Parlez-Vous Baseball?

Vance Cardell

"Is it better to hit the ball onto the green or onto the red?"

​The joys of teaching baseball to someone with whom you can't speak

My father-in-law is French. He is so French that he asks for bread at Mexican and Chinese restaurants. Even well into retirement, he wears a collared shirt every day. He says bon jour each time he hops on the bus -- including here in San Francisco.

Your humble narrator speaks French at a lower level than his 3-year-old nephew -- but with a more guttural vocabulary and crappier accent. So I knew it would be an interesting night out when I took my father in law to a match de baseball at AT&T Park Friday night. 

The first adjustment I'd have to make regarded my longstanding practice of sneaking vast quantities of beer into the stadium. You can't do those kinds of things in front of your newly minted French father-in-law. It makes a bad impression. I smuggled in red wine instead. 

My father-in-law asks many questions -- and he asks them in the rapid-fire diction of someone who can't conceive of how you couldn't understand his perfect French. I made sounds recreating French and "answered" every question until he said D'accord -- "okay," basically. I hope he understood what I was saying. I'm not sure I did.

Baseball is a difficult game to explain on the fly to a naif; translating it for someone with whom you share about 200 words is another experience entirely, however. Try communicating the concept of being "out," for example. There's really no translation for "out" in the baseball sense of the word. You can say "unsuccessful" or "gone" or "retired" -- but to someone who's never seen the game before, these terms don't mean much. In baseball, a man who belts a 400-foot screamer to the warning track is "out," while the guy who dribbles an excuse-me chopper down the third-base line has himself a "hit." The only way I could start to explain this was "C'est la vie."

D'accord.

Vance Cardell

Translating 'wild pitch' is harder than you'd think...

​Even where the pillars of language should have been of assistance, they failed me. During Friday's game, the Giants scored two runs on three Houston wild pitches. This was confusing -- as was my explanation. I thought I'd find the word "wild" in my pocket dictionary -- but the French equivalent is "sauvage." Not sure that's helpful. After a while, I resorted to saying "C'est un bon chose por l'orange" (Good thing for the orange) or "C'est mal por l'orange" (It's bad for the orange). By the way, I hate the Giants' orange uniforms («Je déteste les uniformes orange»).

Among the better questions I could understand was "Is it better to hit the ball onto the green or onto the red?" I did my best to explain that the best thing to do is to hit the ball where the defense isn't. Again, not sure that got through.

You know what did get through, though? We did. Apparently Friday was a "Crowd Control Night" according to park security. Our upper-deck tickets apparently didn't entitle us to march around the stadium and stroll the promenade. But as soon as they found out there was a French person involved -- well bon jour!

We filed out of the stadium after an 8-2 win full of red wine and salted peanuts. Not even an inexplicable half-hour Muni delay could take the shine off this victory. I was told that, in France, after even five minutes, passengers would shout, ask the driver to do something, raise hell. Here everyone sits passively by and listens to their music.

I could only nod my head at this. C'est la vie and d'accord.