There’s No Spanish in Baseball!
Well, in a Massachusett’s Little League game, anyway.
Ump’s language ban incites protest
Little Leaguers told to stop speaking Spanish on field
METHUEN, Mass. (AP) — Coaches on a Little League team filed a protest with the league after an umpire ordered the players to stop speaking Spanish during a state tournament game this week.
Coaches said the order demoralized the Methuen players and cost the team the game.
Call me cranky, but there is an advantage to calling out instructions in a language other than English. And maybe the Spanish speakers were demoralizing the other team. Granted, it could have been handled better, but hey. Excrement happens. It does need to be addressed officially now, but I’ll lay ya dollars to donuts it won’t.
“All I could hear was, ‘We cannot allow this,”‘ Mosher said. “At this point I was baffled why we could only speak English.”
Um, let me take a shot at this. Because we’re in America schmaybe?
August 1, 2005 3:13 pm 
Subscribe
Using a foreign language that no one understands is no different than using signs that no one understands.
Although my philosophy has always been that it doesn’t matter what your opponent knows you are going to do, as long as you execute correctly. For example, a player named Dave once missed the steal sign repeatedly. After about the 3rd time, Coach yelled “HEY DAVE! I WANT YOU TO STEAL ON THE NEXT PITCH.” And so he finally did so, successfully.
Using signs isn’t the same as yelling ‘go to second’. Signs have to be learned by everybody and they have to be executed by the coach AND understood by the player for them to work. It takes a bit of skill for people to give and take signs, so it’s a lot easier to say ‘I want you to bunt’ in Spanish than have the kid pick up the sign and actually do it. Probably very few teams in Mexico use English on the field.
Now, it’s one thing to go out on the field and talk one-on-one to the kid in Spanish. But while the game is being played, it’s an unfair advantage in American Little League, I think. Knowledge is power, especially if you have a skilled team. So where Dave kept goofing the signs, when the coach yelled, a better team should have picked him off. They were forewarned and bad on them. But, if he’d yelled in Spanish, the other team would have had no clue. That would have been a failsafe for their signs not working i.e., an unfair advantage.