Maybe it was the flu talking. Or the DayQuil. Or a combination of the two. But as he sat in the South Florida office of the team president, nearing the end of one final job interview, Jesse Agler answered a question with words he knew almost right away were wrong.
“He asked me what’s your dream job,” Agler recalled. “And I said to be a baseball play-by-play announcer.”
And it was the truth. All Agler ever wanted, since he was a boy growing up in Boca Raton, Fla., watching and listening to Mets games because Florida didn’t yet have a team, was to be the voice of a Major League Baseball franchise.
So of course that was his answer.
But there was one potential problem. The person asking about his dream job was not the president of Florida’s baseball team. He was the president of the Miami Dolphins.
The football team.
“The room got kind of quiet,” Agler said, “and everybody sort of looked at each other, like, ‘You’re supposed to say this job, you idiot.’ But I didn’t have the awareness to do that.”
Agler recalled the president, Mike Dee, chuckling. Wayne Partello, the team executive who recommended hiring Agler to host a new Dolphins talk show, recalled Dee saying, “You know we’re running an NFL franchise here?”
Added Partello: “Jesse said, ‘I’m just giving you the real answer.’ And Mike thought that was amazing. He said, ‘How many kids would have lied to me in that moment?’ This kid’s great.”
That was in the summer of 2010. Three and a half years later, Dee and Partello had moved across the country to join the Padres, and after the death of Jerry Coleman they needed to rework the broadcasting department.
Partello called Agler: “Hey, remember when you told Mike your dream was to be a baseball announcer? Why don’t you come out and check out San Diego?”
Agler had only been to California twice, once to broadcast college baseball in Long Beach while he was at the University of Miami and once to San Francisco and Napa on his honeymoon. But from the night in early 2014 when he got off the plane, he thought, “This is the best place I’ve ever been in my life.”
It wasn’t easy getting here.
Fan from the beginning
Agler was born on opening day of the 1982 baseball season in Vero Beach, Fla. It would make for a better story if he fell in love with baseball by going to Dodgertown every spring, but in reality his family moved to Boca Raton when he was too young to know anything about his birthplace (or his future employer’s closest rival).
Still, Agler was “baseball obsessed for as long as I can remember.”
The first Florida Marlins game was played on his 11th birthday, and of course he was there to see Charlie Hough beat Orel Hershiser and the Dodgers.
“It was the only time my parents ever let me miss school for something fun,” he said.
Agler knew in Little League he was never going to be good enough to play in the big leagues, but he was already looking for an alternative.
“I remember being as entranced by the announcers as I was the game,” he said.
In those pre-Marlins days, Ralph Kiner and Tim McCarver were the primary Mets TV voices, with Bob Murphy, Gary Thorne and Gary Cohen on radio.
“Even as a kid and going to games, we get down to our seats, wherever they were, first thing I’ll do is look up and kind of see if I could find the announcers, if I could recognize them and see them,” he said. “Like that, to me, was as much a part of the magic of baseball as anything that took place.”
Sitting at Petco Park earlier this season, some four hours before a Padres game, Agler detailed the journey that brought him to his current role as the club’s popular radio voice. It was filled with twists and turns and breaks good and bad. But always with the idea of living his dream.
In high school, he ran errands as part of an “unofficial internship” with a regional sports network. He started doing play-by-play on a pirate radio station cooked up by a friend using a Loran antenna, then continued through more conventional means broadcasting countless games at the University of Miami’s student radio station.
“That began the most important four years of my career, though I couldn’t have known it at the time,” he said.
But that was the easy part, especially since that was a period of prominence for Miami, which won national championships in football and baseball during his four years there.
It’s what comes next that often derails so many aspiring broadcasters. He spent the winter before graduation applying for minor league baseball jobs across the country and got exactly one positive response, from a team in Elkhart, Kan., a town of barely 2,000 back then (it’s even smaller now), playing in a college wood-bat summer league.
So two days after graduation, Agler and his father drove a Toyota Avalon from Florida to southwestern Kansas for the start of his professional career with the Elkhart Dusters. On his first night there, he was watching baseball (of course) when he heard tornado sirens (of course). That was new.
“So I got into a closet in this empty house, having no idea what I was supposed to do for like 20 minutes until the sirens stopped,” he said. “And I was like, alright, I guess I’m on my own now.”
