What does it say that Nestor Aparicio has been professionally bullied, gaslit and banned by Orioles and Ravens ownership after four decades of covering Baltimore sports as a professional reporter, author and journalist? Plenty. About billionaires, money, fealty and the death of local sports journalism and the emergence of team websites as monopoly “news” sources. Read and learn…
What does it really say that I was “kicked out” of being an accredited and credentialed Orioles and Ravens media member as a Baltimore sports journalist after 40 years of steadfastly honest, local work?
I get asked this one by friends, fans, listeners, viewers and readers more than any other question.
I thought it was time to give this a thorough and thoughtful answer that you deserve during this Labor Day, when I am a local journalist being denied access to do the professional job I’ve done all of my life by the men and women who do the dirty work for the local sports franchises who just took $1.2 billion of civic money in attempt to privatize the profit while socializing the expense. Of course, Sashi Brown, on behalf of the starving billionaire Steve Bisciotti, used the public money to build the new pint-sized Kevin Byrne Press Box (structured like a little house under the Victory Arch that I once sold 5,000 Poor Suckers Licenses under on their behalf a lifetime ago, begging fans to make football work again in Baltimore).
The other question – or statement, honestly now that Peter Angelos is dead and his family is finally gone from ownership – that I get on every bar stool, dance floor, beach, at every networking event, in every restaurant, at every Crab Cake Tour show since the spring all over the state of Maryland:
“The Orioles are going to welcome you back in, right? You’re going to be back in the press box now!”
Yeah, what could new Orioles owner and mensch David Rubenstein possibly have against a lifelong media guy who is the last remaining relative in Baltimore of his all-time favorite Orioles player (as stated by Rubensplash himself on his MASN broadcast on Opening Day)? The Dundalk guy of Hall of Fame Venezuelan bloodlines who owns an FCC license and used his civic influence to present uncomfortable truths and fight for better ownership for the local baseball team that had significantly atrophied in every measurable way for three decades after being gifted Camden Yards by the people of Maryland?
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Well, settle in because I have a lot on my mind here on this Labor Day when I’m being disallowed to do the work I’ve done since 1984, when as a 15-year old I began learning my media craft and grew to become the best and most influential local sports journalist of this generation.
And whilst my incredible employee and partner Luke Jones is being stretched unfairly (yet somehow very capably) into double duty with the significance of every pitch and throw and catch from the Orioles and Ravens this month and well into October and beyond as the only WNST reporter the billion-dollar local professional sports teams will credential.
When games and practices happen simultaneously, we are only allowed to cover one of them. None of the other media outlets in the city deal with this unprofessional garbage.
My local, Towson-based media business is being denied the right and access to fairly compete with all of the other media companies in the marketplace.
When you read this one, consider it the first of many soon-to-come missives here at #ColumnNes and Baltimore Positive in a never-ending series of “Dear John” letters – I’ve always aspired to be “A Man of Letters” – that will travel far beyond the desk of Harbaugh this fall as both professional sports franchises share the promise to host championship parades on Pratt Street. Maybe you’ll wanna call or write your favorite billion-dollar sports franchise executives and ask them why the only Hispanic journalist in the history of sports media in Baltimore doesn’t have a seat in their press box and at their press conferences?
Ask them why my Caucasian employee has access, and where in their much-vaunted “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” programs does it say to ban the Latino reporter they personally don’t like and fear and disrespect – but allow everyone else in? And then not give a reason or rationale and leave me on the streets to answer the questions from the more than 100,000 fans of their teams who follow our work for integrity-based and deeply knowledgeable Baltimore sports news and views.
The kind of coverage only experts and professionals can provide. That is our brand. So is telling the truth.
