With the Orioles doing late night duty on the West Coast, Seth Elkin of The Maryland Lottery talks some baseball records and Home Run Riches winners with Nestor for the holiday weekend of pennant race fever.
game, homeruns, july, winners, orioles, lottery, prizes, win, maryland, year, gold rush, baseball, pirates, couple, tickets, hitting, oriole, talking, seth, fourth
SPEAKERS
Nestor J. Aparicio, Seth Elkin
Nestor J. Aparicio 00:01
Welcome home we are wn st am 1570, Towson, Baltimore and Baltimore positive happy post Fourth of July as we come to you the Orioles are playing before no one out in the bay area we’re playing pretty good baseball right now. Our friends at the Maryland lottery putting us back out on the road next Friday the Maryland crabcakes war in its fourth year now with the Maryland lottery conjunction with our friends at Liberty cure solutions and Jiffy Lube MultiCare I will have these I’ll have the Gold Rush sevens doublers not quite red, white and blue to red and gold but they will have these on the 12 the Yankees are in town these do not have pinstripes in These stripes don’t run will be there from 2005 maybe even earlier. It’s going to be a good day come down to fade Lee’s and serve the delicious crab cakes that I serve to my friends on our Fourth of July celebration. This guy he was stalking me earlier in the week and I said you know what? Let’s do some baseball here after the Seattle series. Let’s see how much of John Martin’s money we can give away. The Maryland lottery course sponsors homerun riches contest. Yeah, you know Anderson Westberg attitude out in Seattle. Two out of three ain’t bad as meatloaf would say. Seth Elkins here he is you know he’s given up that pirates hat for the Orioles Saturday. I think your rules are kind of winning them over a little bit with his baseball nerd them and looking up statistics and stuff. This is um this is quite a baseball team is it not sat I mean from any account anywhere watching this unfold on a day by day basis. I got to correct myself the first place Baltimore Orioles. I like saying that. Not a whole lot of fun. But the first place Baltimore Orioles out in Oakland. It’s been quite a week since the last time you and I got to go sky was falling after the Houston series right?
Seth Elkin 01:38
We we love saying the Orioles are in first place around here because regardless of whether you’re a pirate’s fan like me which I am and or an Orioles fan it’s always fun to put down the Yankees and to to stick it to the Yankees fans around here when the Orioles finally do overtake them. So that’s that’s been a lot of fun to watch here this week. And you know, since the last time we talked we got the all star rosters I know I was I was hoping that we were gonna get three Oriole starters in the All Star game and we almost did. We got we got a bunch of guys into that final round of voting. And I was disappointed that Ryan mountcastle didn’t end up beating up Vladimir Guerrero for that first base spot because
Nestor J. Aparicio 02:19
I thought was amazing. They took those guys down to the old time Photoshop and Ocean City and they did all the social media gunslinging and did all that stuff. I you know, listen, the All Star game isn’t what it used to be. And you know, I attended that all star game on Pittsburgh back in the 90s with all the juice balls and McGriff hitting homeruns into the upper deck and Lee Smith and all that stuff. Three Rivers I remember all that. This summer, though I think it’s been even more special where even Fourth of July they’re playing out on the West Coast and friends over everybody’s monitoring the game. Everyone’s watching the game. But even as a pirates fan, and I’m not beating on you. It’s certainly John had his phone with me last week with Cleveland Guardian sync first place guardians. There is something that when you’re a lowly, no offense to the Guardians, the pirates or the Orioles, we’re all kind of lonely when I add up the championships that none of us have this century or anytime recently, and while your best pitchers pitching for the Yankees, and coming in here to beat us next week and families and we watch Messina go leave and Britain and you know, so we’ve been through all of that as fans, it’s not often you get to say first place. I mean like then that’s one thing I think add in the Twitter community that I try to avoid a little bit because I don’t need to be in fights on the internet with Oriole fans about anything, right. But they like to fight amongst themselves because it’s a sports fan thing. But that whole first place. Thing is I mean, dude, I’ve been on here 32 years, I would really have to add on 97 was wired a wire. I was here for all that 14 We had some fun, but dude, I’m talking about like, and it wasn’t like we were in first place at the end of April and had a good start. Or we have one of those years with this. This palmiero Your 405 We had a good first half and then Palmero and the pointy and they’re speaking and all that. I would just say first place on the air how many days in my 32 years and I’ve done I mean we’re talking 15,000 days of radio. I you know, less than a couple 100 And then other than those like, none, you know, they’re like they’re years decades that went where you’re not first place for a day. And your pirates gone. You understand that? So like this is these are the good days when I tried to tell young people like yeah, this is 6970 71 We’re in that phase where they can win a World Series and I haven’t been able to like open the microphone and say that out loud much in my my adulthood.
