BATTING PRACTICE

I’m one of those people who get asked “Why are you sitting there watching the TV without the sound on?” My answer is “I can’t stand listening to the chatter of the announcers. I want to watch the game.”

That’s part of the story. Lately I’ve been tuning out more people than just the gabby announcers. That’s because I find that quite a few folks on the screen talk too fast or too low for me to follow them very well and I’m better off if I just tune them out and use the Closed Caption facility to read the dialogue. I can still read Sometimes the CC comes up with words like “so shall list” for “socialist” and “fatter than a sneezing pullet” for “faster than a speeding bullet”, but that’s just due to the difficulty of writing words quickly enough to stay even with the speed of the actors speaking them, and usually corrections are made quickly.

As for the sports announcers, I don’t care what they say or what the captions say. I know they have to keep talking or their sponsors are likely to stop paying them, but I’m really not interested in hearing about how Pete Popout or Dave Dubbleplay is really a great guy who’s good to his mother and does a lot for charity that you don’t hear about because of all the unfortunate publicity about the barfights and speed tickets and other such distractions that seem to follow him around. They don’t represent the real man as his teammates know him, but obviously they’ve been preying on his mind and have a lot to do with his current 5-for-50 slump, during which he hasn‘t been able to get the ball out of the infield except for his fouls.

So much for the human side of the stars, about whose troubles the public knows so little and cares so much less. All they look at is the salaries these guys get without ever thinking of the secret sorrows behind the façade of the swaggering star with nothing on his mind beside his batting average, his little wife at home, and his little girl friend in her home. Even a star can have his happiness marred sometimes through these sources, causing him to resort to strange substances and exotic preparations to cope with his problems. He may even face a hostile stadium full of fans chanting “Steeroids!” as he comes to bat. At times like that he cannot be a happy camper.

Another aggravation a listener has to endure listening to baseball broadcasts is the massive destruction of the Spanish language by the announcers attempting to cope with names like Chavez, Santiago, Roman and all the rest now populating major league lineups. Spanish is pretty widely taught in our schools these days, being a popular choice where a foreign language elective is required since it’s the speech most closely related to English. The rules of pronunciation are simple enough but they seem to have been forgotten by the TV spielers, supposedly speech professionals. So we have “EScobar” for “EscoBAR”, “PaLLmero” for “PalmYERO” (“ll” equals “ly” as in “Amarillo”, “caballo”, etc., etc. We have silent “l’s” in English as in Jim “Pawmer”. He was never called “PaLLmer.”)

In basketball there’s a Mexican player named NaJERa, who keeps getting called NA-jera by the announcers, who appear to be quite proud of their mastery of Spanish. They should take lessons from Alex Trebek, the MC of “Jeopardy”. He has foreign words to pronounce on every show, but makes no mistakes with any of them because he takes the trouble to get them right. That’s professionalism.

Even Alec had to rise above principle the other night, though, and call “Notreh Dahm” University “Noter Dayme”, when introducing a contestant. The audience just wouldn’t have known what he was talking about otherwise. Some mistakes have been around so long they’ve driven out the correct pronunciations of the words involved and gotten themselves installed in their place. Even so I shudder a little every time I hear this one. I grew up with “Dayme” and it didn’t affect my growth at all, but when I found out about “Dahm”, it became impossible for me to accept “Dayme” any more. So I shudder. But I was born to suffer, I guess.

Life is like that when you’re a purist. People are continually making dumb mistakes and you can’t do anything about it. You just grin and bear it. You can’t write in to the newspapers and complain that their reporters are still saying some politician “chastised” his opponent for corruption or whatever when all he actually did was scold him or reprove him or maybe “castigate” him. Those words mean he was critical. “Chastise” means he beat him up. It’s in all the dictionaries. Nevertheless they persist in misusing it. I won’t even go into the misuse of “infer” for “imply.” It’s widespread. But if you protest these outrages in the letter columns of the newspapers, you will be classified as a nut case. There’s no justice.

Speaking of justice, there’s one real-life cop show that finishes every episode in a blaze of stupidity by informing the public that the skels seen being arrested thereon are “to be considered innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.” If that’s the case, what are the cops doing hauling them off to jail in handcuffs? If they’re not guilty, how can such things be? Oh, the cops are an exception, are they? They can presume them guilty, especially if they catch them red-handed. What about the judge they’re bringing them to? Yeah, he can do it too and hold them for the grand jury. So it’s all right for the jailors to lock them up inside the cells, is it? Yeah, that too. And yes, the district attorney can prosecute them even though they can’t be officially guilty or not guilty until there’s been a trial or a plea or a dismissal of the case.

So who is this TV message being addressed to then? Well, to the public at large. You mean they have to decide the case differently from all the people mentioned above? Or is it actually a fact that the Constitution requires the presumption of innocence but doesn’t tell us who’s bound by it? And since the people I’ve enumerated clearly aren’t bound by it, or no criminal would ever be arrested, why should the general public be so bound? Their opinions won’t decide the case, but…the opinions of the trial jury will. So by a process of elimination we arrive at the intent of the Constitution, namely that this jury, and only this jury, will give a defendant the benefit of the presumption of innocence and will try his case on that basis. Did I mention that I heard the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court enunciate this in 1969? Well, I did, but he didn’t mention anything about a defendant not having to take the stand in his own defense (yes, with the Fifth). Next case.






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