8Someone recently told me that I am like the Ricky Gervais of local media: I make them all squirm with the uncomfortable truths of holding up a mirror and pointing to what the rest of us intelligent lifer fans and citizens see very clearly about a lifetime of watching – and paying top dollar for – professional sports franchises as their wealthy humans hold cities, citizens and fans hostage and then raise the prices and lower the access whilst submerging the bar for honesty, integrity and accountability for all of the “too-big-to-fail” profits.
So what DOES it say that I have said so much and demand so much of folks whom I’ve seen up close and personally have so much wealth and affluence as to deem me – and all of you, and deep down you know this – as insignificant personal ATMs, ears and eyes shut, wallets wide open and hopelessly addicted to sports logos and tribal colors and faux “my city vs. your city warfare” like a soap opera with a never-ending and lifelong side order of gambling crack?
I firmly believe that what their “Let’s cancel Nestor and maybe he’ll just die or go away” banishment of me should blatantly tell you is that after four decades of doing this work and being trained by the best people to ever do it in Baltimore – and breathing my corporate, out-of-town FM competitor into existence and all of the R&D and humans that were afforded opportunities by the sweat of my brow who walk as credentialed professionals to work on the sidelines, in the dugout and press boxes that the taxpayers built (again) – I don’t kiss anyone’s ass for a press pass.
Nor should this be a prerequisite.
And it says that weak men like Greg Bader and Chad Steele (and The Whistler you’ll soon meet) fear me and have never made any honorable attempt to communicate with me in good faith. My former West Baltimore producer Ray Bachman had a term for people like them: “Pratt Street,” because they’re one way.
It says that I’m so far into the heads of Bader and Steele that they read every word I say and hear every word of disgust I express at their failure as professional communicators, good citizens and people who have lacked integrity (and courage) at every step through (literally) decades of not dealing with me as a human being.
A few of my “non-negotiables” for engagement as a professional journalist:
8I don’t accept pre-rehearsed, staged press conference babble as factual. (Especially when John Harbaugh’s eyes roll left-to-right, which has always been his ‘tell’ for dishonesty, which I read pretty well from three feet in front of him at every press conference for 15 years but now watch on Facebook Live, which is strangely always ahead of the dot com feed.)
Like a trained professional, I actually ask follow-up questions and press cogent and salient points and issues on behalf of the fans for clarity and context to anything I’ve ever said or written over my career. The “press” actually press for truth. That is my job. It’s why I exist.
I don’t allow the PR handler/intimidator-of-the-moment to hand me the questions or tell me that I’m not allowed to ask about the quarterback today.
I abhor being lied to, and clearly, I don’t intimidate easily – or well. Even if you’re 6-feet-7 and towering over me and shouting nonsense.
It’s beyond unprofessional. (Even when, and especially, when it’s announced as “off the record” … in the darkness they prefer and insist upon as to keep the power and lay the anonymous blame.)
And, at 55 years of age and knowing right from wrong and being raised by a good mother, I don’t respond well to being spoken to in a lifelong, one-way conversation like a farm animal who is lucky to breathe the same air as a hopelessly arrogant, out-of-town sports locker room bouncer in a suit with a fancy title that does nothing to serve the fan base. And would be willing to do anything to hide facts – or gladly mislead – legitimate reporters.
Or even target them, bully them and ban them in front and with full knowledge of their fellow executives, who conveniently look the other direction like a professional wrestling referee who never saw the brass knuckles. (The problem is that I have the text threads. They know they’re lying. Cass. Harbaugh. DeCosta. Bisciotti. All of them…)
8If you don’t have the core integrity as a senior executive of a billion dollar sports franchise to admit that I’m a legitimate Baltimore sports media member – and provide me the proper accreditation based on my lifetime of credentials and current work – what else are you willing to completely lie about to the world?
(Just think about that…)
And what do you expect me to tell the general public and my community that has watched my life and work unfold on a daily basis for 33 years based on my ownership of an FCC license and a sports media business, website and breaking news text service that has been best-in-show for two decades?
