He Announces Baseball Games in Spanish. It is Not His First Language.
Bill Kulik is a longtime Spanish language radio broadcaster for the Philadelphia Phillies. But listeners tuning in wouldnât always know that.
Instead of calling baseballâs championship by its Spanish name, âLa Serie Mundial,â he calls it the World Series. He recently described a playerâs up and down career as âa roller coasterâ instead of âuna montaña rusa,â the proper phrase in Spanish. And when saying something was quite funny, he said âbien funny.â
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.
Of the 16 teams â out of 30 in Major League Baseball â with some form of a Spanish language broadcast, the Philliesâ is unlike any other, largely because of Mr. Kulik.
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 fatherâs work with a chemical manufacturing company.
Many listeners cheer Mr. Kulikâs style. He is, after all, in his 19th season as a member of the Philliesâ 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.
Mr. Kulik â whose radio partner, Oscar Budejen, is a native Spanish speaker â makes mistakes in Spanish, stumbles over a pronunciation or sometimes makes literal interpretations that donât quite mean the same. He turns to English to better convey certain thoughts or facts.
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.
âThere is no way we are going to appease everybody,â Mr. Kulik, 61, said. âOscar 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 youâre going to like our broadcast because weâre going to be different.â
Of the six million people in the Philadelphia region, an estimated 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.
âEl Gringo speaks Spanish very well and at times when he uses English, I see it as normal since Iâm bilingual,â Yolanda Fernandez, who listens to Mr. Kulikâs broadcasts, told The New York Times. âIâm Puerto Rican. We speak Spanglish by nature.â
But another Phillies fan, Elvis Abreu, who is from the Dominican Republic, said Mr. Kulikâs Spanish has made him tune in less to his radio broadcasts.
âItâs bad,â he said. âIf youâre 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.â
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 âcuadrangularâ but many Spanish speakers say âjonrĂłn.â Left field is technically âjardĂn izquierdo,â but many still opt for the former. Mr. Kulik does all this, too, and more.
âThe light switch just turns on and off, and I generally just go with it,â he said.
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 cityâs growing Latino community.
In 2001, he established a broadcast company called the Spanish BĂ©isbol Network, initially thinking he would only serve as a producer, but eventually transitioning into an on-air role.
He earned his nickname in 2003, when he pointed out that Sammy Sosa, a Dominican and a star hitter for the Chicago Cubs, was cheating when he was caught using a corked bat. Thatâs when the other announcer, defending Mr. Sosa, jokingly called him Gringo Malo.
Two years later, Mr. Kulik moved to Philadelphia, where he now not only calls the games, but also buys the Spanish language radio rights from the Phillies and procures advertisers and airtime for all 162 regular-season games.
Over the years, Mr. Kulik said, he has leaned on his broadcast partners for help cleaning up his calls. âOscar comes in,â he said, and âgives the purest Spanish explanation of what just happened.â
Mr. Budejen, who is from Venezuela and joined Mr. Kulik in 2021, said both men understand and respect their roles. âThe objective is that itâs the Phillies in Spanish,ââ he said. âBut we use Spanglish because of the dynamic that exists in the group. And when itâs needed to do the translation, I translate. I have no problem with that.â
Robert Brooks, the Philliesâ manager of broadcasting since before Kulikâs arrival, said he used to get phone calls from people complaining about the way Mr. Kulik spoke Spanish. He would explain that it was Mr. Kulikâs idea to establish the Spanish radio network and there wouldnât be a Spanish broadcast without him.
âHeâs giving them what they want, even if itâs not the way they want it,â Mr. Brooks continued. âI appreciate the fact that he stumbles through it, and when youâre speaking Spanglish to Spanish speakers, every once in a while youâre going to get dinged and youâve got to be able to roll with that, and heâs good with it.â
Some listeners said they enjoyed Mr. Kulikâs broadcasts and his attempts to chronicle games in his less-than-perfect Spanish.
âI love that someone who has such difficulties speaking Spanish accepts the challenge to teach people about baseball speaking how he can,â said Gustavo Beitler, who listens from Uruguay and became a Phillies fan because of a cousin who lives in the United States. âFor him, it would be easier to broadcast a game just in English. So it takes effort to do this.ââ
Martin Altuve, a listener in Venezuela, said âit wasnât idealâ to use English or Spanglish on a Spanish language broadcast beyond baseball terminology but âitâs accepted.â
âHere in Venezuela, Iâm not speaking Spanglish where a lot of people donât speak English,â he said. âBut at the baseball level, and with friends who understand what Iâm saying, sure I use it. I say âleadoffâ and âcloser.ââ
Jose Tolentino, a Mexican and a former Spanish language broadcaster for the Los Angeles Angels, said a baseball program is entertainment, not an English or Spanish class.
âPeople want to be sitting down in their living room with a guy that knows the game,â he said. âIf Spanglish is your language, thereâs a market and thereâs a certain comfort. Yeah, some people arenât going to understand some parts and some people arenât going to understand the others.â
Mr. Tolentino continued, âIâm very proud that I speak very good Spanish. My dad would kill me if I didnât speak good Spanish. But baseball is American. You can say âjonrĂłnâ and âcuadrangular.ââ
On Tuesday, the Phillies will start postseason play, hoping to get further than last year, when they lost to the Houston Astros in the World Series.
Mr. Kulik will be there every step of the way, calling the âbĂ©isbolâ games.