SF Giants manager Gabe Kapler criticizes MLB's Anglocentric umpiring
During his pregame availability prior to the SF Giants game against the Los Angeles Dodgers on Monday, Giants manager Gabe Kapler took a moment to discuss how players who are not native English speakers face a disadvantage with umpires. Kapler acknowledged that this has long been a problem in Major League Baseball but pointed to the implementation of the pitch clock and other new rules as only exacerbating the problem.
“Over the years, when you have an English-speaking umpire and a Spanish-speaking player, that Spanish-speaking player is going to be at a disadvantage," Kapler said. "Now you’re layering on brand new rules, and the language being spoken at the plate is English. I just don’t think that’s fair. I don’t think it’s good."
Kapler told reporters that the Giants coaching staff has told native Spanish speakers on the team to signal to the dugout if there's a situation where they do not understand what an umpire is telling them.
“Any native Spanish-speaking player that we have at the plate, right now, that’s Thairo, if there’s anything that Thairo doesn’t understand, he can call someone out and have that conversation together,” Kapler said. “Whether that’s Nick Ortiz or Pedro Guererro. I just think it’s important we have an even playing field and the disadvantage is pretty large.”
Centering the experience of English-speaking MLB players has been a bias prevalent throughout media coverage of the sport for years as well. In July of 2021, ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith faced significant criticism when he said that Angels star Shohei Ohtani, who is a native Japanese speaker, was “harming the game” by not speaking English.
Anglocentrism, the practice of centering English culture, has been a recurring struggle for Hispanic immigrants away from the baseball diamond throughout the history of the United States.
In 2003, University of Chicago law professor Juan F. Perea wrote about how Anglocentrism has often only allowed Hispanic musicians to garner crossover appeal in the United States once they begin singing in English and deemphasizing their Hispanic roots.
In more recent years, Republican politicians have openly ridiculed speaking Spanish in the United States despite over 53 million Spanish speakers residing in the country. During a presidential debate in 2015, former President Donald Trump said, "This is a country where we speak English, not Spanish."
In 2019, Republican member of the House of Representatives, Steve King, introduced the English Language Unity Act of 2019 with 27 Republican co-sponsors, which attempted to make English the only language allowed for citizenship testing. No vote was ever held for the bill.
Kapler’s comments get at a notable deviation between how MLB teams and the league itself have operated in recent years. As Latin America has become a larger source of MLB players, teams have prioritized hiring translators and bilingual coaches capable of speaking to Hispanic players in their native language. MLB, on the other hand, has failed to take the same steps with umpires.
There is no publicly available data on the number of MLB umpires who speak Spanish, but according to The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport (TIDES) 2022 MLB Racial and Gender Report Card, only 9.3% of MLB umpires are Hispanic compared to 28.5% of players and 31.9% of coaches.
As MLB commissioner Rob Manfred has prioritized speeding up the pace of play, implementing several new rules, the league has not taken any significant steps to make sure all players are able to communicate with umpires. On Monday afternoon, SF Giants manager Gabe Kapler highlighted that problem.
