Angels Making Play for Latinos’ Business

Seven years after pulling the plug on their Spanish-language radio broadcasts to save money, the Anaheim Angels are once again courting the Latino community.

They’ve resurrected Spanish broadcasts, hired Spanish-speaking ushers at their newly refurbished stadium and printed everything from team schedules to beverage cups in both Spanish and English.

The signs of this outreach are everywhere: No fewer than 27 bilingual signs dot the hallways and concessions at the Angels’ new Edison International Field--to say nothing of the free bus rides to and from the stadium into predominantly Latino neighborhoods on selected game days.

The move came after an Angels-commissioned poll last year of Spanish-speaking residents in Santa Ana, which has the highest concentration of Spanish speakers in the state. The poll found that the Latino community most favored the Dodgers. The second most preferred team was the Florida Marlins, followed by the Texas Rangers--baseball teams that have Latin America-born stars, broadcast their games on the radio in Spanish and have extensive outreach programs in the Latino communities where they play.

The Angels--which could boast none of those qualities--weren’t anywhere near the top, even though the team plays its home games just a few miles away.

“There was some injury, I think, in the Hispanic community,” Marie Moreno, the Angels’ manager of Hispanic sales and marketing, said of the team’s past dealings with the Latino community. “I think it really hurt us in the long run.”

It’s a hurt that the Walt Disney Co. has been working feverishly to repair since taking over the team two years ago.

Last season, for example, the organization promoted Moreno--who had been hired under the Autrys, the former owners--from manager of community relations to her current post, making the Angels one of just five major league clubs with such a position.

In February, the club tapped Jose Tolentino and Ivan Lara to call their games on XPRS-AM (1090), a 50,000-watt, Mexico-based signal that extends the team’s presence into at least three states, as well as parts of northern Mexico.

“It fits in nicely with what we’re doing here,” Moreno said. “It’s reaching the audience we want to reach,” which includes an estimated Latino population of almost 1 million in Orange County and 2 million more within an hour’s drive of the Angels’ home field.

“We’re really focusing in on the Hispanic market, and the broadcasts are like the frosting on the cake,” Moreno said. The team also is reportedly negotiating with KVEA-TV Channel 52 about Spanish-language TV broadcasts, but a station official said a deal is far from being sealed.

All of this is not just about promoting goodwill.

Disney and the team are trying to tap a group of consumers who spend an estimated $50 billion a year in the Los Angeles and Orange counties area.

Publicity Campaign Goes on the Road

The financial fields are particularly ripe in the Latino radio market: Radio revenue in the Los Angeles-Orange counties market for 1997 was $575.5 million--the fifth consecutive year the nation’s largest market has set a record. Of that total, nearly $100 million was generated by Spanish-language stations.

Besides bringing back Spanish-language broadcasts and the other moves, the Angels have recruited a small army of bilingual employees from throughout the Disney empire to accompany its interactive Grand Slam Van on promotional campaigns to neighborhoods across Southern California.

Beginning Tuesday, Cinco de Mayo, the team will offer free bus transportation to selected games from sites throughout Orange County. Those who ride the bus may also pay reduced ticket prices.

There is precedent for such bus programs, namely the San Diego Padres’ successful “Domingo Padres” program, in which the team and corporate sponsors joined to offer fans in northern Mexico bus transportation and discount tickets to Sunday home games. In three years, the Padres have brought more than 225 busloads of fans across the border, helping set numerous club attendance records.

The Angels hope their strategy with Latinos pays off the way it has in other places, but solid attendance figures measuring the effectiveness of such campaigns are hard to come by.

“As people come through the turnstiles, we don’t ask where they were born,” says Jim Ross, Florida Marlins vice president of sales and marketing.

But when the Marlins analyzed season-ticket sales by ZIP Code, Ross said season-ticket clients in neighborhoods with a large concentration of Spanish surnames grew threefold in the year after their campaign started. In addition, a ticket office the team opened in Miami’s heavily Latino Little Havana district has done three times as much business as the nearest Ticketmaster outlet.