Seth Elkin 04:35
It’s exciting. And how great is it that they’re leading the major leagues in homeruns? While we’ve got a promotion tied to home
Nestor J. Aparicio 04:41
run, I know you do the math on that stuff. Give it to him. Where are we with the math, we
Seth Elkin 04:46
I gotta go look it up myself. They’re hitting them so fast that I can’t keep track of it here but what we’re doing the majors as as we speak, I’ve gotta go. I gotta
Nestor J. Aparicio 04:57
let me segue this for you. Because when I do At the 25th anniversary documentary, you were good enough to watch. We talked about your background in newspapers in my background in newspapers every night, I had to when Ken Rosenthal was the beat writer, Jim Hanuman in the press box I, they were my colleagues. Every night I was the one in charge of updating the oral stats, because like we had to get it right in the paper. We couldn’t wait on the Elias Sports Bureau to updated AP. I literally, I was the manual guy. I was the overlord of the Orioles. And I would always compare him to what the morning son had, because we had, you know, make sure I had the stats, right. And then at the end of the day, they would send out the official stats, and you could double check them, but I put them in the paper and if mountcastle and Westberg get home runs I had to do that tally. And I know you and Doug Lloyd are in charge of this down here at the Maryland lottery right
Seth Elkin 05:46
yet we every day you can go on the home run Rich’s promotion page and see the tally and we’re a little behind here at the moment as I’m looking we gotta get a couple of games updated here from us. You don’t have
Nestor J. Aparicio 05:58
a Nester in the middle of the night on the Fourth of July having to update every stat.
Seth Elkin 06:02
I’m having worked in a newsroom. I know exactly what that
Nestor J. Aparicio 06:06
data you know, you know that I know that you know, right. So, if at any rate, it’s gonna hit five more today anyway, so whatever number you give me the right yeah, against
Seth Elkin 06:17
against the Oakland A’s that number is gonna go up here. So
Nestor J. Aparicio 06:20
foul balls, there’s too much foul territory.
Seth Elkin 06:24
And lots of empty seats there will miss game on.
Nestor J. Aparicio 06:27
I reminisce this week, the best baseball game I ever saw in person and I’ve seen 57 World Series games in person. Like I’ve been a lot of games. I saw the labor time run. I was Joe Carter. I saw a lot of great baseball games, game sevens, the whole deal. best baseball game I ever saw was that at that stadium was the Oakland A’s and the Red Sox with the Johnny Damon got carted off at that game, and the crotch shop game and Miguel shahada and Barry Zito and like all of that Pedro real nasty game five knockout back in oh four and, and the Red Sox went on winning the World Series but at the heart I came here after that, but you know, I I liked that stadium. I like I’m looking I like that better than Seattle when we didn’t hit any homeruns because nobody hits any homeruns in Seattle. Got
Seth Elkin 07:11
a couple that last game. That was nice. Almost the third one Westberg ended up hitting one he almost did the second one and the last game of that series.
Nestor J. Aparicio 07:18
So you were watching on the Fourth of July?
Seth Elkin 07:21
I absolutely was watching. Yes. And I gotta keep up with it. Because I told you a couple of times before you know my my mom is from here originally. And she is a huge Orioles fan. She’s watching every game. So if I’m not watching,
Nestor J. Aparicio 07:34
there’s gonna cry when the World Series is that I get text messages from her as the games in progress should make you happy. If your mother’s happy. Come on. Okay, good. Good. I want to see an Oreo hat in that office of all that penguins. stuff. Yeah, Seth Elkins here he is the director communications helps us with telling stories. And he’s a baseball guy. He’s one of my baseball’s. So we all know what the promotion Kevin Brown reason when their bases are loaded, we can win a lot of money. Everybody soup to nuts on home, right? Just just top to bottom is we only see it but we don’t always give all the rules to give all that and how to play and how to get involved and how to have your name be in the one read in September when the home runs start to really matter. Yep,
Seth Elkin 08:12
it’s you still got a couple of months left here. We do the drawings a month at a time. So all the winners through the month of July have already been selected, but you still got a shot to enter your $5 homerun riches Bases Loaded fast play tickets. That’s the mechanism to enter you buy those tickets at any Lottery retailer enter into your My lottery rewards account. And you’ll have a shot of being one of those winners for the games. In August or September. We still got two months left and an awful lot of homeruns at the rate that this team is hitting them so plenty of time to still get in on that and lots of other things that we’ve got going on
Nestor J. Aparicio 08:45
for the Orioles and for where we are. We’re really close to right it’s easy to write. You have something coming up with ravens to write
Seth Elkin 08:54
