As Angels Diversify, So Does Fan Base

Five years ago, when XPRS reluctantly signed on as the Spanish-language radio broadcaster for the Anaheim Angels, executives at the station brooded. This, they worried, could kill their product.

“Latinos aren’t supposed to go to Angels games,” said Khaled Abdelwahed, general sales manager for the Hollywood-based AM station at 1090 on the dial. The team had no connection to the Latino community, no Latino players and no expectation that anything would change.

But things have indeed changed. The Angel lineup now has six Latino players, including Francisco Rodriguez, the 20-year-old pitcher who is suddenly one of the team’s brightest stars. In this magical season in which so much has gone right for the team, the Angels have invested heavily and successfully in building a fan base in Orange County’s fast-growing Latino community.

Two decades after the Dodgers led the way with Fernando-mania -- setting the standard for scouting talent abroad and then marketing that talent to its multicultural communities -- the Angels are like the little brother who has finally grown up.

As they have built an ethnically diverse team, they have plastered ads aimed at Latinos on bus shelters in Anaheim and Santa Ana, poured money into advertising on the rock en espanol radio stations that blare Shakira and Chayanne, and produced TV commercials depicting a Latino player taking batting practice on a pinata.

Team officials say more Latino families are attending games, fans are tuning into the Angels instead of Mexican soccer clubs such as Chivas and Cruz Azul, and sponsors are flocking to buy ad time during XPRS broadcasts.

Ratings for Spanish-language broadcasts of the games have doubled, ad sales have gone up as much as 400%, and according to a team survey, Latinos now make up 15% to 20% of the stadium crowd.

“For a long time, [the Angels] forgot about us,” said Angel Orea, owner of a Santa Ana soccer store whose son has been won over as an Angel fan. “You used to see only Caucasians at the games. But they’ve made an impact this year with their advertising. Now, they are the talk of our town.”

They weren’t always. The Angels have reached out to Latinos before, but only in limited fashion. Posting bilingual signs at Edison Field, printing pocket schedules in Spanish and broadcasting games on Spanish-language radio stations failed to win over a soccer-crazed community to a team that seemed so foreign.

Although many of the game’s brightest stars are now from Latin America, the Angels went 10 years without producing a single Latino player from their farm system. For years, the team was reluctant to put money into scouring Mexico and Latin America for players, content instead to invest in big-name stars it hoped would lure fans and produce a winning team. In 1998, Puerto Rican catcher Bengie Molina became the Angels’ first home-grown Latino player in a decade.

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Community Link

“We can’t control the makeup of the team, but it makes our job a lot easier when there’s a connection to community,” said Robert Alvarado, Angels’ director of marketing and promotions.

The need to connect with Latino fans is a lesson other area teams learned years earlier. Four years ago, ESPN broadcast a program examining the outreach successes of the Dodgers and Padres. During the broadcast, viewers were told about a Spanish-speaking Angel fan calling the team’s offices seeking season tickets. The woman was transferred from person to person in the ticket office for 15 minutes while employees looked for a bilingual worker. The episode angered then-General Manager Tony Tavares, and he vowed to improve relations with Latinos.

For the Angels, the potential market is impressive. Santa Ana, which sits in the shadow of Edison Field, has the largest percentage of Latinos (71%) of any large city in the nation. It also has the highest concentration of Spanish-speaking residents in the nation, with about 15% of those ages 18 to 64 speaking no English -- nearly four times the California average.

According to the 2000 census, the number of Latinos living in Orange County surged 46.1% in the last decade. The increases were far greater in Riverside and San Bernardino counties, areas that team executives view as “Angel country.”

This season, with a winning, multicultural team and a long-term marketing strategy aimed at Latinos, the Angels are seeing new fans jump aboard and the allegiances of others being challenged. On a few occasions this year, the Angels have had larger market shares on Latino radio stations than the Dodgers -- a first, according to XPRS officials. In a late-season survey of fans attending home games, 15% of the respondents identified themselves as Latinos, almost double what it was two years ago.

The Spanish-language news media are responding. Early in the season, with the team slumping and marketing efforts still in their infancy, only La Opinion was using its credentials on a regular basis. But throughout the playoffs, up to 10 local Spanish-language outlets have been showing up at games, Angel officials say.

Employing the slogan, “Lanzate a la Diversion,” or Join the Fun, the Angels have flooded Spanish-language television with commercials featuring Latino coaches and players.

In one of the spots, Molina and Benji Gil show up at a 5-year-old Latino boy’s backyard birthday party. The boy is having a hard time busting open the pinata with a stick. Molina suggests that “the trick is to swing really hard.” Gil then swings at the pinata, candy flying everywhere.

In May, Angel manager Mike Scioscia, three Latino coaches and two players attended a lunch with local Latino media representatives, hoping to build relationships that had never existed. Latino coaches and players stopped by youth baseball clinics in Santa Ana, Tustin and Anaheim. Molina visited grade schools in Anaheim.

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Mexican Owner?

The buzz around Latino neighborhoods has grown louder since Mexican billionaire Carlos Peralta confirmed he was among those interested in buying the Angels from Disney, which has been trying to sell the team for three years. Peralta, who owns one of Mexico’s top baseball teams, the Tigres of Puebla, told reporters he was encouraged to see so many Latinos among the sellout crowd when he attended the regular-season finale against Seattle.

“Wouldn’t it be great to see a Mexican owner bring a few more young players here from Mexico?” said Orea, the Santa Ana soccer store owner. “People are getting excited about the possibilities.”

The investment appears to be paying dividends. An attitude and tracking study of 200 married-with-children Orange County Latinos (male and female, ages 18 to 39) gave Angel officials some encouraging signs. In April, only 9% of those surveyed said the Angels were the first baseball team that came to mind. In early September, before Rodriguez joined the team, 16% of a similar group answered the same way. By September, the number of Latinos who had seen an Angel ad jumped from 9% to 25%.

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Plenty of Friends

Felipe Flores, a 30-year-old Santa Ana resident, was already sold on the Angels. Flores had been attending games for 10 years, but he rarely saw other Latino faces in the crowd. This year, Flores has often been joined at games by as many as 20 friends, many of them former Dodger and Giant fans.

“I don’t think its just because the Angels are suddenly a winning team, because the Dodgers and Giants have had great seasons too,” Flores said. “I think all the advertising they’ve done on television has made a difference.”