I tell them about highly compensated and self-congratulatory powerful men and women in power suits with corner offices in publicly financed facilities who tell their private jet and limousine billionaire owners they can control every message and every human, and every tweet and status. The kind of “brand manager” and internal “power” (or is it a weakness?) to even send MASN broadcaster Kevin Brown home for an inexplicably embarrassing mysterious, month-long “timeout” just last summer for not wearing the birdhead appropriately and pressuring a professional broadcaster that “alternative facts” be presented about the Orioles’ decades of ineptitude on the field where the stats are the real measurement. We’ve all witnessed it and endured it.
A generation after legendary Hall of Famer Jon Miller was flogged by Peter Angelos as “not bleeding enough orange and black” on my radio show in 1997, they’re demanding that baseball broadcasters subvert truth and basic facts about the game in order to be allowed to wear the team cartoon bird logo over their hearts like a flag to the estate.
And our citizens just gifted $1.2 billion more of civic money to billionaires to erect larger golden domes to further gouge the public with pricey downtown discos that look like an airport lounge in Dubai at the 50-yard line of what used to be my press box seat that was once used to hold these people accountable to the public not just for what they’re doing with their football players as much as what they’re doing with our civic money and goodwill.
What is worse? (and this is not a trick question):
8“Head Coach” Deion Sanders, a man who has hundreds of millions of wealth and a state job, cowardly terrorizing a five-figure-a-year affiliate sports reporter in Boulder, Colorado trying to feed his family by singling him out at a “Prime” press conference to challenge his credibility for asking simple football questions…and then the University signing on to ban the reporter from asking more questions.
Or John Harbaugh, who has made more than $100 million of local sports money, being a part of banning a four-decades, established and influential local journalist, business owner and civic advocate from all media access and then sleazily lying to me (and you) about it all? While quoting Bible scripture after running the ball three times in a hideous home AFC Championship Game loss…
And if you don’t care about holding any of them accountable for their words or deeds or profits while you deify their sports accomplishments and send them to the human “Hall of Fame” based on hero worship – or you’ve given up or in, or even worse – gone so kayfabe as to not even care to understand the economics and basic integrity of the operation as a local business “stakeholder” with a franchise that allegedly was once believed to be a “civic trust” – then you are truly a hopeless mark.
Just like me with the (officially licensed) Baltimore Colts belt buckle and Houston Oilers trash can of my childhood in my office right now.
Like Trump, their favorite sports fans are the uneducated ones. The “suckers” they know they can do anything to and charge premium prices and still keep for life. (And that is most of you, they believe, no matter how much they spend on their baseball payroll – you’ll eat the Salisbury steak and call it a filet mignon). Like the ones in Cleveland who’ll still buy tickets to see the likes of DeShaun Watson play quarterback after 30 years of watching the Browns futility and civic awfulness of the criminal allegations against the owner. Or whatever anyone who still owns a burgundy and gold hat for the Washington Football awfulness has endured and still purchases with their hard-earned money.
Or anyone who is trying to find all of the NFL games from Brazil and Europe and Thursday Night Prime and blah, blah, blah. I’ve got your Peacock right here! The bill is coming. And you’ll pay it…or they think you will. You will even alter and plan your Christmas dinner around it. Thanksgiving, too!
I still bought my season tickets in Section 513 and held my 4 PSLs and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars chasing the Baltimore Ravens professionally and cheering for them long after the humans inside the franchise started treating me like a human garbage pail during the week in Owings Mills as that “media vermin” Ol’ Ballcoach Saban warned ’em about in college.
8And this is a baked-in part of the problem for the continuing game of never-ending billionaire profit while almost comically claiming the business goals are somehow philanthropic or community building.
