George Lopez Salutes Dodgers’ Spanish Voice Jaime Jarrín
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George Lopez is one of the industry’s most well-known comedians and a life-long Los Angeles Dodgers fan. Here he pays tribute to Jaime Jarrín, the Spanish-language voice of Dodger baseball who will retire next month after 64 seasons with the team. Lopez’s latest TV comedy series, “Lopez vs. Lopez,” premieres Nov. 4 on NBC.
I’ll never forget my first visit to Dodger Stadium.
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It was a Friday afternoon. It was 1966 or ’67, I was about 6 or 7, playing baseball in the street in San Fernando with my friends. All of a sudden, I look up and there’s grandparents coming down the street
in my grandfather’s big, gray Pontiac Bonneville.
“Get in,” my grandfather Refugio said as he pulled up next to me. As a kid, my first thought was “Uh-oh, what did I do?”
My grandfather and grandmother Benita didn’t say much as we got on the 5 freeway and drove up to Los Angeles and Elysian Park. As we turned a corner, there it was: Dodger Stadium. It was the biggest thing I’d ever seen in my life, and this was the most unexpected experience of my life at that time.
This was the day that Jaime Jarrín became part of the family forever. After we got our tickets, we found our seats, sat down and I could hear that everyone in the stadium was listening to the game on transistor radios, and they were listening to the voices of Vin Scully and Jaime Jarrín.
My grandparents didn’t speak English well. Jaime Jarrín was your eyes and ears of a sport when you didn’t speak the language. He allowed you to understand it, he would tell you what he saw on the field and make you feel like you were there.
To be there as a child, to have my eyes opened the widest they’d ever been and to have that feeling be accessible to others, no matter what language they speak — that is a beautiful thing.
For me, hearing Jaime Jarrín’s voice is equivalent to the smell of my grandmother’s cooking and the warmth of her kitchen. It’s a feeling that tells me I’m gonna be OK, no matter what else is going on. And like my grandparents, Jaime Jarrín’s voice has been there for me my whole life. Funny thing is, I came to prefer listening to Jarrín call Dodger games and my grandfather preferred to listen to Vin Scully. Back in the days when people thought that children should be seen and not heard, we didn’t talk much. But baseball was something we did together.
As an adult, I’ve been lucky to get to know Jaime. He’s not only a talented broadcaster, but also truly a special person. He’s got a bit of royalty to him. He always speaks to everyone with a lot of respect no matter who you are, but there’s a humor and a warmth there that he gives you from the beginning. It’s not something that you ever feel like you have to earn with him. He takes you in, he puts his hand on your shoulder. He talks straight to you. That’s so unlike a lot of the men that I grew up around.
Now, I have even more admiration for Jaime Jarrín as a professional. I know that for every three-hour game there’s 10 hours of work. Now I know how the work you have to put into announcing to make it sound so natural, to never be stuck or say the same thing twice, or never say ‘Who is that?’ on the field. It’s so hard to do that and make it look so easy — I realize that now because I try to do the same thing in my end of the business.
Nothing shows the respect that exists out there for Jaime Jarrín than how he helped bring the great Fernando Valenzuela back into the Dodgers’ organization. I was there for Fernando-mania in the early 1980s.
It was crazy. But things didn’t end well for the team and the superstar young pitcher from Mexico. There was bitterness for a long time.
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