Actually, yes. Enough to know when a Dane is being cranky from a hodepine.
But seriously, I have a story about it.
When I was coaching my boy in Little League baseball a few years back, we lived in a town that had a large percentage of immigrants from the Dominican Republic. People from the D.R. absolutely are obsessed with baseball, so they are very intense about their children playing it, how they are coached, and particularly who coaches them.
Now I know baseball. I was raised on it almost as much as I was raised being Catholic. There's a lot of the same calisthenics in both (standing, kneeling, a lot of sitting, then standing and kneeling again, and so on).
Ok, so, my first 2 years coaching, when my son was 6 and 7, I was asked to he the assistant coach under two very well respected coaches who wete semi-pro baseball players from the D.R..
Sadly, our teams sucked, largely because the coaches took everything way too seriously for a bunch of little kids. I mean, we're talking about kids that had only recently learned about Santa Claus.
Anyway, by my third year, the league had no one to coach the Fall Ball team, so I volunteered to do it.
I made it fun. We had races around the bases at the end of every practice, with my fat ass chasing them around. And I taught all of the kids to juggle 3 baseballs, and each kid got a cool baseball nickname. We had the Big Hurt, and Charlie Hustle, The Natural, Nails, a boy named Q, The Doctor, Miss V (a fantastic girl on our team whose real name was Vanessa), Gentleman Mike, and several others. The kids loved their nicknames.
It's just a part of baseball.
So after a great fall season where we dominated all of the surrounding towns and won the championship, I was finally allowed to coach my own offical Little League Spring team.
Having known most of the kids for three seasons, I was able to draft almost all of them back onto my spring team.
Unfortunately, not a lot of the parents from the D.R. were very happy that their kids had an unknown white coach for the season that mattered, and they made that pretty clear to the league.
Nonetheless, we played on. And week after week, we slaughtered our oponents, going 15-1 throughout the season. We would have been undefeated, but the f'in umpire had to leave and called the game even though we were the home team, had our last licks coming up, were only down by 1, and I had my 4 best hitters coming up to hit.
Ok, so the Norwegian part.
While the season was going on, a lot of the coaches as well as the parents would shout instructions to the kids on the field in the D.R. dialect of Spanish. I speak enough Spanish to know what they were saying, but not all of the kids did, not even some of their own D.R. kids and certainly not the kids that weren't Hispanic. The kids would say to me that it was hard to understand everything being shouted out. Since it caused confusion on the field with the players, which is the last thing a coach needs when it comes to an intricate game like baseball, and young kids that are just learning to focus on a matter at hand, I asked them to tone it down.. I also asked my coaches to only speak a language that everyone understands together, which we agreed upon was English.
Well, the league found out, and there was a storm of accusations of racism against me. I defended myself by saying that parents can say whatever they want to their kids; it's none of my business, but since my coaches backed me up, the matter was dropped reluctantly.
I ended up having competing coaches and parents show up at my games, shouting lots of really bad things in Spanish during my games (in front of the children).
Undterred, we continued to have fun, and played on, going 8 and 0 in the first half of the season with most games ending by the 4th inning by the mercy rule.
One night after a practice, my son said that we should fight back by using our own language. Now I speak English, Spanish, a little German, and some Norwegian, so we decided thar we would learn baseball phrases in Norwegian whenever my son was on the mound pitching.
Things like throw high, or low, soft then hard, inside and out. Walk him, or don't lose him vs. waste a pitch when you are 0 and 2 on the count.
It was great. And all of the kids on my team wanted to know what we were saying, so we taught them little bits of Norwegian, and we all used it during practices and games. Norwegian was our team's secret.
By the end of the season, we crushed every other team, winning the league championship.
I had some parents from other teams coming up to me at the awards ceremony asking me to draft their kid the next year, and to teach them that magical baseball language that we used to win. Lol. Norwegian, the language of baseball.
Uffda.
Sadly, the more senior coaches (all from the D.R.) who were in charge of selecting the kids to go on to the county All Star games only selected 4 kids from my team (all whose parents were Domincan), but they snubbed my son who was by far the best pitcher on my team. It was a joke.
Looking back, it was a great time. My son quit baseball after being treated so badly, but moved on to rugby, then football, the Muay Thai.
If I were one of those old coaches, I would cross the street if they saw my son coming their way today.
Btw, my boy is going to have his first Muay Thai fight in a couple of months. I'm gonna have to learn figtin' phrases in Norwegian for him, I guess.
