No. 286: CHICO ESCUELA & ME: I made my first appearance on sports-talk radio at a serious disadvantage & the host ambushing me was the least of it.

I wasn't working in my first language. Or even in my second.

You laugh at Garrett Morris’s Chico Escuela but he speaks to me.

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On Friday I relived my relatively disastrous debut on Canadian radio back in the early 90s when I was out on an abbreviated book tour, one that was abbreviated by my publisher declaring bankruptcy. Check out: No. 285: CBC, MORNINGSIDE & THE CRTC: How I narrowly averted scandal & ridicule with my Canadian radio debut

You might have picked up a slightly awkward bit of phrasing above or on your pass through Friday’s story or a parsing of the opening sentence here. “Why does he call it his ‘Canadian’ debut?” you’d ask. You’d be making a no great leap in presuming that a young-ish Toronto-based freelance sportswriter would have had no occasion to be on radio beyond his backyard—if you knew me at all, you’d have made the jump. A voice made for print.

Fact is, I made my debut on sports-talk radio talking in a language other than English. Not that I signed up for it. Not that I had a choice.

This goes back a year before my appearance on Morningside in a useless attempt to pump sales of The Only Ticket off the Island, my star-crossed book about baseball in the Dominican Republic. In fact, the story goes back to my time in the D.R. when I was researching the book.

I’ve written on this SubStack about antic times in the Dominican. It’ll be well worth your time to have a read of my week with the wannabes in a Dominican fantasy league, playing alongside Tony Fernandez, Damaso Garcia and assorted stars. The whole mess became a chapter of the Audible Original that gave this SubStack its name. Check out: No. 45: TONY FERNANDEZ, DAMASO GARCIA, JOHN MAYBERRY & RAMBO / Which one doesn't belong? The last one in line, the one who put fantasy into the Dominican fantasy camp.

(You’ll need at least a trial subscription to access the deep-archive stories.)

Some things went right when it came to writing The Only Ticket and I might be able to bear reading it if I tried, but the Globe and Mail was too generous. Jack Batten, a featurist I had worshipped as a schoolboy, wrote: “Joyce spent three months in the Dominican, a stay that, judging from his brushes with crime, the climate, the roads and other perils, ought to win him a medal for journalistic valor. He spoke enough Spanish and showed enough chutzpah to get himself into situations that yielded a terrific range of anecdotes, observations and inside stuff. By "inside," I mean inside baseball and inside island life.”

Fact is, The Only Ticket should have been a much better book—maybe the biggest do-over of my career. I would love to time-travel. back and write it all over again. I left all kinds of story on the table. I look at this trailer for a Spanish-language documentary about baseball in the DR and wonder what might have been.

As Jack Batten pointed out in the review, I wound up spending three months in the D.R., but time wasn’t my only luxury. I had unfettered access, a free pass to come and go at the stadiums and in the clubhouses across the Dominican winter league. I was surrounded by my principals—I stayed at pretty swank hotel in Santo Domingo with all the import major leaguers and visiting MLB execs. I could do interviews in the line-up at the breakfast buffet and by the pool.

While every MLB team has a player-development operation in the D.R. these days, only the Dodgers and the Blue Jays had complexes back in the late 80s and early 90s. The Dodgers’ head man Ralf Avila gave me a hall pass, but their complex was a bit of a shlep out of town. I spent far more time with the Jays’ honcho Epifano Guerrero, a.k.a. Epy—I tagged along with him to games and tryouts as well as sitting with him, watching the prospects at the camp that he had cut out of the bush a half hour north of the capital. (I’ve written about Epy on this SubStack previously. Check out: No. 88: EPY GUERRERO / When the baseball scout came in off the road. It was as if Epy could see the future so many times, yet he never saw his own end coming.

Media just doesn’t get that sort of access anymore. I just had no idea what to do with it. Sigh.

Mine was a dawn-to-midnight immersion in the Dominican game—the day at the Dodgers or Blue Jays complex, the night at winter-league games, which featured MLB all-stars, prospects in the pipeline and journeymen. Because of the tropical conditions, the winter league didn’t schedule day games. While I went to the ballparks in San Pedro de Macoris, La Romana, San Cristobal and Santiago, I spent most nights at Estadio Quisqueya, the ballpark shared by the two Santo Domingo teams, Los Tigres del Licey and Los Leones del Escogido. ¹

And for the games in the capital, I’d arrive at the stadium when the crew were rolling out the netting for batting practice and I’d take a seat in the dugout, usually Licey’s. I made myself a fixture on the scene, made small talk with everybody, players, coaches, crew, the works.

