San Diego has been a one-sport city since the relocation of the Chargers to Los Angeles – meaning that it is all things brown and gold when it pertains to professional teams. The San Diego Padres have not earned a postseason berth in a full 162-game regular season since 2006. Today, the roster has various superstar players, including Manny Machado, Juan Soto and Yu Darvish. The team, along with its broadcast partner 97.3 The Fan, led by program director/brand manager Adam Klug, just completed its deepest postseason run since 1998 – making the National League Championship Series.
“The Padres are the only professional team here in San Diego, and we’re the flagship,” Klug said. “Our goal is to knock it out of the park and to be the eyes and ears for our audience members who can’t be at all the events we get access to.”
97.3 The Fan was originally a country radio station for 50 years before Entercom (now-Audacy) acquired Lincoln Financial Media, its parent company, and thus the frequency. Following several changes in format including a move to top-40 and talk radio, the station officially relaunched as a sports talk radio station in April 2018. Two months later, the station hired Klug as its program director.
Klug had a penchant for sports radio from an early age, tuning in to different types of programming throughout his formative years. While he attended the University of Georgia as an economics major, he landed an internship in sports media with 790 The Zone in nearby Atlanta. The internship was unpaid but ultimately led to his being hired to work as a producer at the station shortly after his graduation from college. The ownership of the station was originally under Big League Broadcasting and was the only brand in the city under its portfolio – in essence keeping everyone more focused and dedicated to improving the sound of the station every day.
“It felt like old-school radio,” Klug said. “It wasn’t a station that was owned by a giant corporation like a lot of current sports stations are. It was a really small ownership group. It’s interesting because everybody who worked there – the sales staff; the promotions staff; everybody was all-in, all the time on 790 The Zone because it wasn’t in a cluster.”
Having the chance to immediately work in a top-10 market out of college provided Klug with the experience necessary to cover sports in an urban hub. His primary role was to produce the station’s morning show, a program in which he put his time and energy into determining how to enhance the sound and sustain ratings success. While he departed the station to join ESPN as a general producer in 2010, the decision was quite difficult because of the uncertainty associated with the transition.
“I think most producers are used to being all-in on one show and working with that talent and always thinking about how to make that show better,” Klug said. “When I was offered the job at ESPN…. I definitely had to think about it – but ultimately I said: ‘It’s ESPN. I got to go.’”
Following a year of rotating shows as a freelance producer including AllNight with Jason Smith and College Football Tonight with Mel Kiper Jr. and Freddie Coleman, Klug seized an opportunity when the producer for The Doug Gottlieb Show left to take another job. Once he was named the show’s new producer, he immediately established a professional relationship with Gottlieb and enjoyed his time working for him. Being adaptable and easy to work with paid off when Gottlieb moved his show to what was then a new brand in CBS Sports Radio – and decided to take Klug with him.
“He was considering leaving six months into our tenure kind of working together and he was kind of keeping me in-tune with all of those discussions and [the] decision-making process,” Klug recalled. “When he decided that he was going to leave – even though we hadn’t been working together for so long – we had worked so well together that he asked if I’d be interested in continuing to produce his show over at CBS.”
Klug was thrilled to have the opportunity to produce a marquee show on a growing sports radio network, which also featured Jim Rome. Six years later when Gottlieb was considering a move to Fox Sports Radio, Klug wanted to find a way to advance his career. As a result, he declined the opportunity to remain with Gottlieb once the move to Fox Sports Radio was official. He stayed with CBS Sports Radio to become the executive producer of Reiter Than You with Bill Reiter.
Programming a sports radio station represented a dream job for Klug and he kept his radar on opportunities to enter the space while producing Reiter’s show. He recognized the difficulty associated with assimilating into the radio space and did whatever he could to distinguish himself from other candidates.
“I had spoken with people who I consider mentors within the company and let them know about my interest and desire to grow professionally, and did everything I could to put myself in a position to take that next step when the opportunity came,” Klug said. “At the time, I was looking to become a program director and get my opportunity to program a sports station and at that point with all the experience I was willing to probably go just about anywhere to get that opportunity.”
Once 97.3 The Fan in San Diego came calling, Klug knew it was too good of a chance to pass up and recognized its gravity throughout the interview process. Once he joined the station in June 2018, he began doing everything possible to position the station to cement itself as San Diego’s top sports radio station.
Today, though, radio stations are in constant competition with other multimedia outlets and platforms for attention and engagement. As a result, Audacy renamed Klug’s position as program director to brand manager to more accurately reflect the roles and responsibilities he has. The change has extended far beyond the executive staff though, representing a paradigmatic shift in thinking about the future of the medium of dissemination.
“Within Audacy they don’t refer to us as radio stations; they refer to us as brands because 97.3 is our brand. It’s our image. It’s everything that we do,” Klug explained. “We are content creators and we distribute our content on multiple platforms. Radio is the main platform, but it’s not the only platform.”
As the flagship radio station for the San Diego Padres in a one-sport city, keeping fans engaged with the team during the highs and lows is essential for business and content creation. During Klug’s first year with 97.3 The Fan, the Padres finished with a win-loss record of 66-96, last place in the National League West. It was in that same year though that Baseball America ranked the organization as the number one farm system in the league, indicative of developing talent in the minor leagues that would eventually make an impact on the big league level.
From the outside, it was apparent that the team was seemingly prioritizing its future and concurrently brought in first baseman Eric Hosmer on what was then the largest contract in team history for veteran production and leadership. Nonetheless, the team still had the lowest payroll in their division and ranked in the bottom-10 compared to other major league teams.
