Yesterday morning, Professor John Nowak shared the following short story at the opening plenary session of the Fourth Annual Constitutional Law Colloquium in Chicago:
During the 1962 major league baseball season, New York Mets center fielder Richie Ashburn and Venezuelan shortstop Elio Chacón often collided in the outfield due to a language barrier. Whenever Riche Ashburn went for a pop up in shallow left-center field, he would scream, “I got it! I got it!” only to run into Elio Chacón, who spoke only Spanish. To avoid future collisions, Ashburn learned to yell, “¡Yo la tengo! ¡Yo la tengo!” to call Chacón off shallow fly balls.
In a later game, Ashburn happily saw Chacón backing off. As he positioned himself to catch the ball, bam! This time, he was run over by left fielder Frank Thomas, who understood no Spanish.
Considering that Professor Nowak is a distinguished scholar of US Constitutional Law and that he told this story at a conference on Constitutional Law, what do you think the moral of this story is?
prior probability 
It seems that this Constitutional Law professor was attempting to show his class how even the most common simple know things can be misunderstood due to language barriers. He was most likely trying to show how non English speakers most likely do not know what the Constitution says due to their lack of English. This would pose problems for non English speakers in them not knowing what their Constitutionally protected rights as well as Constitutionally barred actions are. By the way the players should have just called “ball” since that is a common word between Spanish and English speakers.
In my opinion, this professor was attempting to convey the importance of all individuals, that are working together to accomplish a common goal, needing to have the same understanding of a given theme. Even if there is an agreement amongst the minority portion of a group as to the meaning, this does not guarantee the outcome will be positive. If the entire team would have been aware of the interpretation of the phrase, it would have been more beneficial to their performance in the game. This lesson translates to society where there are constant differing opinions and confusions as to the translation of governing documents and policies. If people collectively agreed on how society is supposed to operate, and they effectively communicated with each other to create one set of standards, everything would run a lot smoother.
I agree that the “moral of the story” has to do with the problem of interpretation. According to the Wikipedia version of this story, Frank Thomas was not present at the team meeting where it was agreed that Ashburn would yell “yo la tengo” to call off Chacon (just as none of us were present during the drafting of the Constitution in 1787 or at the subsequent state ratification conventions). Moreover, as JC notes above, Thomas did not understand Spanish. In fact, after colliding with Ashburn and getting up, Thomas asked, “What the hell is a Yellow Tango?”