The show Friends is a 90s cultural touchstone for Americans who grew up watching it on NBC. It spawned hairstyle phenomenons and is still referenced all over the pop culture landscape to this day. And now that it’s in syndication and streaming on Netflix, it’s gotten a new chance to attract a new generation of fans.
Many of those fans, as it turns out, are Major League Baseball players. The New York Times wrote about the show’s somewhat surprising popularity with players. Many of those players are those that speak English as a second language, and the piece explores a very good reason for its taking hold in MLB clubhouses.
The Times piece calls the show a “Rosetta Stone” of sorts for players that want to learn more about America and how to speak English in a practical way. And it’s certainly been effective for a number of players.
“The basics you can learn in a classroom,” said Wilmer Flores, an infielder with the New York Mets. “But to speak the language, that comes from here in the clubhouse, on the street or from television.”
Flores is a huge ‘Friends’ fan who has been aided in the endeavor by the growth of streaming media.
“Now that it’s on Netflix, I always put it on and watch it,” said Mets infielder Wilmer Flores, 26, who is from Venezuela. “When I get up in the morning, I turn on the TV, and whatever episode is there I’ll watch and keep watching. I stop it when I come to the stadium. When I come home from the stadium, I pick up where I left off.”
What has the sitcom done for his English proficiency?
“It’s near perfect,” said Flores’s teammate, Jerry Blevins, who is from Tennessee. “When he doesn’t know something, it’s surprising.”
The piece mentions other players like the Yankees’ Louis Severino, Diamondbacks outfielder David Peralta and Rangers pitcher Miguel Gonzalez as players who admit they obsessively watch Friends when they’re not at the ballpark.
It’s a fascinating way to learn English: start with subtitles on and slowly learn the language as you enjoy the show’s plot. And the players argue that you can get the basics of the English language in the classroom, but that it’s harder to get the cultural differences and inflections unless you have a working example of them.
Lucky for the players, Netflix is full of 10 entire seasons of wacky antics from the Friends cast. Perhaps the best part of the piece, though, is the revelation of just how much of a Friends superfan Flores is. He claims he’s visited the studio where the show was shot and even plays the theme song as his at-bat music.