This was all very early in my career, mind you—I hadn’t worked spring training or even had a press credential to an NHL game, so I just had no idea how sweet and unlikely this arrangement was. On the flip side, the presence for MLB All-Stars notwithstanding, the Dominican winter league wasn’t at all accustomed to the presence of gringos like myself. The ballyards weren’t tourist destinations—if you were from away, you were assumed to be working for MLB and belonging there. I never had to show a pass—a good thing because I never had one issued. I just walked through the turnstiles, right into the clubhouse and onto the field. The only time I was ever pressed was by the clerk at the front desk of the Hotel Santo Domingo, a four-star hotel where all the imports stay—I dropped the name of the Licey GM and I was thrown on the team’s guest list at the Dominican league’s rate $14 US a night, about one-fifth the usual charge for the full duration of my stay.

I spent no less than 12 hours a day immersed in baseball, putting in a 9-to-4 shift at one of the baseball complexes or chasing this story or that (e.g., an interview with an ancient veteran of the Negro Leagues or with MLB alums like Rico Carty or Juan Marichal) and then, after a quick bite, heading to the Santo Domingo ballpark. Some days would stretch longer if I was heading out to San Pedro de Macoris, which at the time was the hometown of six MLB shortstops or piggybacking with Epi on a scouting trip, rubber-necking at an age-group tournament or a tryout out in the boonies. My immersion was even more extended than it sounds—every morning I’d be in the line-up at the breakfast buffet with the American MLBers staying at the hotel or sometimes I’d squeeze in a trip to the gym with Doug Jennings, an outfielder who came to the winter league fresh off a rookie season with the Oakland A’s.

Estadio Quisqueya was my anchor, though. One of my favourite timewasters during batting practice was watching the host of the Santo Domingo radio broadcast flag ballplayers, managers and coaches for live interviews on his pre-game show. This was a two-hour exercise in improv. Nothing was arranged and scheduled, mind you. That would have fallen to a producer, and this was strictly a solo act—the host didn’t even have a techie working the sound levels. I have no idea how the host would know if the crew back at the station was getting his feed. I presume it was simply an article of faith.

(Also contributing to the impromptu aspect was the pervasive lag time in Dominican life, a casual and even ambivalent attitude towards scheduling. But for the games’ starting times, the baseball world in the D.R, operated on Dominican Time, e.g., a 5:30 p.m. meeting on Monday might wind up being 6, 6:30 or after the game and if not Monday, then Tuesday or the next-time-I-see-you if it happens at all. If a meeting is booked for 5:30, you can have a relative degree of confidence that it can happen, but something approaching metaphysical certainty that it won’t happen at 5:30. As for people actually arriving early, sorry, wrong island. Oh, and while I did offer the schedule of games as an exception to Dominican time, I should note that my book used as its framework a game that was delayed by a power outage. Another game that season in the D.R. was delayed when a team bus got stuck in traffic.)

This wasn’t a wireless mic he was working with, mind you. If the technology was available elsewhere it hadn’t made it to the D.R. or at least was beyond the means of the Santo Domingo station. The host’s mic was hooked up to 100 feet of cord that stretched back to the Licey clubhouse, where it was coupled to phone line. I’m sure there were other extension cords involved. The radio feed was more precarious than listeners could ever know—if a batboy tripped over the cord in the dugout, the host with the mic out at the cage would have no idea that it was dead air.

I had seen the host at every game at Estadio Quisqueya and only ever exchanged a polite hola with him—I never caught his name nor the radio station that he was working for. I presumed he didn’t speak English—if he did, my unofficial guide on my trips to the D.R. back in those days, a reporter named Roosevelt Comarazamy, would have introduced us.

