Deportes and De Cline

Item: The growth in Spanish ad- vertising was five times that of English buys in the first half of 2008.

This is where I should make any number of Colbert-esque pander-jokes, wrap the post up in a big pinata or sombrero, and call it a day. But I've got more to do here.

First off, the short-term implications.

1) This makes soccer (and to a much lesser extent, baseball) a bigger and better play, in both coverage and importance.

2) The Lemur is already on it, of course, with their Deportes coverage (here's hoping that in the evolution of their network, the Deportes Era of Olbermann/Patrick intellect lasts a little longer than it did in englais).

3) Someone will eventually make a buttload of money by being a right-wing Hispanic blowhard, because it's not as if that community doesn't enjoy its fair share of homophobia, patriarchy and general tight-assedness.

Now, the long-term.

The Latin American and Asian influx into baseball has helped to mask an overall talent decline. The NFL and NBA has taken the cream of the African-American over the course of my lifetime (and, of course, utterly decimated the hopes of anyone for an American rebirth of the heavyweight division in boxing). So what happens when (not if) the next generation of Ramirezed and Hernandezi decide they'd rather spot up behind the arc or go on a fly pattern, rather than work on their double play pivot?

What I suspect will happen is part of what's already going on... a diminishing of the awe-inspiring physical. Fewer guys throwing in the mid to high 90s. Fewer home runs traveling 450+ feet. Fewer triples, less lightning-fast reaction defensive plays in the infield. The best will still stand out, but the average guys will seem much more, well, average.

The average viewer probably won't notice so much. (If a similar decline happened in football, no one would notice either -- witness the popularity of high school and college ball.) The casual viewer has already left the game due to the overwhelming length of it, along with the uneven salary field, the strike-induced disasters of the '90s, and the Tour de France level doping of the 2000's.

You also have the general graying of America to think about here, along with the very long bad economic time that looms. There's still a lot of down to go in this roller coaster before we get back to anything approaching lean and mean, especially in the privileged classes. It's hard -- very hard -- to work out the justification for superboxes and corporate sponsorships when companies are cutting back on just about everything, and having to pay an ever-increasing amount for transportation and health care.

Anyway, that's all very far away from the here and now, which is that if you want to make a sports marketing buy that's an actual bargain, you'd better make sure your ad campaign is bilingual. And if you want to make the claim that the quality of play in baseball has never been higher -- a statement that has been true for over a century now, and demonstrated by the simple fact that pitchers don't hit as well as they used to, and fewer young stud players can compete at a young (i.e., pre-21) age -- you might want to take the shot now.

Because it's probably not going to be true for very much longer.