When Rich went to San Diego to build a baseball broadcast on an Alt Rock Station. 

Entercom’s Padres Radio Network KPI

• Build an MLB play-by-play broadcast.
• Introduce radio play-by-play sales to a radio cluster that didn’t have any spoken word formats.
• Create shoulder programming and social media on an Alt-Rock radio format.  

In 2016, the San Diego Padres announced their partnership with Entercom Radio to leave their long-time flagship, The Mighty 1090. Rich was hired in December to head up the new flagship for Entercom.

The new flagship faced many challenges as the Padres migrated to their new FM home. The games were put on Alt 949, a music format. The previous flagship dropped its rates in the final year of the contract. This challenged the new station since the previous advertisers had gotten rock-bottom prices on the old flagship.

Rich moved to San Diego and left his family behind in Florida to finish out the school year and sell their house. He began working with the engineers to ensure they were prepared for the upcoming season. He identified the need for a music station without experience in sports play-by-play. He repulped an unused studio to be the new control room for the Padres. He also worked with station engineers to set up space to archive games and to cut game highlights. He then worked to find a staff of producers and tape editors for the season.

Rich helped create the sales program for Entercom’s new baseball account executives. He worked with them to develop sales programs. He also created the game formats and established rates to reach their sales revenue goals for the season. He worked on pre- and post-game features and in-game liners to help drive revenue. Working with the local sales manager, Rich oversaw all broadcast and sponsorship acceptances. Under his leadership, he created enough valuable content to save some of the former sponsors from the previous station and bring in new sponsors to help meet sales goals. Herrera also stood up on social media platforms for the radio broadcast. Before the 2017 season, teams posted audio highlights with a still photo and an MP3. Herrera found freeware from SUNY. NY created the first audiogram in MLB, now an industry-standard in broadcasting. He also developed Social Media content, including the Padres Radio Social Media rundown a d, a daily podcast of game highlights, and a weekly podcast of the “Top 9 Plays Of The Week”. This was crucial since the radio broadcast had no shoulder programming because it was on a music format during the day.