The rest of the summer was much better. When it was over, he went back to Florida and, well, started over. Among the contacts he made while at Miami was the program director at WQAM, the school’s flagship station. He got a job doing updates.
And then came his first break.
The NHL was in a lockout, so the station had Steve Goldstein, who was about to begin his first season calling Florida Panthers games, host a nighttime talk show. Agler was doing the updates, and he said he “just clicked” with Goldstein, who began keeping him on the air beyond the normal time for delivering scores.
“I always felt like he was testing me a little bit,” Agler said. “Like does this kid really know stuff, or is he just coming in and reading a script?”
Goldstein quickly learned Agler “knew stuff.” And when the lockout ended, he suggested to station management that they hire Agler to host the pregame and postgame shows.
They listened … which would lead to another break. The Marlins also were on WQAM, and one of their executives was a hockey fan, who told Goldstein the team was looking for a pregame and postgame host.
Agler was recommended and then hired to fill that role. He also engineered the games and did some fill-in work as a game broadcaster. At 24 he figured, “Oh, I’m good. I’m set.”
Two seasons later, the Marlins switched stations and Agler was out.
It would be seven years before he called another baseball game.
Now what?
Bouncing around low-paying radio jobs for a couple more years finally forced Agler to face the question: Is this career going anywhere?
By this point there was another person to consider. Agler was starting to date Tovah, the woman who would become his wife, and as he put it: “She has a normal job in HR. She’s like a functioning adult. And I’m not.”
Tovah wondered if maybe there was something outside sports that interested Agler. He recalled his days as a political science major at Miami when a recruiter from the State Department spoke to his class about joining the foreign service. It sounded interesting except it wasn’t baseball.
Agler began the process. He said he was one of three or four people selected from a group of 30 or 40 and was given “conditional employment” with the State Department, but an actual job was months away.
Around the same time, an opportunity came up at another station in Miami to do traffic reports. To Tovah, it was a “no-brainer” – a steady paycheck, regular hours, benefits. To Agler, it sounded like “as mundane of a thing as could possibly exist.”
But he took the job and though he couldn’t have known it at the time, it turned out to be one of the best decisions of his life.
A couple months later, the station signed up to broadcast Dolphins games. And one guy at the station knew about sports: Agler.
Partello’s idea was to have the station air a team-produced daily show that would talk about the Dolphins, and the host also would write a blog for the website. Partello asked Agler about his writing experience and said he got this answer: “I write a blog every day (but) it’s password-protected, nobody can read it. … It’s just so I keep my skills sharp when I don’t have that in my job right now.”
Said Partello: “I heard that and said, ‘I want this kid on my team.’”
The NFL Draft was coming up, and the Dolphins and the station provided wall-to-wall coverage. Agler was tasked with hosting the sixth and seventh rounds.
“Nobody said it was an audition,” Agler said, “but I treated it like this was my shot, maybe my last shot. And I mean, I did an absurd amount of research. I came in with two giant three-ring binders. I had something on every prospect that might be drafted.”
All that work paid off.
“For the first time in my life, and probably the first of only two or three times ever,” Agler said, “I walked away from something and I thought to myself, ‘I crushed that.’ I was like, very proud of myself. That never happens.”
Partello called two days later and offered him the job. Agler removed himself from consideration with the State Department and then waited for the interview with Dee, who still needed to approve the hire and knew little of Agler. At one point, Partello said Dee told him: “We just went through (interviews with) all these big-name broadcasters that we didn’t go with, and you bring me Jesse Agler?”
But Dee agreed to the fateful “flu interview.”
“Fast forward,” Partello said, “and Jesse became an integral part of the relationship between the team and its fans when we were in Miami.”
The same plan was in place with the move to San Diego, which started with Agler hosting “Padres Social Hour,” overseeing all digital and social media operations and doing some fill-in work. It would be two years before he was full-time in the booth, but he had made it to The Show.
Switching coasts
Agler was new to San Diego and new to the Padres. His radio partner was not.
“Getting to sit with Ted (Leitner) every night, I always call that getting my Ph.D. in baseball broadcasting and in San Diego sports fans, understanding San Diego sports fans — Padres fans in particular,” Agler said. “Another critical step was being next to him hearing him (and) learning not just the history of the franchise, because you can grab that out of books and Baseball-Reference(.com), but from someone who lived most of it, who narrated most of it.”
