For Spanish Announcers, the Talk Is Baseball

Although many sports broadcasters--and sportswriters, for that matter--grow up hoping to play the games they eventually wind up describing, Ivan Lara had his eyes focused on the press box from the start.

As a youngster growing up in Ciudad Obregon, in the Mexican state of Sonora--where baseball, not soccer, is the local passion--he remembers listening to storied broadcaster Alfonso Araujo Bojorquez paint a word picture of games in Mexico’s Pacific League. When he and his friends gathered to play on the sandlots, Lara would absent-mindedly begin describing the action from the sidelines.

A studious-looking 34-year-old, Lara spent the last seven years calling games for the Tucson Toros, the Triple A affiliate of the Houston Astros. There he earned a reputation for being one of the most talented young Spanish-language play-by-play announcers in the country.

Yet with just a handful of big-league clubs broadcasting a complete schedule of games in Spanish, full-time jobs with major league teams were hard to come by. So when the Angels called, he didn’t have to think long.

“Since I was a child, this has been my first passion,” he said. “So to be able to accomplish something that I’ve been working all my life for is very gratifying.”

Lara’s broadcast teammate Jose Tolentino, on the other hand, just lucked his way into the broadcast booth.

A self-described “lifelong minor-leaguer and 15-minute big-leaguer,” Tolentino, 36, was nearing the end of a 14-year professional career as a first baseman and outfielder in farm clubs for various teams (he played just 44 games in the major leagues, with the Houston Astros), when a travel agent in Hermosillo, Mexico, flagged him down on the street and asked him to autograph a promotional poster.

The agency was owned by the same company that ran the city’s largest newspaper, El Imparcial, and the chance meeting led to an invitation for Tolentino to write a guest column for the paper during the 1997 Caribbean Series, a four-nation winter-league championship, in Hermosillo.

During the series, Tolentino said, the ESPN television crew invited him into their booth for a couple of innings’ worth of explanation about the Caribbean series. They liked him so much that they asked him back for last winter’s Caribbean Series in Venezuela.

“After that,” he said, “the job offers came in.”

With the Angels, Tolentino’s role is to complement Lara’s play-by-play call with analysis and insight gained during his career as a player.

“That’s where I have an advantage,” he said. English listeners “have Joe Morgan, all the experts. In Spanish, usually there’s not a player doing radio. I want to educate. I think [if] you give a lot of information to people, they grab whatever they want to grab.”

The fact that both announcers are Mexican, like the vast majority of their audience, adds to that enjoyment.

“People can relate to us and feel like they’re in Mexico listening to a baseball game as opposed to Cuba or any other country,” Lara said.

“We’re Mexicans,” Tolentino added. “I think that’s a big step.”