The post-game interview with Pedro Martinez and Jose Ramirez was pretty great. Jose rarely sits for those, as it seems clear he is uncomfortable listening and speaking through his translator on a big stage. Jose was sitting there, with a bit of an uncomfortable smile, speaking through his translator.
Pedro Martinez eventually was overwhelmed with empathy and respect for Jose, almost like he thought “this man is a hero, he shouldn’t feel humiliated right now.” Pedro broke script and just started speaking to Jose in Spanish. Jose visibly exhaled and the two just talked. The audience, or most of it, couldn’t understand the language, but somehow the sentiment came through. It was actually a beautiful moment.
Pedro seems to have a genuine soft spot for the Guardians as a whole. I have noticed over the last decade whenever our team is in the playoffs and covered by TBS he always seems to be pulling for us, complimenting our players, etc.
Considering he was one of the Indians’ biggest adversaries in the 90’s, that is really cool to see.
So cool to hear about this moment he had with Jose!
For me 97 is the one that haunts me the most. That series should have never gone 7 and back then the team with the better record didn't automatically get home field advantage it went back and forth between leagues every year otherwise game 7 would have been at home.
All of us brother. Inwas born 91 so only have vague memories of the heartbreak in the 90s, just half remembered flashes of anger and despondency as my friend’s dads were so broken.
2007 was my first real anger at sports I ever had. Skinner not sending Lofton around 3rd is seared into my brain. I threw my crucifix I had been grasping as hard as I could at my pal’s TV in the moment and no one was even mad. We would have demolished the Rockies.
2016 did a number on me, I thought we were gonna be NBA and series champs so much….. i still say though, and I stick to this, I said for years and years if I only saw one single CLE championship that would be enough for me. And 2016 NBA was the best finals of all time, so I’m kind of living with house money now. Or I tell myself that at least….:
I want Josey to win won so bad though..:
I’ve been watching these games from Taiwan right now cheering my fucking ass off. The Taiwanese people I’ve been meeting have been pulling for us hard.
It might be a little reductive, but I can imagine the Taiwanese loving an underdog story dating back to the 1940s.
More likely it's just the infectious fun of being around fans of something. Having lived in Dayton for awhile, we adopted various "First Four" teams playing to get into the NCAA March Madness bracket. I'll always have a soft spot in my heart for Lamar. Not a random guy named Lamar, a university from Texas that actually has close to 18,000 students and lost to Vermont in a 2012 play-in game.
The 95 Series didn't really gut punch me like the other three you mentioned. I knew the Braves had dominant pitching and that one was gonna be tough. The 07 one was really frustrating because that was an almost guaranteed Championship.
'95 didn't hurt me. It sucked, sure, but I was brought up by my dad telling me a few things over and over, one of which was that good pitching beats good hitting every time. I knew what was coming and hoped for a couple fluke bad starts by one of Maddux, Glavine or Smoltz.
97? That shit still hurts. Literally. I put my stupid, young and angry man fist through a door after Renteria hit that and broke my hand. It hurts when it's cold. Not nearly as bad as that memory though.
Haha. I was 13 when that happened and I'll never forget that game. I'm still 50/50 on whether or not they would have beaten New York but they should not have lost to Boston up 2-0.
I was 12 and too young to really know any better but looking back at the ‘99 ALDS the final three games was total managerial malpractice by Grover. Every decision he made was not only wrong but they actively compounded creating issues for future games in the series too.
I was at that game in the bleachers. I have told the story so many times of how the stadium just deflated when Pedro came in. It seemed impossible to even get a hit off of him. And it was.
Yep, I remember that distinctly. I think a lot of other details of the game have faded with time for me (Bret Saberhagen was on the Red Sox and STARTED that game?? We let Nagy go out for the 4th inning even after having given up 7 runs already?? Etc.)
I wouldn't be surprised if this is true but I'd be careful about using statemuse. I've seen it get some pretty basic questions totally wrong in the past.
I think wherever it pulls data from is solid (I assume fangraphs or baseball reference) but the AI is a little shaky at interpreting things.
Sometimes it is spot-on though! A quick cross reference with fangraphs and baseball-reference seems to confirm that he did only have 16 games against Cleveland in his career.