I was minding my own business around the batting cage, trying to figure out which ballplayer or coach I might tap next for an interview, when I felt a hand grip me on the shoulder. I was caught off guard and before I knew it that grip tightened like Mr Spock’s Vulcan squeeze and spun me 180 degrees, knocking me off balance. I had no idea who had put his grip on me, but I assumed that it was a master of akido or ju jitsu. When I regained my balance, but before I got my bearings, this unknown assailant was thrusting what I thought was a gun three inches from my face. When the world came into sharper view, I realized that this wasn’t a gun, but in fact a microphone with a bulbous sock on it, the weapon of choice for the radio host who kept his clamp on my shoulder to make sure I couldn’t get away.

My ear for Spanish isn’t great—I can sort out the drift of stuff more easily reading it on the page than pick up words spoken in conversation. Some folks I can’t make a word—Campusano was one that I couldn’t understand at all. Others I can dial in if they go slowly enough. Por favor, poco mas despacio was my fallback, “Please, a little more slow.” The radio host I could pick up most of what he was saying—I got the part about who-I-was and what-I-was-doing here.

So, I went for it. I’d only been on radio at Ryerson a couple of times, reading about five minutes of news on the campus station, which I don’t count as real radio. I was making my sports-talk radio debut in my third language.

“Soy periodista canadiense. Me llamo Gare Joyce. Trabajo por las revisitas in Toronto. Escribo un libro sobre el béisbol en la República Dominicana. Paso la temporada con los equipos de la liga invernal y hablo con los jóvenes a los complejos de los Azulejos y los Dodgers, los peleteros de la futura.”

Something along the lines of, ahem, “I’m a Canadian journalist. My name is Gare Joyce. I work for magazines in Toronto. I’m writing a book about baseball in the Dominican Republic. I’m spending the season with the teams in the winter league and talking with young prospects at the complexes of the Blue Jays and the Dodgers, the ballplayers of the future.”

That I got through it spurred confidence. I mangled the pronunciation of canadiense—I had a habit of dropping the second N. And I stuck to the present tense throughout, because the past and future and all the variations were never my strong suit in Spanish class and that was 15 years before. And my delivery would have been painfully deliberate, comically so—I always prefaced conversation my conversations with an apology, hablo claro pero despacio (I speak clear but slow). To the listeners in the D.R., I would have sounded somewhere between Garrett Morris’s Chico Escuelo from SNL’s original News Update and Bill Dana, famous as the Latino astronaut Jose Jimenez of the Ed Sullivan Show.

When he asked me about the Jays—I vaguely got the drift of the question—I went right to the player who gave me a ride home from the ballpark my first night at the ballpark when I couldn’t flag a cab, Tony Fernandez.

“Hablo con Epi Guerrero de su historia de Tony Fernandez. De todos los peletoreros de San Pedro de Macoris penso Cabeza esta la primero var a Cooperstown et cetera …”

Translation: I talk with Epi Guerrero about his story with Tony Fernandez. Of all the ballplayers from San Pedro de Macoris, I think he is the first who goes to Cooperstown etc …

Again, as you’ll note, all present tense, which only contributed to the askew syntax. I knew that in real time, but still, I thought I was getting my meaning across.

I managed to get through a couple more questions and was feeling pretty proud of myself, like this was something that I could use to. Not that I’d be selling any of my books in this market—promoting The Only Ticket off the Island to Dominican readers would be like a weatherman from Miami writing a treatise about snow and flogging it to an Inuit bookclub at the Iqaluit Chapters. Still, I allowed myself to imagine that I could maybe do a regular spot on this radio show, that it might get my name out there and maybe grease the wheels, making introductions to scouts and agents easier. You’re the guy with the bad Spanish on the radio.

At that point, heading into a fateful fifth question, I noticed a couple of ballplayers making eye contact with the radio host and giving him looks that delivered the message—who’s this gringo think he is? That was all the urging radio host needed to mess with me. So what would be the final question came as a torrent of words, hundreds of them, in a matter of 30 seconds. I could see the ballplayers had gamed this out and were laughing their asses off as the look of terror creased my face—yeah, now I know how it felt for them when they were roped into English-language interviews outside their comfort zone.

I had but two words to answer his question, which I couldn’t make heads nor tails of.

“Debo var.”

Translation: I gotta go.

Me llamo Chico Escuela!

1. I was only in Santiago once and never made it to San Francisco de Macoris.