who knows whom, wanting to say who knows what on a live radio station.
As I stated in the first sentence of this missive, I don’t take live phone calls on sports radio at WNST any longer.
Why?
Because I don’t think it’s good radio or conversation. Much has changed about the world since I started taking phone calls in 1991. The internet has allowed everyone their own voice to be published in their own space for their own audience.
But somehow there’s some fictional notion that I no longer interact with Baltimore sports fans?
That’s insane. Have you visited my Facebook page?
Have you seen our Twitter lately?
We have people all over the world interacting with our social media and my #GiveASpit tour brought more folks into the fold.
But here’s the truth:
Like anyone sane, I no longer interact with vicious assholes – ones who offer nothing to me intellectually or my radio station or our product for the audience. And I no longer take random phone calls on the radio because 90% of the time I didn’t find it compelling or interesting. I started taking phone calls in 1991 and took roughly 20,000 of them in my radio career.
We’ve taken more phone calls at WNST-AM 1570 than most people have had hot meals.
It felt like every year the quality got worse and the gene pool for real sports information and intelligence became far more shallow. Keep in mind, in those early days of sports radio, holding a trivia contest and giving away prizes was a staple of the programming.
Any radio industry expert – even those assclowns at Aribtron – would tell you that less than 1% of 1% of sports radio listeners EVER call a radio show.
So, I’m sitting around all day waiting for them to call and make my show better?
Really?
And what is the quality of what I’m going to get to make my show better or more interesting or compelling?
And who needs to allow a bunch of relentless pricks in their life – disguised as “customers” or “callers”? I dealt with plenty of that in my 20s. I’ve taken more phone calls than any host in the history of Baltimore sports radio. Tens of thousands of phone calls – back when many of them were actually good.
Insults, debates, nice conversations, interesting chats and even some wonderful displays of humanity when the right people called with the right information or cogent and salient points. When I did my March 5th show for my father I would get calls all day that were worthy of the “Caller Hall of Fame.” I made a lot of friends in Baltimore sports and many callers became friends over the years.
But, over time and with the advent of message boards at the turn of the century and social media over the past decade, it became a rapidly deteriorating art form – good, quality callers on sports radio shows of any kind. The lack of respect, cursing, brazen racism, lack of topicality, or quality banter all made anyone coming to sports radio want to roll their eyes.
When I put on 105.7 The Fan these days – and it’s rare because it sucks so bad that I can’t listen to it – I’m the one rolling my eyes.
I’m sure this is what I’m missing this week by not taking phone calls at WNST:
“Fire the coach!”
“Bench the quarterback!”
“Kill the _______!”
“Hey Nestor, you’re an asshole and you’re WRONG because __________….”
It could be worse. I could get Steve Bisciotti’s emails…
And every hanger-on who ever wanted to do Baltimore sports radio still hates me because I didn’t make them the Dan Patrick or J.T. The Brick of local sports journalism with my magic wand. And every person who called felt a God-given right to be heard no matter how outlandish or ill-informed their thoughts might be.
We had constant prank calls, phone dropout issues, seven-second delay FCC issues, volume issues, etc. How many times did I have to tell a caller to turn his radio down because we were on seven-second delay?
We also had thin-skinned hosts getting