Makes it even better when you learn we were about to acquire Pedro in 97 but the deal fell apart at the 11th hour because we refused to include Jaret fucking Wright. Granted, Bartolo who was the other player we were gonna ship out got us Grady Brandon Phillips and Cliff Lee but I think Pedro would’ve gotten us over the hump.
I've become impressed, he can speak about hitting and defense very insightfully and not just pitching, whereas some former pitchers aren't as great in that side of TV analysis.
This sounds like a made up story but I ran into Pedro at the security check in atlanta, and of course started cheesing with “are you Pedro Martinez”. After he confirmed, I talked about my love for the guards and my relationship with him in those golden years. He told me straight up that he was trying to get traded to Cleveland at the time but it was denied. Then we talked about Jose, the current guards team, etc. The dude talked to me for a solid whole terminal until a Sox fan started actually going full photo with him. Respect to the dude forever.
Genuinely was a joy to watch, Pedro has been softly pulling for us the entire playoffs it seems. Always blows my mind that not a lot of the national media pulls for the Guards. Longest drought in baseball, multiple heartbreaks, just seems like we would be a good story for them!
There might be a weird oversaturation with Cleveland sports relative to the size of the fan base and actual impact on the major sports leagues.
The Cavs are always solid, but the Lebron Drama has given us outsized exposure over the last 20 years despite only one Chip and him not playing for us a lot of those years.
The Browns are always in the news for being sad, pathetic, tragic, and signing Watson.
The Guardians are just solid, always good, no drama. The losses haven't been particularly tragic for the last 10 years. We can win 23 straight games, but it's not exciting to the world when they assume we'll lose to power-hitting megamillion darlings from NY, LA, Boston, or Chicago. We're always the bridesmaid, never the bride. We've been friend-zoned.
As someone who has hung out with Jose: he speaks excellent English he just does media in Spanish because he cares deeply about young Hispanic baseball fans feeling represented
Really? That’s cool to know. I wish we could hear him speak to fans in English too just to “get to know him” a bit more. But as long as he speaks a bit in English for his hall of fame induction, I can live with it haha. It’s unreal to have such a star athlete stay in Cleveland like he has decided to do. He is what LeBron was supposed to be. A hometown hero.
Also, I would be leery doing interviews in a second language when a lot of journalists are trying for a gotcha. Obviously plenty of foreign-born athletes get past that, but if your English is marginal, it could be an issue.
Love the reasoning that he's doing it for the Spanish speaking fans! Never heard that before but regardless I think it's pretty clear he doesn't need a translator. Just watch him when he's listening to the original question. He's always nodding in comprehension.
Obviously he speaks some English, but I haven’t seen any evidence that he’s super fluent or comfortable with it. I don’t really care, but I don’t think this “excellent English and he does it for representation” talking point is true, that’s all.
Last year in the playoffs he did a whole interview in English. Let me see if I can find it, I'll edit this if I do.
edit: here, embedded in this page. He speaks English, and if he wants to do his interviews in Swahili sign language, I support that glorious son of a bitch.
I just watched that interview, and I honestly don’t understand how somebody else could watch it and claim that he has a perfectly fluent command of the English language lol.
Yeah obviously as I’ve said I don’t really care! He loves Cleveland and is a good dude and an amazing baseball player; I love the man. But this strange (to me) narrative of the translator being a performative representation thing for him to just signal to Dominican baseball fans makes very little sense to me. It’s quite clear English is his second language.
I mean, agree to disagree. It’s fine English, and he speaks it better than I do Spanish, but it’s still halting and he’s clearly not super comfortable with more complex sentences and ideas in the English language.
And that’s all fine, I don’t really care. But it makes sense to me why he has a translator and it’s not just to be an inspiration to young Dominicans or whatever like people are saying here.
It's not his command of English that's halting, it's his personality. He isn't groping for words, he is just not a guy who enjoys talking about himself. He is just reserved.
Again, agree to disagree. I’ve seen Jose talking on TV dozens of times and it clearly seems to me to be a command of English. That seems obvious to me in that clip above, it’s not just him being reserved.
I don’t really get this line of thinking, would you say then that his translator is essentially a fake because he’s unnecessary and only there all the time to signal to Dominican fans about the importance of Spanish and representation? Makes little sense to me.
