The topic is Dave Marcus, and Jesse Agler immediately begins talking about Dwight Schrute.
But maybe not in the way anyone familiar with the fictional character on the American version of “The Office” might think.
There’s an episode, Agler explains, where Schrute leaves his job as a salesman at Dunder Mifflin to work at Staples. Shortly thereafter, his old boss, Michael Scott, starts to wonder about certain changes at the office: Why is this plant dying? Why isn’t his desk organized the way it used to be?
He thinks maybe it was the cleaning crew, and is stunned when told, no, it was Dwight.
“Dave Marcus is that to Padres radio,” says Agler, now in his ninth season as a full-time member of the club’s radio team. “He is so unappreciated. But if he weren’t there, nothing would be right.”
Fortunately for everyone who has worked on or listened to Padres radio for the past three decades, the 56-year-old Marcus has not left for Staples or another baseball team or any other job (nor does he have Dwight’s unctuous personality).
As the producer-engineer for Padres radio broadcasts since 1994, he has been in the booth for nearly every regular-season, postseason and spring training game — witnessing around 5,500 games in more than five dozen stadiums in four countries. He skipped one game his first season for a bachelor party, vowed never to do that again, and has missed only six games that counted since, all in the immediate aftermath of his father’s death in 2005. (He also was absent for the first two weeks of exhibitions in 2015 after his son Daniel was born.)
Most people have no idea what Marcus sounds like; probably even fewer have an idea what he looks like (until now). But as Agler said: “He is the reason that the light goes on. And he is the reason anybody hears us. He makes the broadcast better by all of his efforts, and it’s all stuff that no one would ever know was happening. And that’s a special kind of person that accepts that and, you know, thrives almost in that sort of situation where they know they’re not going to get the recognition.”
Starting off — and showing up
Like so many kids, Dave Marcus grew up wanting to be a professional athlete, in his case baseball or soccer. And, like so many kids, he learned that was a nice dream, but as he put it, “My mom told me to have a backup plan.”
And so he did: He wanted to be a broadcaster. Growing up in Rancho Palos Verdes, he loved listening to every sport on radio. Los Angeles had Hall of Famers calling all the major sports — Vin Scully, Chick Hearn, Bob Miller, Dick Enberg — and Marcus heard them all and more. Baseball was his favorite — he attended his first game as an 8-year-old in 1976 at Dodger Stadium — and he said after he was old enough he would drive to games and always be sure to look into the press box to catch a glimpse of Scully, Jerry Doggett and Ross Porter. He also heard them mention another member of the team, a producer-engineer named Bob Wall. “So I knew this job existed,” he said.
But his top priority was to be a broadcaster, so he headed to San Diego State in 1986, walked into the campus radio station and asked how he could be part of the operation. “Play by play, color, engineering, no one really had a job interview,” Marcus said. “Hey, you want to do it? You can do it. It was very inclusive.”
One day the sports director asked a family friend named Paul Mendes, who was in TV production, to visit the station and talk about how the business worked. Mendes mentioned he was producing a UNLV basketball game the next week in Long Beach and anyone who wanted to come up and hang out was welcome.
Marcus was the only student who showed up.
He helped out that day — he recalled almost getting run over under the basket by Rebels star Armon Gilliam — and the next summer Mendes hired Marcus for another job. A year later, Mendes was with the Gulls and Marcus called him and said he wanted to produce and engineer the team’s radio broadcasts. He did that for a couple years, also interned at KGTV Channel 10 and then wound up as a weekend sports producer. In 1991, he got hired at the Mighty 1090 writing and then producing, and during that time he also began working some Aztecs games as a producer-engineer.
And then, early in 1994, someone handed him a job listing: KFMB was looking for a producer-engineer for Padres games.
“This is the dream job for me,” Marcus recalled thinking.
The listing said five years’ experience was required. Marcus had just three but he figured he knew some people at the station who might put in a good word for him. So he typed up a resume and drove it to the KFMB offices. He told the receptionist he was there to drop off an application and resume for the Padres job. He expected her to say thanks, drop the paperwork into a pile of other paperwork and maybe he’d get a call in a week or two or never.
Instead, she called the program director to see if he was available and Bill Stairs said, sure, send him back. Just like that Marcus had an interview. He got called back for a second and a third and in early February he got the call: The job was his.
“God bless that receptionist,” Marcus said. “I don’t remember her name and never saw her again. Had she just put that resume in a pile who knows what might have happened.”
One other twist to the story: Maybe a week after Marcus was hired, he went to the station to meet some people. He was introduced to Stacy Taylor, the longtime talk-show host, who asked Marcus if he was the new program director.
Bill Stairs, it turns out, had been fired.
Thirty-one seasons later, the man he hired remains. Marcus worked six years at KFMB, four at KOGO, 13 at the Mighty 1090 and is now in his eighth with Audacy, which owns 97.3-FM. Maybe the receptionist knew something.
Producer, engineer — and much more
So what does a producer-engineer do, anyway? The latter part is pretty self-explanatory. Marcus makes sure the equipment is set up properly, the broadcast gets on the air (“I’ve never not gotten a game on the air”), the sound is clear, the commercials get read, and so on.