The Padres’ Latino outreach has been even more aggressive.

When John Moores and Larry Lucchino took over the team in 1994, they instituted Spanish-language classes for club employees, opened a store in Tijuana and, two seasons ago, even talked Major League Baseball into allowing them to move a regular-season series with the Mets to Monterrey, Mexico.

Those measures, combined with grass-roots efforts in predominantly Latino neighborhoods in San Diego County, have helped boost Latino attendance at Padre games from less than 5% of the total audience in 1994 to more than 20% last season, according to Enrique Morones, the club’s director of multicultural marketing.

Outreach Lands Jobs for Local Youths

The Angels have been up front in admitting past errors with the Latino market and have welcomed community input--as well as advice from other clubs, such as the Padres and the Arizona Diamondbacks.

For example, when Mel Sanchez, a Spanish teacher at Santa Ana High School and director of the school’s translating and interpreting program, wrote Anaheim Sports President Tony Tavares last summer offering to help with the Angels’ outreach program, Tavares immediately arranged a meeting.

Sanchez’s students have subsequently helped the club translate schedules and stadium signage, but the full fruits of his meeting with Tavares will be revealed later this month, when the club announces a partnership program with the school.

“They were very receptive,” said Sanchez, who has already placed three bilingual students in part-time jobs with the Angels. “They’re making their strides. [Their efforts are] known at our school, I’ll tell you that. Kids are coming out of the woodwork now telling me they’re Angel fans. It surprised me.”

Elsewhere, the public’s response to the Angels’ efforts has gone beyond simply rooting for the team.

In Santa Ana, tiny Flower Street Park is being renamed Angels Community Park. And some of the team’s most strident critics, among them Hall of Fame Dodger broadcaster Jaime Jarrin, who last summer excoriated the club for failing to do more for the Latino community, have gone out of their way to applaud the team’s new approach.

“I was critical of them, but now . . . I have to congratulate them,” said Jarrin, who has called Dodger games in Spanish since 1959.

For their part, however, the team’s new Spanish-language broadcasters, Lara and Tolentino, insist the club’s checkered history is just that--history.

“That’s a closed chapter,” Lara said. “This is a new organization, and they’re doing things the right way everywhere. I’m part of their new chapter and I’m happy to be part of their new chapter.”

That said, Lara conceded that although the Angels are making positive strides, it’s clear from the calls and mail he has received that the new ownership will have to continue working to make bygones be bygones.

It can happen, though, to which the Dodgers can certainly attest.

The Dodgers got off to a rough start with the Latino community when the team moved from Brooklyn to Los Angeles and the Los Angeles City Council voted to evict a largely Latino tenant community from Chavez Ravine so that Dodger Stadium could be built.

Despite that, the Dodgers over the years have become a favorite among Southland Latinos, a relationship that reached a climax in the ‘80s with the marketing gold mine that Fernando Valenzuela became for the team.

That is another page the Angels may need to take from the Dodgers in their quest to put Latino fans in the stands: putting more Latin American players on the field.

Although nearly one in five major league players was born in Latin America--including the most valuable players in last season’s World Series and All-Star game--the Angels have developed just 20 Latino players during its 37-year history. Last year, the Angels organization was the only team in baseball that did not produce at least one Latin American major league player.

That too may be changing.

The team’s new ownership has committed what it says is a substantial amount of money to reestablishing a scouting presence in Latin America. In addition, the Angels recently signed a two-year agreement with the Aguascalientes Railroadmen of the Mexican League, and last spring the team tried to sign Cuban defector Orlando “El Duque” Hernandez. The club also has revived its Dominican academy and hired three full-time scouts in Mexico, two in Venezuela and one in the Dominican Republic.

So, is all of this paying off?

Though hardly scientific, there is one sign that it may be: Angels baseball caps are becoming as plentiful as Dodger caps in the parks and streets of Santa Ana.

Said the team’s Moreno: “People are beginning to see the sincerity of what we’re doing.”