He Announces Baseball Games in Spanish. It Is Not His First Language.

Bill Kulik is a longtime Spanish language radio broadcaster for the Philadelphia Phillies. But listeners tuning in wouldn’t always know that.

Instead of calling baseball’s championship by its Spanish name, “La Serie Mundial,” he calls it the World Series. He recently described a player’s up and down career as “a roller coaster” instead of “una montaña rusa,” the proper phrase in Spanish. And when saying something was quite funny, he said “bien funny.”

This is the distinctive linguistic world of Mr. Kulik, a broadcaster nicknamed El Gringo Malo (The Bad Gringo), whose on-air persona is irreverent and even silly. Though most of what Mr. Kulik says in front of a microphone is in Spanish, he sprinkles in generous doses of English and Spanglish, a blending of the two languages.

Of the 16 teams — out of 30 in Major League Baseball — with some form of a Spanish language broadcast, the Phillies’ is unlike any other, largely because of Mr. Kulik.

He was born in New Jersey, and took only one Spanish class, in high school, he said, but first learned the language while spending nine childhood years in Colombia and Argentina, where his family lived because of his father’s work with a chemical manufacturing company.