the Ravens second chance that the Ravens scratch off tickets will come in August and and then there’s a second chance contest to that we’ll get started with that. Of course everybody anticipates you have the big enchilada there is the Ravens seats for 20 years that we love given away we have so much fun with that. But
Nestor J. Aparicio 09:11
wow, it’s a winner on two and I would tell anybody, the fellow that one that is a big raving fan. He’s taking his daughters to the game. But more than that he’s coming back on during a couple of Super Bowl because he works with with people with challenges with drug abuse and alcohol and a really good man and so I had him on and then last year we had homerun riches winners on with Barbra Jean but but the winner last year who won the seat on the Jacksonville trip came on with me and was like row Quan Smith was given them cheesecake on the plane. So like, you know when you get those kinds of stories and the fan gets taken in on the plane when they win, you know, and they went a lot around here. You know, Joe Flacco once said to me, we went a lot around here it’s it’s even more fun and people really do win and they get to go to these awesome things,
Seth Elkin 10:01
and the my lottery rewards is the mechanism for all of that. And we certainly encourage anybody to get involved in that. But since you mentioned winning, we’re at a point in the year here, where we just started the new fiscal year, the state of Maryland’s budget year, fiscal year goes from July through June. So we’re into July now we’re at the beginning of a new fiscal year gives us a little bit of a milepost to look back at where we’ve been over the course of the last year fiscal year 2024. And you get those lists that we send out every week. And we post them on our website, too, we call it the weekend winners, where we list off all of the winning tickets worth $10,000 or more that had been sold or redeemed over the prior seven days. So we keep a running tally of those when we get to the end of the fiscal year. And it’s a good chance to take a look back and see where we’ve been we had in fiscal year 2020, for more than 1700 prizes of $10,000 or more. And that averages out if you do a little math, it’s 33 of those a week on average, or just shy of five a day $10,000 or more that are being won all over the state. So you know that your opportunity to win is out there all the time on all of our games. And we certainly would point anybody to our website, and you can check out the weekend winner posts that we do that are up there, every Monday, we get that published, and we get that sent out. And a lot of media outlets will pick that up. And that’s great for us to get the word out there about that you can look for the blue weekend winners logo in the news section of our website. And you can read those lists week by week as they go. But just for a little fun. We had 32 prizes of a million dollars or more that were awarded in fiscal year 2024. So 30
Nestor J. Aparicio 11:45
to 1 million or more, or that’s one every two weeks, pretty much. Yeah,
Seth Elkin 11:51
including a pair of $5 million prizes, on $50 scratch off tickets, one on the 50 years ticket that we launched last year, and then one on the $5 million cash ticket that we launched in February of this year. So we love keeping track of that stuff and love keeping people informed about just how much winning is happening. I think when I first came to the lottery nine years ago, I think that was the thing that really amazed me about it is I don’t think I understood the scale at which the lottery operates. You think okay, people win the lottery, people win big prizes every once in a while it’s happening all the time. It’s happening every week, we award about $4.7 million a day in prize money. That’s the scale that it’s happening at. So that kind of sales are going on and it’s generating that kind of winning. And that’s a lot of fun for us to look at and appoint people to to to keep everyone informed. You
Nestor J. Aparicio 12:43
know, I don’t know how Jim Kennedy does these press releases, but it is interesting to me that like this week, I read it and some weeks it catches my eye and I always catches my eye on the word Dundalk is in it for so that’s where I’m at and I see that we have winners 50,000 winners in Dundalk, Hyattsville Mount Rainier, which I you know, I think of that as being where the Orioles were this week. And silver spring. I have to look up where Mount Rainier, Maryland is Prince George’s County that’s near Hyattsville. Yeah, all right. Good enough. All right. So I’ve probably been, you know, I probably been off in the road there. But when I see Dundalk you catch my attention, I just want to say I don’t know where man’s liquors is 6900 hollyburn Avenue, I guess I’d have to look that up. It might even be the old liquor store that I used to go to, it may be renamed because my place was on Albert Avenue, right by my high school. So when I see these places, and I think, Nick, somebody just walked right in there and walked out $50,000 And they did it on the Gold Rush Tripler. This is a dump explain these family games, because I’m seeing all the 777 Gold Rush 50,000 50,000 on the Tripler. I’ve got the doubler. I did have a I had a $20 winner, not a 20. But I had a $20 winner Coco’s two weeks ago was F. Yep.