I watched the Angelos clan take a $29 million cash investment in 1993 and then completely destroy what anyone in this community ever associated with “The Oriole Way.” And they cashed out six weeks ago, more than 31 years later, with $1.725 billion for two kids who spent three decades fighting with each other and a family that destroyed the brand and my downtown on summer nights for a generation of citizens who paid the freight via their cable television bill. And the annual profits of tens of millions of dollars, generous tax breaks, free rent and benefits over a lifetime of being born on third and believing we saw them triple off the wall as they count the Baltimore and Wall Street money from the Nashville dugout after a squeeze play.
A losing and laughingstock franchise fell forward and upward to the tune of $50 million a year in value while it destroyed the soul of the city on summer nights and offended everyone in its wake.
And banned one local journalist and AM radio station host and owner after a billion dollar MLB team refused to pay their bill for a successful sponsorship package in 2004. And then sent the Oriole Bird to assault me at a game where WNST sold them 1,500 tickets in right field while the team was in last place again.
And you think the billionaire dancing on the dugout, throwing out baseball caps and making Johnny Bravo television hype promos wants to answer legitimate questions from someone other than Cal Ripken’s son or one his MASN employees parading as a journalist? No one has answered a question here about the baseball team with any integrity since Edward Bennett Williams died and Larry Lucchino refused to lie for Peter Angelos in 1993.
Speaking of lies, I’m in search of the truth here…
The first time I watched David Rubenstein on CNBC was back in the spring, talking about his charitable endeavor with the Baltimore Orioles. It went from being a “great investment, no one has ever lost money owning a pro sports franchise” to “really, a philanthropic endeavor” to “we expect it to generate a lot of revenue in the coming years” all in one breath over 90 seconds.
8I felt like I needed a political and financial shower after that one…
And then the real Birdland faithful – the humans who buy the tickets and serve as the engine that pays for it all – got their orange Team Rubenstein welcoming love letter last month for the 2025 season tickets and upcoming October playoff gouging and the membership rewards shrinkage. Every human ATM who bought tickets to see Rio Ruiz went to social media (rightfully) pissed off.
I’ll be writing in the coming weeks about my “interactions” with Team Rubenstein and the real future owner of the team, Michael Arougheti. They’ll probably never sit with me and I’ll be shocked if I ever meet either of them again (I had the pleasure of sharing an all-too-brief moment of the same oxygen with Arougheti – and Priscilla – on Opening Day and that was really something…) but my first question would be about how they’d legitimately position the Baltimore Orioles as a philanthropic business play?
Of course, I’d have a lot of salient questions for a homecoming Baltimore billionaire who hosts his own talk show who is going to run from me whilst he owns the hometown baseball team and have his whistling assistant tell me that my press credentials are “under team review” only to phone me six weeks later to speak to me like a sewer rat. (Here’s a preview of my “Dear Mr. Rubenstein” letter: his very esteemed professional communications specialist screamed at me to “Shut up!!!” six times back in May and told me that I need to be more contrite to get my press credentials back. I was far more polite to him than I should have been. I also quietly assured him that my name isn’t Kevin Brown. Or Roch Kubatko.)
But someone is gonna have to fork over more than the price of the pricey concessions if Adley Rutschman and Gunnar Henderson and Jackson Holliday are going to Cooperstown as Baltimore Orioles. (The sentence I just typed will cost Orioles fans – or their “philanthropic” ownership more than $100 million a year in 2029 when they’re all 27 years old. And a minimum of $700 million up front. This, of course, is if they’re as good as Mike Elias says they’re going to be…)
This is the part where I wish good luck to incoming Orioles president Catie Griggs, whom I hope is more friendly and kind than any of them. Time will tell…but here’s what I’ll tell her when she gets her personal letter from me:
I worked in every locker room ever as an ambassador and ombudsman of Baltimore sports fans seeking truth and to tell the inside story to local folks in the best and fairest and most accurate way possible – first in the newspaper, then on the radio, onto the internet, and in any words I’ve ever communicated. I’ve treated every athlete, every coach, every team executive with a lifetime of professional respect. That never wavered from the first time Tom Robinson took me into the AHL Skipjacks press box in 1984 at the Baltimore Civic Center at Sportsf1rst and The News American. It’s the trust that more than 100,000 of you have every day that if it has my name on it – and the WNST and Baltimore Positive brand on it, it’s true and accurate.
