when the Bills were losing 35-3 at halftime!) He is also the one person in the world who I can honestly say I’ve never heard a bad word about. He only has friends and everyone loves Ricig!
His son Tup, also, is responsible for first calling me “Nasty” Nestor.
And even THAT is a “baseball story” through and through.
When Eddie Murray first was dealt to Los Angeles, I still had an Eddie “thing.” I loved Eddie Murray right up until the time I actually met him, which is how any Baltimore kid who grew up to be a media member might feel.
Eddie’s nearest first and nearest approach as a member of the Dodgers was on May 14, 1989, when he came to The Vet.
I took my 4-year old son up to the game that day. Eddie Murray hit two homers and drove in five runs in a 9-0 rout of “my” Phillies.
I came back into The Evening Sun newsroom that Sunday evening lamenting how badly the Phillies and their pitching sucked.
Ricig always hand-delivered his cartoon to the office on Calvert Street on Sunday nights and we’d always catch up on whatever life was bringing us at that point. I told him about the game and Eddie, and off the cuff, told him there was no way he could give me the first names of the five chumps that the Phillies used on the mound that afternoon.
He said he could. I made a bet that I’d baby sit his kids for a night if he could.
I pulled up the boxscore, gave him the last names (which I’m still mostly unfamiliar with) and he rattled off four of the names quite easily.
Alex Madrid was the starter, who lasted 3 and 2/3 innings. Randy O’Neal, Gordon Dillard and Greg Harris rolled off his tongue as well.
The final arsonist, who gave up four earned runs on three hits and two homers including one to Murray in just one inning of work also had a last name: Frohwirth.
But, after a pregnant pause, he made a wild guess: “Todd,” he said.
Damn! I’d been had, so I made the phone call to his wife Terri and set up a summer Saturday night to hang out with his kids (who I liked but who were complete terrors when I was around) and combine a Saturday night as a single Dad with my son, Barry, who was a little younger than his two boys, Steve and Tup.
I arrived, settled into the Ricig’s humble abode in Northeast Baltimore and Terri had food already bought, prepped and ready to grill. Chicken wings, burgers, dogs, cold beer in the fridge and the ballgame was on in a couple of hours. They also provided the phone number to the local pizza shop for delivery, just in case.
I was doing a good deed, spending time with my son, entertaining him on a Saturday night and I could get some peace and quiet in the basement watching the ballgame on a summer Saturday night.
Somehow, the wings caught on fire on the grill, which blazed out of control. The kids were screaming and hungry, I was missing the damned game and I sent them all to bed early so I could watch baseball in peace and quiet.
From that evening on, I was simply known to Ricig’s kids as “NASTY NESTOR.”
Oh, and here’s the footnote of interest: Todd Frohwirth actually became a friend of mine three seasons later when he pitched for the Orioles at Camden Yards. We even went to an NCAA Tournament basketball session together in St. Petersburg during the spring training of 1994 with Mike Mussina, who was Frohwirth’s roommate on the road during his first seasons in Baltimore.
Every one of my employees and all of the people you hear here at WNST are my extended family, really, and I hope that comes across our airwaves on a daily basis. And every one of them came to me through sports and every one of them shared the exact same kind of childhood: we all grew up in a household where the O’s games were on every night.
To me, it’s a virtual perquisite to have a job on the air at WNST. If you don’t have the history with the Orioles in Baltimore, to me you just aren’t qualified to host sports radio in the Charm City.
Because all of my friends KNOW the history of the Orioles better than they know their own family
