I’m not saying that I agree with the ump (because I don’t), but I do disagree with your analogy. The analogy should not be “an American team faced a ‘no-English ruling’ anywhere else in the world.” It should be “a Spanish team faced a ‘no-English ruling’ in Spain.” The wordking my be subtle, but the underlying idea is very different.

That should be “wording” and not “wordking.”

Did they play any S.O.D. at this tournament?

Hmm. Good point. Although it doesn’t change the feeling that it was a stupid decision to me.

As for whether they were playing Speak English or Die, well, we have only our speculation…

There is something very frustrating about being a mono-lingual indidivdual in the presence of bilingual people who choose to speak the langugae I do not understand. This happens with Spanish, Tagolog, Chinese, Korean, and Russian speaking people in my area. I don’t mean when I’m standing on the sidewalk and hear a different language; although sometimes I really would like to know what they’re talking about, but that’s just because I’m nosey. I mean in situations where you’re buying something at a store or restaurant and employees stand right in front of you carrying on separate conversations in a foreign language. It’s rude. Don’t get me started on the nurses speaking Tagolog. It’s sort of important to know what’s going on around you when you’re in a doctor’s offcie of hospital.

This baseball thing? I’m not sure where I stand. However, when I was a boy and played soccer the Mexican kids all communicated with each other in Spanish and the fair-haired honkies just sort of stood there like idiots so my emotional response is to side with the umpire. (Btw, I eventually figured out what “pasela!” meant.)

Being around people speaking something other than English has never bothered me, nor does the idea that people might speak another language in the middle of a game. That, to me, doesn’t even seem that far from using code words to describe plays or hiding hand signals to communicate. That’s just being sure that the opponent doesn’t have the advantage of knowing precisely what you’re telling each other to do on the field.

It is important to be able to communicate in emergency situations (which is probably why I’m still an official English kind of guy), but shouting plays to your players on the baseball field doesn’t qualify in my mind.