I was flipping back and forth between the two LA baseball games late last night, the Dodgers at the Giants and the Angels hosting the A’s, and the most striking difference (apart from the fact that the Dodgers lost and the Angels won) was the difference in quality between the broadcasters. The Dodgers game had Vin Scully and the Angels had, well I don’t know who they had because they were a distinctly unmemorable typical broadcast combination. One announcer, one colour guy who played with the team some time ago. So naturally I spent more time listening to, and occasionally watching, the Dodgers-Giants. And I was struck by this line of Scully’s, which I’m not sure I can accurately capture in text. (The camera at the time is focussed on Felipe Alou, the Giants manager.)

Felipe Alou. That’s his name in the United States. But it’s not his name in the Dominican Republic. There he’s called Felipe Al-OH.

Obviously Scully didn’t spell out the two different ‘names’, just used the two different pronunciations. My impression is that Felipe’s name is spelled the same way in both countries, it’s just a pronunciation difference. I was struck by a couple of things about the line. First, it is interesting how easy it is to do something almost akin to mixing use and mention in the first four words here. The ‘that’ has to refer to the words just used, individuated as it turns out phonetically not lexically. The ‘his’ is, I think, anaphoric on those very words. Secondly, despite how natural the line sounded at first, it’s moderately difficult I think to come up with a theory of naming on which what Scully said is true. It just isn’t true, I think, that names are individuated phonetically.

Anyway, that was more interesting than the anonymous Angels broadcasters. The most interesting line there came from the anonymous colour guy talking about Terry Francona, who is now the A’s bench coach, but apparently was the colour guy’s manager in Philadephia.

I respect him a lot for treating me like a smart player when I wasn’t.

Not a theory of respect you’ll see in many philosophical contexts I’d bet. Finally, for those of you who think that moving sporting teams provide more interesting identity puzzles than brain swaps etc, what should we make of this sentence.

With a win Sunday, Kansas City would be the first team since the 1987 Milwaukee Brewers to open 10-0. In any case, the Royals are the AL’s first 9-0 team since the 1984 Detroit Tigers.

Ignore the wild improbability of the Royals being 9-0. (At what point does one’s prior probability that every news organisation is lying to me become higher than my prior probability that the Royals will be n-0 for n>0?) What to make of the second sentence? In a sense it is true: no team now in the AL has opened 10-0 since 1984. But when the Brewers opened 10-0 in 1987, they played in the AL. (They moved to the NL in 1998.) So in 1987 an AL team opened 10-0, but no AL team has opened 10-0 since 1984. I can see a way to get the scope of the tense operators to work so that this is true, but it isn’t how English works is it?