Personal experience aside I think it’s genuinely hilarious to think a guy who has lived in the US for the majority of the year for over a decade doesn’t speak English
I learned last night that Pedro is from a small city (Manoguayabo) about 35 miles away from where José was born (Baní), I bet that adds to his affection for our goat <3
breaking into Spanish at the end last night was a very sweet gesture from him!
I think that would explain a lot. I've observed, so I could be totally wrong here, that Jose isn't particularly chummy with a lot of the big DR stars in MLB (Tatis, Soto, Machado, Vladdy) and much prefers the small-town life he grew up with over the limelight. Pedro's ability to relate with Jose really explains the soft spot he appears to have for Jose.
Anyone happen to have a link to this? I must have missed it.
Pedro pissed me off after game 3 of the ALDS because it sounded like he was literally begging the White Sox to finish the series in game 4, but now I'm thinking it may have been a language barrier thing and it came off the wrong way because he's been very complimentary outside of that.
It is and honestly it doesn’t make sense to me to have two native Spanish speakers speaking in their second language. One thing I’ve learned is no matter how fluent in the second language someone is - it will always be easier and more comfortable in the first, if the first language is mutual.
Yeah. I mean he’s not wrong. Those teams had 100 wins.. nobody is going to take the guardians seriously as contenders unless they win the whole damn thing.
It's not wrong. Just a strange omission. And no American League team won 100 games this season. Not to mention Tampa and Milwaukee have never won it all.
Ah my bad. Thats true - they just both won their divisions pretty handily (obviously Rays less so). Who knows.. I don’t have much against Pedro the broadcaster. As a player on the other hand…
I remember that too but I took it as "for the sake of the White Sox, I hope it doesn't return to Cleveland" not outright rooting against us. Plus I think that the White Sox did have the best storyline going into the postseason. If I wasn't a Guardians fan I would've been rooting for them all the way too - that was an incredible turnaround. But on the same token the story it all still had to culminate in the ALDS and go down like it did.
It felt weird that we were in a position of "old Guard in the way of the young upstarts" when the white sox were the only team that could possibly give us that role, in comparison.
John Hart did an incredible job building that team and then a dogshit job keeping it going. (I just watched Albert Belle on a podcast make a compelling argument that he wanted to stay and left because Hart was a dickhead in negotiations.)
Thank you for highlighting this moment! It was very cool to watch live, the respect Pedro showed to Jose. And it was cool of the broadcaster to let it happen. No one interrupted. No one looked uncomfortable. It felt right, especially considering we kicked off this season with the WBC. Baseball is for everyone.
Pedro loves Jose and you can tell there’s a lot of mutual respect there. Jose speaks decent enough English but yes he is still uncomfortable with it. He also does interviews in Spanish for his fans and family back home which just adds another reason why Jose is so cool to me
Oh my gosh, YES! We were watching and thought it was ridiculous that Pedro had to speak English so it could be translated to Spanish to Jose to get a Spanish answer translated back to English 🙄 like just let them speak Spanish and give us the fun details translated after. I'm glad Pedro switched almost immediately. I don't usually care for the national commentators, but Pedro seems like the nicest guy on that whole crew.
The last thing Pedro said to him (from my wife’s very loose recollection of her Spanish classes in college), he said that the “City of Cleveland and its fans love you too” or something like that.
Pedro is easily the best studio analyst going right now. He understands the game at a deep level, can communicate to the casual and diehard at the same time, and is wildly entertaining/engaging.
I hate Pedro Martinez, but its purely because he was a thorn in the side of cleveland for so long....but yeah just to see him getting wrapped up in Jose was a fun watch and a ton of respect for Pedro be a really good addition to the panel, doesnt ever really feel like he's just trying to be an mlb shock jock, just doing his job and being pretty good at it.
I’d so much rather listen to Pedro brake down pitching and the modern day state of the game than I would Smoltz which is crazy because both are from the both area and see the current game completely differently
Pedro is really good at mixing his experiences in with his analysis. He’ll talk about how he used to hold the ball for a certain pitch and when he liked to use it.
He’s highly analytical AND passionate about the game.
I would buy him all the beers he wants just to hear him talk about baseball.
I would also do that for Tito and Buck Showalter, despite being a Yankee
In response to Jose saying Cleveland is everything to him and he loves Cleveland Pedro said "and Cleveland loves you and respects you, and we, all hispanics and everyone here, also love you." Jose says "amen amen thank you very much" Pedro says "anytime".
