Watch: Andover’s Mike Yastrzemski quizzes Giants teammate on Massachusetts slang
“I don’t know what a packie is."
His last name already carries plenty of weight from Billerica to Barnstable, but Giants outfielder Mike Yastrzemski has plenty of roots in Massachusetts.
The grandson of Red Sox legend Carl Yastrzemski, Mike hails from Andover and honed his craft on baseball diamonds sprinkled across the Bay State.
And even though the former St. John’s Prep product now spends most of his days on the West Coast, Yastrzemski is still well-versed on the slang and vocabulary found within the Commonwealth.
In a new video posted by San Francisco radio station KNBR, Yastrzemski ran through several Massachusetts-based words, phrases, and pronunciations with fellow Giants outfielder Austin Slater.
As expected, most of the terms that Yastrzemski quizzed Slater on completely stumped the Jacksonville native.
The greatest hits of local lingo were featured in Yastrzemski’s interview, including “Bubbler,” “Dunks,” and a woeful pronunciation of Worcester by Slater.
Granted, Yastrzemski is also going to catch some flak for not knowing one term.
“I don’t know what a packie is,” Yastrzemski acknowledged. “What’s a packie?”
You’d be hard-pressed to find many locals who actually call Boston “The Hub” in 2023.
But it still left Slater completely flummoxed.
“The bar? Is that like you’re going to The Hub,” Slater guessed. “Isn’t that like the Mecca in Boston? Bars?”
“It’s just like the area of Boston,” Yastrzemski explained.
“Oh, that’s very conceited, a little bit,” Slater replied.
As for everyone’s favorite regional modifier, “wicked”, Yastrzemski said that the tried-and-true verbal tick was hard to erase from his everyday usage during his early days at Vanderbilt University.
“I’m trying to think of how I can say this on camera,” Yastrzemski said when asked how to use “wicked” in a sentence. “When I got to college I had to try and sub that out. Because I’d say, ‘It’s wicked nice. It’s wicked hot. It’s wicked cool.’ Like, literally everything.”
“It’s like ‘hella’ out on in California,” Slater added.
“And I never heard it. Like I couldn’t hear myself say it,” Yastrzemski continued. “And so everyone on the team was like, ‘Dude, you’ve got to stop. Like you have to stop, I can’t hear this anymore.’ And I was just like, ‘I’m a freshman.’ I’m like, ‘Okay, I’m pissin’ everyone off. I just gotta stop.’”
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