Seth Elkin 13:50
Every so often, a couple of times a year. Usually we have what we call them the family of games. And so they’re all kind of related to the same theme. And we launched a family of of Gold Rush games in May of this year. So there are there are a variety of the you’ve got the the $1, gold rush, sevens, the $2, Gold Rush doubler. And then you get up in price, you get the $5, gold rush, sevens Tripler, you get the $10, Gold rose sevens multiplier, and then there’s a $20, Gold Rush 777. And you know, the price structure increases, of course, as you go higher in price, but we want those together. And it’s a lot of fun like that people can try their hand at one of those tickets. And Sam, maybe I want to try another price point, maybe I want to go for higher prize. And that’s something that we do again, a couple times a year you’ll see a family of games. There’s also a multiplier family of games that we launched earlier this year, and there was a second chance contest attached to that I believe, if I look here that they were still coming up on the top prize in that multiplier. Second Chance contest is going to be awarded here relatively soon. The there’s a $75,000 cash prize that we’re going to give away through my lottery rewards on the multiplayer family. So any of the multiplayer tickets that were launched earlier this year, and the entry deadline for that to July 15 is coming up. So July 16, we’ll do the drawing and we’ll have a $75,000 winner we’ve already awarded 450 $1,000 prizes in that multiplier, Second Chance contests so you know, look for those families of games and see if that’s connected to a second chance as the multiplayer was and and go have some fun with it. And see what see what you win. And we’re hoping we can’t wait to meet that $75,000 winner because that’s a nice prize for us. Well, you know, the
Nestor J. Aparicio 15:34
punch line for me is my studio air conditioning broke and I’m in here and I’m baking and I’m just literally I’m I feel like a glazed doughnut right bro farms right now. I mean, I’m just I am a mess. So we need to get out a little bit here. You guys are getting out plenty. I know it’s hot. We’re all thinking Pete a beachy pulley and all that stuff. But certainly summertime leads to events. You guys come and spin the wheel. You do a whole bunch of stuff out in the community this time of year. Yeah, we’re
Seth Elkin 16:00
actually a little quiet here around the Fourth of July and a little bit after but we got a couple things in the latter part of July. We’re going to be at the lake Arbor Jazz Festival in Prince George’s County and Mitchellville. We’re gonna be at the Baltimore magazine crab fest. Both of those are happening July 20. And then we’ll be in an Orioles game. The Padres are coming to town will be an Orioles game in late July and then
Nestor J. Aparicio 16:22
you know, that’s my National League team. Right the Padres? You know, I you know, you knew that right.
Seth Elkin 16:27
I think I didn’t know that. I think we’ve talked about that. So I own a
Nestor J. Aparicio 16:31
Clemente Jersey if it didn’t say pirates on the front, but I have worn Clemente stuff as you know, but I only own one juror. It’s Tony Gwynn. That’s the only it’s the only other than like Oriole related gear. It’s the only gear I have is Tony green jersey.
Seth Elkin 16:44
Yep. And how it’s hard not to be a Tony Gwynn fan, no matter I
Nestor J. Aparicio 16:47
love this jersey because it’s brown and mustard and it’s throwback and it’s it’s perfect. 1984 Tony Gwynn home jerseys perfect.
Seth Elkin 16:57
At the risk of upsetting our director John Martin, it’s awfully hard to pull off basic Brown in a sports jersey. It doesn’t it doesn’t really go very well.
Nestor J. Aparicio 17:05
See I like you know, this is where your Steeler dome and my ravens can you know gang up and listen, the Browns don’t need us to gang up on them will have to have the whole season to do that. You know I’m saying? So I’m just you know what, I’ll just say this for the summer and people going to games or going out to see the Padres game and spinning the wheel with you guys. It is really been. It’s why I’ve done this for 32 years waiting on summers where baseball can be this much fun and I can talk baseball with anybody. You made a fourth of July party and we’re just talking baseball. Your mother’s talking baseball. You’re talking baseball. My last name is Aparicio so I love baseball. We’re gonna be talking baseball next Friday. I’ll invite Seth and Ron i By the way, Ross’s husband Greg, I still haven’t gotten him out. And it’s a Yankee game, so I’m gonna re invite him to a perfect time, especially when they’re in second place. Next Friday, we will have the Gold Rush sevens doublers that Seth just told you all about and we hope to have some more winners. It isn’t Marilyn crabcake tour. Cool off. We’ll get together we’ll do it again. I don’t know if you’re asking me at first place after the all star break we’ll have an all star game in Texas. It’ll be hot there. And it’s just fun. It’s a great summer and we’ll have a raven scratch off talk about a couple of weeks as well. Seth enjoy the rest of the holiday hydrate out there and tell John Martin stay busy giving away all this money with all these homeruns we’ll do take care of your AC problem over there stop Alcon is here and Martin NOD is back here and we’re getting the AC fixed around here and I’m melting on a Fourth of July weekend. Big thanks to our friends at Jiffy Lube multi care if they put me in my car, right go out and get some AC as well as Liberty pure Solutions and I’m going to need to hydrate when all this is over with. Yeah, it’s it’s warm in here. I feel like I’ve been at a dance party and in July. I’m Nestor we are wn st am 1570, Towson Baltimore. We never stop talking Baltimore. Positive
