Broadcasting Bloopers

The broadcast of a baseball game can, at times, be very annoying. I've written about this before. Sometimes the announcers share fascinating bits of information and talk about very interesting aspects of the game. Other times, they say ridiculous, boring, or totally outlandish things that drive the viewers (or maybe it's just me?) crazy.

So far, in the World Baseball Classic, I've been rather impressed with the announcers of the Dutch games. I mean, there have been some exaggerations - for example, an announcer saying that Eugene Kingsale or Sidney de Jong is a household name in the Netherlands. Most of the Dutch people I've met don't even know that the Dutch play professional baseball, let alone thenames of these players.

Really, though, I've learned a lot about the Dutch professional baseball league - the Hoofdklasse - from the commentary, the training camps in the Netherlands and the MLB organizations that have interests in the Netherlands Antilles, and about the multi-national backgrounds of various players and coaches on the national team (including as it does players from the Netherlands, the Netherlands Antilles, and people like Leon Boyd, who has dual Canadian-Dutch citizenship). I've even been impressed with the pronunciation of Dutch names.

Until Saturday's game against Venezuela. The announcers changed, and so did the quality - it sank, just a little. Previously, they had pronounced "Jansen" - and indeed, most Dutch names - the Dutch way. (In this case, "Yahnsun"). But on Saturday they went with what sounded like "Jantzen". The only exception was Sharlon Schoop, whose name has been pronounced more or less accurately, as "scope" - about as good as one can expect from an American broadcast, as the [ch] sound (the phoneme /x/, a voiceless velar fricative, for any fellow linguists out there) doesn't really exist in the English language.

But the highlight of this reel of broadcasting bloopers?

That came when one of the announcers referred to the Netherlands as a central European country.

The Netherlands has a sea coast. The Netherlands is in Western Europe, in both the geographical and socio-economical senses of the term. Do a quick google search for "central Europe", and you'll find a few images of maps, none of which include the Netherlands. Even the wikipedia article on the subject doesn't mention the Netherlands, except in one rather unrelated parenthetical note about a hundred-year-old military conquest.

Get with the program, guys. There are tons of people compiling background information for you. Maybe, since it's the World Baseball Classic, you should ask for a world map, too.