Thank you for posting this. I noticed that as well and saw the other announcers looked like a combination of dumbfounded it was happening and not understanding what they were saying.
I also felt like Pedro felt awkward asking Jose the first question in English and needing to go through the translator and was really impressed. Pedro broke script.
Who's that bowtie bastard who sits in the dugout and asks dumb questions to the players and staff midgame?
I remember he did an interview with jose in English and I just remember being pissed that he forced Jose to do that. People said he chose to do it etc. But jose seemed uncomfortable. Just let the guy speak spanish.
I remember reading an article in Baseball America, or listening to an insider talk on the radio, and after the World Series to the Marlins, the Indians were so close to acquiring Pedro at the winter meetings. Pedro was coming up on free agency and the Expos were going bankrupt so they had to trade him. The Expos were holding out for a deal involving Jarrett Wright. The Indians were offering something like Bartolo Colon, Brian Giles, and Rickie Sexson, but Jarret Wright was just coming off the dominate playoffs, and the Expos demanded him, to the point the article said they offered Pedro for Wright, almost straight up. The Indians said no because, in their defense, Wright looked like the next big thing. They then traded him to the Red Sox.
The Indians unwillingness to include Jarrett Wright is what prevented Pedro from coming to Cleveland and that always haunted me haha. Who knows if it’s true or not, but he was so good and would have been awesome to watch pitch for the Guardians even for a year or two.
I saw this last night and thought it was silly that two native Spanish speakers were using their 2nd language and a translator for the convo. Was glad when Pedro threw the script out and switched to Spanish, made for an even better post game interview, even though I couldn't understand most of it.
I am glad you posted this. Was a very cool moment, I was very impressed with Pedro and he definitely made Jose smile when he did that. Glad I saw it live.
Bro. I've seen a couple Spanish speaking interviews and Jose is a MUCH different cat in his native language. He talks a lot and is extremely personable.
They need to find a better way then a translator for these situations. So old fashioned.
Counterpoint : Pedro Martinez can get bent. He and TNT started off ALDS game 5 with highlights of him striking out Indians last time we met in the playoffs. Just like when the Browns to anything positive, some hack has to show highlights of The Drive. I mean why not show the river on fire while you're at it? His speaking Spanish there was entirely performative. I'm on an English broadcast, I speak English and so does Jose, but instead I'm going to make sure everyone knows I'm special. A Stephen A Smith moment for sure.
I love Jose and he's a treasure to the city and not to be that guy but Jose has been here like over a decade and he can't learn enough elementary school English to pass an interview about a baseball game? You'd think he'd just pick up enough by now from being around it with zero effort on his part. I mean media interviews are a major party of his hundred million dollar contract.
Still tear down the Thome statue and put up Jose to tomorrow. It just blows my mind with some of these guys. Japanese players are the worst offenders.
He does speak English well enough, and he absolutely understands the questions asked to him in English, he is just more comfortable in his native language, especially when on a national TV spotlight.
the others have jumped on you (rightfully imo) so I won't rehash their points, but another reason he does his interviews in Spanish that a lot of people don't consider is so his loved ones and all his fans in the DR and other Spanish-speaking countries can understand him! I'd much rather him always use a translator, even if his English is perfect, if it means he can also speak to those who don't know English as well
Everything these athletes and coaches say becomes a sound bite for the 24-hour media cycle. Why would anyone do an interview in their second language when they don’t need to? Most of the world doesn’t speak English. Get over yourself.
NO reason that Jose, or another player, HAS to learn English, which is why teams employ translators. Non-English as a first language speakers may not always quite understand various says and idioms that we use, but can be better conveyed by someone who speaks both.
Hell, some languages have words that mean different things just based on the inflection used, you know bro, like those oh so evil Japanese players. Like how if I say, "you're such a dick" can be taken differently based on the tone in my voice at the time. 😁
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u/No-Campaign-1734 1d ago
Pedro seems to have a genuine soft spot for the Guardians as a whole. I have noticed over the last decade whenever our team is in the playoffs and covered by TBS he always seems to be pulling for us, complimenting our players, etc.
Considering he was one of the Indians’ biggest adversaries in the 90’s, that is really cool to see.
So cool to hear about this moment he had with Jose!