Coinciding with the Padres’ focus on its future, 97.3 The Fan changed its sales approach to encourage investors to see the rebuilding plan through by investing early and reaping the benefits down the line as opposed to having an immediate impact. Four years later, the Padres made an exciting postseason push and were within three wins of a World Series berth, generating profound buzz and excitement in the San Diego sports landscape.
“We put together these presentations that said ‘Here are the previous number one [ranked] organizations,’” Klug said. “‘It was the Cubs in 2012, let’s say, and then the Astros and 2013. Low and behold in 2016, the Cubs [won] the World Series and then in 2017 the Astros.’ When you get ranked this well in your farm system, it leads to this. It was: ‘Get in now. Get in on the ground floor.’”
Aside from sales, the development of the organization’s progenies from one era to the next caused 97.3 The Fan to focus more heavily on the minor leagues than it does today. Many of the prospects at the time were well known and garnered large expectations, including Fernando Tatis Jr., MacKenzie Gore and Luis Urías – all of whom are making impacts in the major leagues whether or not they are still with the Padres.
“It changed the approach of our programming… as our sales [were] based upon where they were in the rebuild process,” Klug said. “….Our programming and our sales approach kind of shifted from the percentage of focus of the minor league coverage to now we’re really talking about making runs here in the playoffs.”
Cultivating a content strategy for the Padres postseason run has been intensive and intricate with the team working tirelessly to close new deals and execute special broadcast coverage for the postseason.
Over the last month, the team has always been thinking one round ahead – meaning that they were already planning for the NLCS when the NLDS was taking place against the Los Angeles Dodgers. One round earlier, plans were being put in place on how to best approach a series with their interstate rivals if the team defeated the New York Mets – which it ultimately did in three games.
“We’re planning around in advance,” Klug said. “….Our sales staff has been working around the clock locking in new business as we’ve advanced…. It’s basically been around the clock frenzied mayhem for the last couple [of] weeks here.”
Baseball season is long and many fans grow a proclivity for their local broadcasters whether they be on television, radio or on some other platform. In the postseason though, media rights deals give national networks the exclusive broadcast rights on television and as a result different broadcast teams are heard.
San Diego Padres regular season baseball is broadcast on Bally Sports San Diego and features play-by-play announcer Don Orsillo and Mark Grant. Throughout the playoffs though, Padres fans watched their team on ESPN for the Wild Card Series with Karl Ravech, David Cone, Eduardo Perez and Buster Olney; then on Fox for the NLDS featuring Adam Amin, A.J. Pierzynski and Tom Verducci; in the NLCS the team remains on Fox but is now joined by broadcasting duo Joe Davis and John Smoltz with Ken Rosenthal reporting.
That is not the case on radio though – it has been play-by-play announcer Jesse Agler and analyst Tony Gwynn Jr. bringing fans all the action on 97.3 The Fan and streaming on the Audacy app.
“We see a lot of commentaries on social media about Padres fans’ reactions to watching the TV broadcast and the reaction they have to hearing the national broadcasters on TV,” Klug said. “It warms our hearts to see all the love – the outpouring of love – we’ve gotten for our local broadcasters throughout the playoffs. We’ve actually gotten tons and tons of feedback and reaction [from] our listeners muting the TV… firing up the radio broadcast… and syncing it up with the TV so they can hear the local broadcasters while watching it on TV.”
When the Padres are not on the field, the station has a wide array of sports talk programming including its morning show Ben & Woods and The John Kentra Show during afternoon drive. As there have been various innovations in media as consumption habits have changed with emerging technologies, the job of an on-air host encompasses significantly more than simply showing up to a studio and talking about sports into a microphone.
“I think it’s more of an all-in job than it used to be and now that social media is so prevalent, you build your listenership through engaging with them… and bringing them into the fold,” Klug said. “I also think that sports radio has evolved to where you can talk about more than just sports now.”
Ultimately, keeping an audience engrossed in sports radio with a saturated content marketplace and distribution platforms means that hosts need to go beyond the game more than ever before. Sports radio, at its core, has its roots in discussing sports and implementing fans in the conversation but today, the format, along with others like it, try to bring listeners a product that extends past its traditional boundaries in terms of topic selection and execution.
“At the end of the day, we are entertainers,” Klug said. “You have to be entertaining and be able to talk about [different topics] whether it’s pop culture or TV or your personal life. At the end of the day, it’s whatever it takes to keep your audience engaged.”
For those considering a path to radio management, it is essential one figures out what in the industry they aspire to do and then pursue the most optimal path possible to arrive at that point. Going into the industry without somewhat of a roadmap is more complicated when it comes to thinking about future advancement because there are many content outlets but a shrinking number of people necessary to produce it – an evident shift in efficiency.
The comparative advantage radio possesses regarding content production continues to become more valuable as the aggregate opportunity cost declines and demand to work in media remains steady. As a result, being focused on one’s future goals and having a strategy to achieve them is, according to Klug, an effective route to follow early in one’s career. Just being able to do that though starts with walking through an open doorway and a willingness to do whatever it takes to succeed.
“You have to love what you do,” Klug said. “I think radio is a difficult industry because it’s desirable and so many people want to be a part of it…. Get into the door and get experience any way that you can and put yourself in a position where you become invaluable. I think most companies are prone to hire from within so you want to put yourself in a position to grab [an] opportunity.”
Derek Futterman is an associate editor and sports media reporter for Barrett Media. Additionally, he has worked in a broad array of roles in multimedia production – including on live game broadcasts and audiovisual platforms – and in digital content development and management. He previously interned for Paramount within Showtime Networks, wrote for the Long Island Herald and served as lead sports producer at NY2C. To get in touch, email Derek@BarrettMedia.com or find him on X @derekfutterman.