One thing about Agler that impressed Partello — who left the Padres after the 2020 season but is still in San Diego as co-founder and CEO of Cuento Marketing — was his preparation, which was obvious with the draft show in 2010.
Leitner noticed the same thing and more.
“This kid, and I can call him a kid, is brilliant,” Leitner said. “I used to call him ‘NASA’ because whatever it was, not just technology or remembering facts, but anything. He was right there and helped me.”
Leitner said Coleman always stressed the broadcast was not about any one person looking good, but everyone doing whatever they could to make the broadcast sound good.
“Jesse was on board from Day 1. No ego,” he said. “Such a pleasure. Could not have asked for a better partner in that same motif of one for all, all for one.”
That, Leitner said, is what made his broadcasts work so well with Agler, and what also makes the current-day pairing click with another link to Padres history.
And in a way, Agler reminds Tony Gwynn Jr. of someone very familiar.
“I can respect somebody who takes their craft as seriously as he does,” Gwynn said. “Probably overstudies in most cases. But I appreciate that. I mean, I’ve watched a lot of this stuff in some ways with my dad coming to the field at 1 o’clock for the 7 o’clock game. I understand that type of work ethic. I jive with it.”
Agler is just six months older than Gwynn, so the two grew up watching the same baseball players, TV shows and movies and listening to some of the same music.
“There’s just a lot of things we have in common,” Gwynn said. “We grew up in the same era of baseball and enjoy the same nerdy things about the game. And that made what would eventually become a partnership pretty seamless. Obviously, I have the experience of playing. But there’s an element of growing up watching late ’80s baseball, ’90s, into the 2000s that we see the game in a lot of the same way.”
“Dream pairing,” said Agler.
Agler said the idea is to present the broadcast as though two friends are sitting together watching the game. But he added: “We also want to give the vibe of two guys who are absolute baseball dorks and who love every little stupid thing about this game and want to talk about all those little things.”
That could mean telling a human-interest story in one inning, talking about stats and analytics in another and baseball history in another. Or maybe all three in the same inning, or with the same batter. Agler knows his audience is diverse.
“You want to be able to hit as many of those people as often as you can,” he said. “So it’s know your audience, while also understanding that probably the bulk of the people who are listening to you on the radio are angrily sitting in traffic. So you want it to be a pleasant experience overall.”
Always improving
Few could argue that’s what listeners have when hearing Agler, whether he’s working with Gwynn or Bob Scanlan on radio or with Mark Grant on TV.
And yet Agler never stops trying to improve. He’ll listen to other announcers at times but is careful not to focus on any one for too long. He did that with one of his favorites about eight or nine years ago before he was calling many Padres games and looking for ways to get better.
“I started listening to a lot of Dan Shulman,” Agler said. “And then all of a sudden I went back and I listened to myself at one point that summer, and I was starting to slip a little bit almost into a Dan Shulman impersonation, like my cadence had become a lot like his. And I was like, ‘No, no, no, that’s not good.’ I recognized it immediately.”
Sometimes it’s more instructive to go back and listen to himself. He’ll pick a game from a couple weeks earlier, go to a random inning and listen for five minutes. Hear what sounded good, hear what maybe didn’t. And no moment is too small.
“This is where you’ll see I’m insane,” he said.
“I’ll like, listen to a home run call, and after the main part of the call, I’ll hear that I paused for three seconds to give the crowd their moment, and then I went back and thought, ‘It probably should have been more like two seconds.’ I’ll microscopically do surgery on it. And it’s a terrible thing to do to myself, but I think it’s important.
“… I really dive into that on a fairly regular basis. Always trying to get better. Always, always picking myself apart.”
Agler knows how close he came to none of this happening. A twist here or a turn there when he was in Miami, or a different front office in San Diego, or who knows what else could have derailed his dream and led him to a foreign service posting anywhere from Azerbaijan to Zimbabwe.
But luck is one thing. Talent is another.
Said Leitner: “Jesse got great luck, finally, after paying his dues … and made the best of it. Getting your foot in the door is wonderful, but you’re not sticking around if you’re not good.”
Posner, a former writer and sports editor for the Union-Tribune, is a freelance writer.
Jesse Agler file
Age: 42
Born: Vero Beach, Fla.
College: University of Miami
Family: Married 13 years (Tovah) with one son (Jonah, 8) and one daughter (Ellie, 3). The Aglers live in San Marcos.