“He’s my favorite radio engineer in all the world; plugs in a power cord like no other engineer I know,” joked Padres TV analyst Mark Grant, who met Marcus more than 30 years ago. “Seriously, he’s like a brother to me. Very humble guy. Dave always wants to get it right, be on top of things.
“The joke is he spends the night at the ballpark to make sure everything gets set up, take care of the little things. We need more Dave Marcuses in the world.”
The “producer” portion of Marcus’ job is a bit more nebulous. Basically, he does whatever he can to help the broadcasters, and therefore, the broadcast. Agler noted Marcus’ “fairly encyclopedic knowledge of the history of the Padres, so he can really help fill in some gaps, even for Tony (Gwynn Jr.). You know, stuff that we don’t know about or didn’t know about previously.
“ … Now with the pitch clock it’s actually harder to look up (statistics) while you’re blabbing on the air, so all of a sudden, you know, Tony’s making a comment, Dave pops in my ear, and he’s like, ‘That was the most runs the Padres scored in an inning this year.’ And that’s awesome.”
Bob Scanlan, who occasionally works with Agler or Gwynn on radio, said Marcus “was instrumental in helping me make my transition into the booth. I was there with Ted (Leitner) and Ted is obviously established and I’m in new territory, but Dave right from the get-go made me feel completely comfortable and got me up to speed with everything: ‘Hey, here’s what you need to be aware of, here’s what Ted likes in a broadcast, here’s something to be careful of.’ So I’m forever grateful to Dave.”
Marcus sees it as just paying it forward. When he was hired the Padres rotated three radio broadcasters: Jerry Coleman, Leitner and Bob Chandler. All three helped him when he was new to the job — and they weren’t.
“I was lucky when I first started,” Marcus said. “Ted and Bob could have just (said), ‘Who’s this kid?’ I turned 26 that spring training. … And Jerry was 44 years older than I was.”
But Coleman lived his life as a great teammate: with the Yankees as a player, in the military as a pilot and with the Padres. And part of being a great teammate is taking someone young and helping to educate them.
In every city the Padres visited, Coleman would tell Marcus to meet him early in the afternoon in the hotel lobby. They would take a taxi to the stadium and Coleman would show Marcus whatever he needed to see.
“That’s the hardest part when you’re new,” Marcus said. “Where’s the clubhouse? Where’s the press box? Where’s the elevator? Which booth is ours? When you’ve never been there before, those are things you have to figure out. Here’s Jerry Coleman, distinguished broadcaster, player, war vet, all that stuff, taking the time to do this for me. It just made me feel so much more comfortable.”
Coleman also entrusted Marcus with his fabled star, the one that would swing out of the booth after a great defensive play at home prompted the announcer to utter his signature call, “You can hang a star on that baby!”
At his first home game in ’94, Marcus said Coleman explained how the young producer-engineer should throw the star out the window and wave it back and forth.
“So, opening day, there’s a star play,” Marcus said. “I just kind of pick it up, drop it out the booth, wave it back and forth. I’m thinking I’m kind of cool. … And on the air, Jerry said, ‘No, no, no, that’s not how you do it, Marcus. That’s not how you do it.’ I was like, what? What’d I do wrong? He’s like, ‘Meet me here tomorrow. We’ll work on this.’
“I thought he was just joking. He wasn’t kidding.”
So the next day Coleman and Marcus were in the booth five or six hours before the game, and Coleman was tossing the star out the window the proper way, then having Marcus practice.
“I can only imagine the people in the ballpark, looking up saying why is Jerry Coleman throwing the star over and over out the window?” Marcus said. “And here’s me doing it, you know, back and forth. So that’s how I knew right away how serious it was. It’s not some trivial thing. This was, like, very important to him how it was done.”
Marcus handled the star for many years but in recent years he moved to the back row of the radio booth at Petco, so the job usually falls to Gwynn.
Waiting to win it all
The obvious question for someone who has done the same job for more than 30 years is when does he plan to stop. Marcus said it isn’t anything he’s planning to do soon.
“I’ve probably stayed around long this long because of the relationship I’ve had with those (broadcasters),” said Marcus, who lives in Torrey Highlands with his wife (Tammy) of 13 years and their son. “Like, it’s fun to come to work. You know, that’s such a big part. It’s not always a guarantee in this business.”
For 30 years the job has allowed Marcus to meet the likes of Scully, Bob Sheppard — the famed Yankees public-address announcer who came by the booth before the 1998 World Series to confirm the pronunciation of Quilvio Veras’ name — and so many more. And think about a moment in Padres history since 1994 and Marcus has seen it: the 3,000th hits for Tony Gwynn and Rickey Henderson; nearly every one of Trevor Hoffman’s saves; playoff series wins over the Mets and Dodgers two years ago and, most recently, Dylan Cease’s no-hitter (the broadcast for Joe Musgrove’s in Texas was done from Petco Park due to COVID-19 restrictions).
One must-see moment remains: Watching the Padres win a World Series.
“I always ask friends of teams that won the World Series, like, hey, what’s that like, you know, to actually win everything?” Marcus said. “That kind of keeps me going, just hoping that someday … ”
Posner, a former writer and sports editor for the Union-Tribune, is a freelance writer.
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