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Bill Kulik is a longtime Spanish language radio broadcaster for the Philadelphia Phillies. But listeners tuning in wouldn\u2019t always know that.<\/p>\n
Instead of calling baseball\u2019s championship by its Spanish name, \u201cLa Serie Mundial,\u201d he calls it the World Series. He recently described a player\u2019s up and down career as \u201ca roller coaster\u201d instead of \u201cuna monta\u00f1a rusa,\u201d the proper phrase in Spanish. And when saying something was quite funny, he said \u201cbien funny.\u201d<\/p>\n
This is the distinctive linguistic world of Mr. Kulik, a broadcaster nicknamed El Gringo Malo (The Bad Gringo), whose on-air persona is irreverent and even silly. Though most of what Mr. Kulik says in front of a microphone is in Spanish, he sprinkles in generous doses of English and Spanglish, a blending of the two languages.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Of the 16 teams<\/a> \u2014 out of 30 in Major League Baseball \u2014 with some form of a Spanish language broadcast, the Phillies\u2019 is unlike any other, largely because of Mr. Kulik.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n He was born in New Jersey, and took only one Spanish class, in high school, he said, but first learned the language while spending nine childhood years in Colombia and Argentina, where his family lived because of his father\u2019s work with a chemical manufacturing company.<\/p>\n Many listeners cheer Mr. Kulik\u2019s style. He is, after all, in his 19th season as a member of the Phillies\u2019 Spanish broadcasting team. But his twist has irritated some Spanish speakers and raised questions about language and culture in a country with roughly 63 million Latinos.<\/p>\n Mr. Kulik \u2014 whose radio partner, Oscar Budejen, is a native Spanish speaker \u2014 makes mistakes in Spanish, stumbles over a pronunciation or sometimes makes literal interpretations that don\u2019t quite mean the same. He turns to English to better convey certain thoughts or facts.<\/p>\n He deliberately uses Spanglish, he said, in part to better connect with the many Puerto Ricans in the Philadelphia area and with newer generations of Latinos in the United States who have grown up speaking both languages.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cThere is no way we are going to appease everybody,\u201d Mr. Kulik, 61, said. \u201cOscar is going to give you more of the old school and the Gringo Malo is going to bring you the new school. And hopefully in between you\u2019re going to like our broadcast because we\u2019re going to be different.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Of the six million people in the Philadelphia region, an estimated<\/a> 11 percent are Latino, with Puerto Ricans representing the largest group. As the number of Latinos in the United States has soared, the percentage of Latinos age 5 and older who speak English proficiently at home has also grown, while the percentage who speak Spanish at home has declined, according to the Pew Research Center<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cEl Gringo speaks Spanish very well and at times when he uses English, I see it as normal since I\u2019m bilingual,\u201d Yolanda Fernandez, who listens to Mr. Kulik\u2019s broadcasts, told The New York Times. \u201cI\u2019m Puerto Rican. We speak Spanglish by nature.\u201d<\/p>\n But another Phillies fan, Elvis Abreu, who is from the Dominican Republic, said Mr. Kulik\u2019s Spanish has made him tune in less to his radio broadcasts.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cIt\u2019s bad,\u201d he said. \u201cIf you\u2019re broadcasting a baseball game for a Hispanic community, you have to bring the message to the people very clearly about the plays and the game in Spanish because the channel is obviously in Spanish.\u201d<\/p>\n Because baseball was popularized in the United States and then spread to Latin America, several terms used in Spanish are borrowed from English. A home run, for example, is formally a \u201ccuadrangular\u201d but many Spanish speakers say \u201cjonr\u00f3n.\u201d Left field is technically \u201cjard\u00edn izquierdo,\u201d but many still opt for the former. Mr. Kulik does all this, too, and more.<\/p>\n \u201cThe light switch just turns on and off, and I generally just go with it,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Mr. Kulik has been going with it for decades. After many years in Boston working in marketing, cable television and producing a local baseball show in English, he pitched the Red Sox on a Spanish language radio broadcast to appeal to the city\u2019s growing Latino community.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n