Talking Baseball en Espanol

XPRS-AM (1090), which does its programming from Hollywood and its broadcasting from Rosarito, Mexico, has signed a two-year deal to carry Spanish-language broadcasts of Anaheim Angel baseball beginning next season.

The Angels were widely criticized for canceling XPRS’ broadcasts six seasons ago in a cost-cutting move. But when Disney took over the organization early in the 1995 season, management said the return of a Spanish-language radio network would be a priority.

“We’re very excited about this and the Angels are very excited about this,” said XPRS spokesman Kahled Abdelwahed.

Disney Sports spokesman Bill Robertson declined to comment on the deal.

The team has committed to live broadcasts of all 175 Angel games, beginning with the team’s spring-training contests in Arizona. That marks a major change from XPRS’ last deal with the club, in which only selected road games were carried and only then by broadcasters in Southern California who translated the play-by-play call of the team’s English-language announcers. XPRS officials said they expect to name the new announcers within two weeks.

At KKHJ-AM, It’s All News, All Day, All in Spanish Just 15 years ago, Spanish-language radio in Southern California was made up largely of sleepy AM stations with formats that ranged from regional Mexican music to . . . well, to more regional Mexican music.

Since then, the market has exploded--so much so, in fact, that it’s now the largest, fastest-growing Spanish-language radio arena in the nation. And it’s among the most sophisticated as well. Buoyed by an influx of hundreds of thousands of political refugees from Central America and by the hard edge of recent U.S. laws aimed at immigrants, Southern California’s Latino population has begun expecting more than music from the radio.

And that’s a challenge that KKHJ-AM (930) embraced last week when the Los Angeles station switched formats to become the only Spanish-language all-news station in the country.

“We did a lot of research [and] we saw the need for a news station,” says Andy Mars, the corporate vice president for Liberman Broadcasting, which owns KKHJ as well as KWIZ-FM (96.7) of Santa Ana. “Given the current political climate, we think it’s appropriate.”

*

Mars says the station will mix long news blocks with shorter news-driven talk shows, adopting a format similar to English-language stations such as KGO-AM in San Francisco and KMOX in St. Louis. To make that work, he said, the station is hiring four reporters and recently reached an agreement with CNN’s Spanish-language unit that gives KKHJ exclusive rights to the network’s programming in Southern California.

But the inspiration for the format change actually came from the success of the Spanish-language news operations at KMEX-TV Channel 34 and KWHY-TV Channel 22.

“We’ve seen what KMEX’s success has been. And we saw the [ratings] spike that Channel 22 has had with its news,” Mars said. “We’re real excited about this.”

KKHJ’s move was undoubtedly motivated, too, by flagging listenership. Since popular drive-time host Renan Almendarez Coello left the station two years ago, its Arbitron ratings have fallen by nearly 75%, dropping it to ninth among local Spanish broadcasters. The station tried to arrest the free fall by duplicating KTNQ’s switch from all-music to talk, but the content of most of its shows was unfocused at best and, at least to some listeners, bordered on the obscene at worst.

In fact, the format switch comes just two weeks after the National Hispanic Media Coalition asked the Federal Communications Commission to deny KKHJ’s license renewal application based on what it called the station’s “indecent programming.”

The coalition’s petition focused largely on Alfredo Najera’s wide-ranging talk and advice show, “Alfredo Contigo,” which coalition Chairman Alex Nogales described as being as “raunchy as [it] can possibly get. Howard Stern is nothing compared to these guys.”

Ironically, Najera was one of just two major on-air personalities to survive the change. He’ll now co-host daily two-hour news-talk shows beginning at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m.

More ratings problems could be ahead for KKHJ, however. A longtime consultant to Spanish-language radio stations throughout the U.S. and Puerto Rico says the main reason KKHJ has the all-news format to itself is because nobody else has been able to make it work. “It’s an act of desperation,” he said.