8Men like Greg Bader and Chad Steele fear me and dehumanize me and loathe me – seeking to de-legitimize my personal reputation, work and my business – because, as Bono once sang, “I’m dangerous, ’cause I’m honest.”
As a fan, friend, follower, listener, or anyone here who has ever gotten a WNST Text or read a book or attended a roadtrip with my family, you should be appalled and outraged at how I’ve been treated.
And you know why? Because they would’ve done this to you and your family and your highly credible four-decade local business as well. It’s beyond unprofessional. And it’s wrong. And if you see them, you should tell them.
And the questions about why I’ve been “canceled” after supporting both of the franchises locally as a business owner, fan and local citizen – and quite publicly and unabashedly – all of my life, should be directed to Steele and Bader. And the billionaires whom they dubiously represent.
Ask them why they’ve exterminated me.
As I told The Whistler, I really don’t know why…but it sure feels and looks petty and small to anyone I ever encounter on the streets of Baltimore who thinks a few questions to a few billionaires every once in a while isn’t too much to ask for the city’s investment and the public’s involvement and trust.
They never gave me a legitimate reason because they don’t have one.
8And who is going to ask them?
They’ve done all they can do to – literally in the case of DeCosta and Bisciotti, last spring – run from me at every turn and avoid a good faith conversation. They lack integrity and accountability. My banishment oozes that for anyone who has been paying attention.
My extermination should tell you that they don’t trust me to do their bidding for them.
And they shouldn’t because I’ve never carried an ounce of water for liars.
So they attempted to intimidate me (or poison my name within their organization) until such point that doing the job certainly provided no joy anyway, and then threw me out – without providing any cause and certainly without any questions from other cowardly-by-nature and intimidated media members and organizations. And Bader and Steele clearly intend to keep me out and suffocate my coverage and my professional credibility until I’m dead or out of business.
And now I’m the “bad guy” who has spouted nothing but truth on the radio since 1991.
If you don’t believe me, ask the wife of former Orioles manager Buck Showalter, whom I’ve only met once in my life:
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That’s a “Bad Guy” in uppercase. Really? That’s what Team Angelos told everyone in their universe for a generation. I was the Bad Guy for reporting truth, straight gospel, while they bilked the community for $1.725 billion and destroyed and embarrassed the franchise on and off the field over two generations.
My friends and sponsors and lifelong supporters still come to Baltimore Positive on the regular and I’m very grateful.
Maybe one day I’ll be a “Good Guy” and return to being a Baltimore sports journalist who isn’t treated like he deserves to drink from the fountain out back. I saw that first hand in Arlington, Texas last October. So did Luke when they tried to take his MLB media clubhouse credential for having the audacity to be accompanied by vermin like me.
Because you’re still here reading, supporting my work and my small, local business, I will keep doing my world-class and best-in-market sports coverage and work long beyond Labor Day and continue growing Baltimore Positive as a thriving conversation of hope for my hometown.
Believe it or not, as I told Terrell Suggs many years ago when he opined that I loved when the team lost because it gave me something to write about (which a decade into his career should’ve shown his incredible ignorance and that of those in his franchise’s PR department to my work), “Nothing good happens in my life when the Orioles and Ravens lose.”
I’ve done everything in my power to explain to fans ‘the why’ behind an Orioles and Ravens win or loss.
And we’ve done that better than anyone’s done it this century in Baltimore sports media. That won’t change. Ever.
8And you’re watching and reading and listening to it because I’m still doing the best work of my career. I appreciate that!
And if you see Eric DeCosta, tell him I’m still alive. He still stands. I’m just out on the porch.
Hear my name. Take a good look. This could be the day…
