SAN DIEGO — I am tempted to ask Jaime Jarrín about the work. About what it’s like to narrate 162 baseball games on the radio at age 83. About how he decided not to cut back his schedule this year only when his wife, Blanca, passed away in spring training. Or about broadcasting the Thrilla in Manila, or the funeral of President John F. Kennedy, or 22 consecutive seasons of Dodgers baseball without missing a game. Jaime Jarrín has done all of these things.

At the moment, however, I am moved to ask about the Spanish vocabulary of baseball.

Imagine if Vin Scully had moved to Germany in 1955, and stayed for 60 years broadcasting soccer games in English to British expats. That’s essentially what Jarrín did. When he was 19 years old he left his native Ecuador for Los Angeles, knowing nothing about baseball.

When he joined the Dodgers’ nascent Spanish-language broadcast team in 1959, Jarrín had a lot to learn in a short amount of time. That included, not insignificantly, the terminology of a sport that was not invented by Spanish speakers.

Spanish-language baseball broadcasts predate Jarrín. Buck Canel, an Argentinian-born New Yorker, did the first World Series broadcast in Spanish for NBC in 1937. He was the first Spanish-speaking broadcaster to receive the Hall of Fame’s Ford C. Frick award in 1985.

Manny Mota, the pinch hitter-turned-coach who is three years younger than Jarrín, listened to broadcasts growing up in the Dominican Republic. With nothing but water standing between his native island and the surrounding Caribbean nations, Mota said he could hear games on the radio from Cuba and, on a clear night, Venezuela.

The Dodgers hired their first Spanish broadcast team when the franchise moved from Brooklyn to Los Angeles. René Cárdenas was the first to call games on the Spanish-language station KWKW in 1958. Járrin joined a year later. To prepare, he read books. He listened to Cardenas and Canel. He learned the vocabulary of baseball.

Now he’s teaching it to me.

Spanish is a relatively natural sidestep for an English speaker, slightly less intuitive than German but infinitely easier than my futile attempts at conversing with my wife’s family in Mandarin.

In Los Angeles, Spanish is ubiquitous. Telanovelas are less a guilty pleasure than an effective teaching tool for everyday words. Yet they are useless for picking up the peculiar vocabulary of baseball.

Enter Jarrín, who has opened my mind to many linguistic nuances that do not exist in baseball’s native tongue. His broadcasts contain four “anchor words” – strike, out, foul, safe – for which Spanish never developed its own equivalent. I can conjure an image of each of these things without the help of Google translate.

The rest is dicey.

“The outfield, we call the garden,” he said. “Los jardineros.”

Right field, center field, left field? Right gardener, center gardener, left gardener.

The umpire does not call a strike in Spanish. The preferred term is canta – to sing or to chant. Joe West would approve. Speaking of singers, there are many words that equate to “runs” in Spanish, but the preferred term is carreras. A team does not score its carreras; it enters (entra) them.

An inning is an episodio (episode). The act of catching a fly ball is captured by the word captura. The bases are not considered empty, but limpia (clean). That brown hill of dirt the pitcher stands on? It can be one of two things – la loma (the knoll), the preferred term of Fernando Valenzuela, or el monticulo (the mound), which Jarrín prefers. The Spanish broadcast is a passport to an entirely different baseball world.

It so happens that passport (pasaporte) is the term for a walk or a base on balls. To earn his pasaporte, the batter must take four bola malas (bad balls), a pointed value judgment for a usually genteel game.

In English, to “strike out” has meaning beyond baseball. You can strike out on a date, or at work, or on a test. The words have migrated beyond the game. Likewise, in Spanish, the word for strikeout (ponchado) did not migrate into the game from anywhere else in society. It can only migrate out, into my next novela.

The “home run” also migrated outward from baseball into American society. But this is not the case in Spanish. Jarrín’s preferred term is cuadrangular, something out of a geometry textbook. Others prefer jonron, a Spanglish-ized version of the original American term.

Related Articles Freeway Series Photos: Will Smith hits go-ahead blast as Dodgers defeat Angels

Dodgers hit five home runs, end Angels’ postseason bid with win

Dodgers’ Tony Gonsolin makes his pitch for postseason rotation spot

Walker Buehler passes test as Dodgers beat A’s to win another series

Dodgers prepare for postseason with quarantine time Marly Rivera, who broadcasts games for ESPN Deportes, said the “Spanglish” terms are more recent entries into baseball broadcasts. Maybe that’s why Jarrín so rarely uses them. For Rivera and her contemporaries, Jarrín is the dean of the business. Only the Dodgers and the Padres air 162 games on Spanish-language radio, and no one will call more games in a season than Jarrín, even after all these years.

“I shared a World Series booth with him at Fenway,” Rivera said. “I looked behind me and I had tears in my eyes. I’m sharing a booth with Jaime Jarrín, are you kidding me?”

The language that Jarrín uses to describe the game is pure, but it is not his own. It was handed down to him, as it was handed down to Canel, and even he isn’t sure why an outfielder is a gardener and a walk is a passport.

“Many, many, many years ago, especially some Cubans who came to play here in the United States, I’m sure they were the ones who started inventing the words,” Jarrín said. “Since I can remember, 1959, those are the words.”