René Cárdenas, the first radio announcer to broadcast major league baseball games in Spanish to a domestic audience while with the Dodgers and who helped start Spanish-language broadcasts for two other teams, died Sunday in Houston. He was 96.
The Dodgers announced his death Sunday night, noting his 21 years — over two stints — with the team starting in 1958. The broadcasting pioneer also served as the Houston Astros’ first Spanish-language announcer starting in 1962.
Cárdenas called games for 38 seasons with the Dodgers, Astros and Texas Rangers and paved the way for Jaime Jarrín, who joined the broadcast team in 1959 and served as the Dodgers’ broadcaster for 64 seasons.
“He was indisputably one of the pioneers of Spanish-language baseball radio broadcasting, and he opened the door for other broadcasters to reach the major leagues,” Jarrín told The Times in Spanish Monday morning. “He was a total professional, truly.”
Cárdenas was born on Feb. 6, 1930, in Managua, Nicaragua. His grandfather, Adan Cárdenas, was president of the country from 1883-1887 and is recognized for introducing baseball to Nicaragua in the late 19th century while his uncle, Adolfo, played on the first national team.
But Cárdenas became more adept at describing the action and before he left high school, he was not only writing for La Prensa, Nicaragua’s leading newspaper, but also broadcasting games for Radio Mundial, the capital city’s top-ranked station.
“He had a very original style,” Edgard Tijerino, a Nicaraguan sports journalist, told The Times’ Kevin Baxter in 1995. “It was a way of broadcasting that nobody here in Nicaragua had. The people of my generation remember him with fondness and still value the work he did.”
When the Dodgers moved from Brooklyn ahead of the 1958 season, they partnered with KWKW-AM (1330), the only Spanish-language radio station in L.A. at the time, to broadcast the games in Spanish. Cárdenas was hired as the lead play-by-play announcer while Jarrín shadowed him that first season before settling in as the No. 2 announcer. During that time, Cárdenas was part of the first Spanish broadcast of the World Series in 1959 and the All-Star Game in 1961.
Before the 1962 season, Cárdenas moved on to serve as the lead play-by-play announcer for Houston’s new team, then known as the Colt .45s. He chronicled the team’s first 14 seasons, during which the team moved into the Astrodome and were renamed the Astros in 1965.
Cárdenas returned to Nicaragua in the late 1970s to live in semi-retirement, but political unrest in the country, in the form of the Sandinista National Liberation Front, forced him to flee and eventually return to the United States. The rebels’ final push to victory would take them right past the front door of Cardenas’ three-quarter-acre hacienda.
“They were fighting around my house every night. We used to go under the bed every single night for months,” Cárdenas told The Times in 1995. “We were in a war without being soldiers.”
Cárdenas, who became a U.S. citizen in 1963, had his house, life savings and many priceless mementos from his broadcasting career seized.
After working with Texas Rangers, Cárdenas returned to the Dodgers for the 1982 season. By this point, Jarrín was firmly in place as the team’s lead play-by-play announcer — particularly in the wake of Fernandomania the season before, when Jarrín’s profile was raised as Fernando Valenzuela‘s interpreter during his media interviews.
“It was explained to him by our producer, ‘You can’t come back as the No. 1 announcer because Jaime is established, he has many years as the lead announcer and he is beloved by the community,’” Jarrín said Monday. “René said, ‘I don’t care, I’ll come back as the No. 2 with Jaime. I just want to come back to the game of baseball.’ He was determined to return to the Dodgers.
“It was during that time that we established a close-knit friendship and we were well-received by the community as a broadcast duo.”
Cárdenas worked with the Dodgers through the 1998 season and moved back to Houston, where he wrote for multiple outlets and then broadcast Astros games on the radio in 2007 and on TV in 2008, setting another first at the time: the only MLB team with a standalone Spanish-language broadcast featuring dedicated cameras and Spanish-language graphics separate from the English-language broadcast.
Fifty years after his first broadcast with the Dodgers, Cárdenas remained a pioneer.
He was nominated several times for the Baseball Hall of Fame’s Ford C. Frick Award, including last year, but did not receive enough votes for induction. He is in the Nicaragua Baseball Hall of Fame, the Broadcasters Wing of the Hispanic Heritage Baseball Museum Hall of Fame and in the Astros’ team hall of fame.
“I think what hindered him was that he didn’t fully establish himself with the Dodgers,” Jarrín, one of three Latino broadcasters in the Baseball Hall of Fame, said of Cárdenas’ chances of enshrinement. “He was away for many years. So that lack of continuity may have hindered him, possibly. Because professionally, he is deserving of being in the Hall. I would love it if he got inducted posthumously because he was a broadcasting pioneer and a true professional.”
