because they knew I would be able to talk with their pitchers and coaches and go to an airport without a problem,” Mayorga said.
Deiferson Barreto, a secondyear infielder for the C’s, says his first year in Vancouver “was really hard,” particularly off the field.
“I only know hello, hi, and that’s it,” the 22-year-old Mexican said.
Now capable of carrying on an interview with a reporter without an interpreter, he says the classes helped make it easier to talk with coaches, fans at the park, and the family that hosts him during the Northwest League’s three-month season. He said he’s hoping to use his new-found skills to keep in touch with them when he returns home.