Sports business professor Marty Conway joins Nestor to offer MLB insights on revenue and where the Baltimore Orioles payroll might go under new ownership. The impact of declining revenue from regional sports networks and the shift towards direct-to-consumer apps is the primary concern with the future of MASN in the balance but the importance of sustained success on the field to maintain fan interest and revenue needs to be the long game of the Rubenstein group.
Nestor Aparicio and Marty Conway discuss the Baltimore Orioles’ financial situation and future prospects under new ownership. Conway highlights the impact of declining revenue from regional sports networks and the shift towards direct-to-consumer apps. He emphasizes the importance of sustained success on the field to maintain fan interest and revenue. Conway notes that mid-market teams like the Orioles must carefully manage their payroll and revenue streams. Aparicio expresses frustration over the team’s empty playoff seats and the need for better fan engagement and accessibility to games. They also discuss the potential for increased investment and the importance of reaching a broad audience through various distribution channels.
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
Orioles payroll, MLB revenue, new ownership, regional sports networks, free agency, consumer behavior, season tickets, playoff attendance, mid-market franchise, fan engagement, direct-to-consumer, over-the-air games, sustained success, investment potential, Baltimore market
SPEAKERS
Marty Conway, Nestor Aparicio
Nestor Aparicio 00:01
Welcome home. We are W, N, S T, am 1570 Towson, Baltimore, where Baltimore, positive we’re taking the Maryland crab cake tour out on the road for the holidays. Happy holidays. The word is on December 4 that Marcello is going to have special eggnog for me, and we’re going to be kicking off the kids. I love that place, and I love their crab cakes in their shrimp and we are doing, for the very first time, we’re doing a crab cake tour stop at a place where they got no crab cake. And my next guest knows why, because it’s sort of my Arnold’s. It’s sort of my Fonzie place. I’ve been going for 30 years. Everyone who is special in my life in whatever way, who’s have ever had like a real lunch with me or real dinner with me has been to me cheese. So we’re gonna be doing the Maryland grab gate or to meet cheese, because I said so. And they don’t need a crab cake to be great. And they have a pony rotundo, which is still the best thing in town, and I’ll have that Marty Conway is here. He is our professor at the Georgetown University of all things, sports, business, science and marketing and branding. And I don’t know what I leave out, Marty, I can talk about your Oriole past and Rangers and this and that teaching and all the things that you do your Springsteen fandom, but at the heart You’re like a baseball goon like me from the very, very beginning. We’re both sort of stuck into this from baseball from 50 years, and I just I miss you. How are you? How’s life
Marty Conway 01:33
great? And we both love the menu at amicis. You can essentially take anything and make it great, but that’s what that’s what matters most. Put
Nestor Aparicio 01:40
that marinara on a shoe you don’t even need. I We had lunch here last week, and we took a dude for the first time. He’s like, I’m taking the meatballs to go. I’m taking the calamari separated to go. And I’m like, it’s just, it’s amazing. So that so coming down and do it be a part of the holiday thing? Um, Oriole off season. I just look, it’s Thanksgiving week, alright, and I want to be very thankful for all my blessings, including new ownership. I don’t know if you’ve heard since last time we got together, I met Mr. Rubenstein two weeks ago. It was night before the election night for our whole Brook loose. I met him out at Beth defilow. He gave a speech couple hours long and shook his hand. You probably read my letter to Mr. Rubenstein. I don’t know that he’s read it. I don’t think he cares much about much, from what I’m gathering anyway, um, I don’t know. I haven’t lowered my expectations. Luke and I got into a big fight on the radio in the last 24 like literally got mad at me because I said he’s got Stockholm Syndrome and we can’t sign Juan soda. They don’t need one soda. Yeah, they need they need good baseball players, and they need to operate like a real baseball team. And I don’t know my press pass, they get like everything, right? 10,000 empty seats in the upper deck are the playoffs. You and I haven’t been together since, I don’t know, the summer, and I’ve like, when I come to you, you’re a little bit like a priest to me, bro, like I love you. You’re my friend. We’ve known each other a long time. I didn’t know you back when you’re Mr. Big with the Orioles or whatever, but it’s a holidays, and, like, we’ve all waited for change. You’ve been kind of polite and called it unorthodox mister Angelo. He’s gone. It’s over, like, all of that. I’m just trying to, like, reset all of it, and the level of expectations for Katie Griggs and Michael lot for all of it. And I don’t mean the two hits they got in the playoffs or, you know, I just mean like, what are you seeing and what, how do I set my level of expectation? Because I’m not there yet.
Marty Conway 03:33
So I see a couple things. I see a, not a small market, but maybe a mid market franchise beginning to operate like a true mid market franchise. And I’ll say this, there’s a couple things going on in baseball. This has been, I mean, I think you really have to follow the game to understand it. But what has gone on with regional sports networks over the last now, three to five years, but more importantly, the last, probably two to three years with diamond sports, which was the holding group for, I don’t know, 12 to 15 different teams, not the Orioles, because the Orioles hold their own rights and mass and but they’ve gone through bankruptcy proceedings, and Now that bankruptcy process is ending, and they’re coming out of it. And teams and Major League Baseball are trying to make a decision, their best decision, but that decision means, in every case, lower revenues from your regional sports television broadcaster Period End of discussion, they are not going up anymore. At best, you’re staying equal, and in most cases now, your choice is either to take less from the new diamond entity coming out of bankruptcy, or you go the route that Major League Baseball wants teams to go, which is you hold on to your rights. You pass them to Major League Baseball and they create. They produce the games for you, and you resell them locally, either a to your cable operator, ie XFINITY or Cox or spectrum, wherever that is, or you sell them in a direct response app at you know, app that you might pay $19 a month or $29 a month, or whatever it is. That’s a fundamental shift, because on average, Major League Baseball teams get about 28% of their total revenue from that one particular source. And so if I told you today that 28% of your advertising revenue was going to be either in question or potentially go down, how would you operate? I would pull the you would pull the oars in. You’d find ways to cut the burn and to maintain that. And I think that’s what we’re seeing, is that the Juan Soto sweepstakes, if you will, probably comes down to no more than five teams. And those five, two of those teams are in New York, probably one or two of those teams are in Los Angeles. And then throw in another team that Scott Boris can gin up Texas, whoever it is to join the sweepstakes, and that’s pretty much it, and everybody else is going to be operating either with what they currently have in terms of revenue or new money from ownership, equity or other areas to do it. So that’s what I see happening across the sport, and I think it’s probably the first time in the last 25 to 30 years where baseball’s had to pause this free agency situation a little bit, and the best of the best will get the 500 plus million. Maybe Corbin Burns will get 500 million. Maybe Juan Soto will get an excess of that. Who knows? But those numbers are getting smaller every year, and that’s why I think the Orioles have to look at this now and say, what is our revenue pie now? What will it be three years from now? How does it look different? Do we have other assets around the stadium that we’ll be able to draw from? Will we have more fans, and I think that’s probably the process that they’re going through, so I would expect them to be more competitive in the market, although I wouldn’t anticipate that they’re in the blockbuster signing in this offseason, at least yet, Marty
Nestor Aparicio 07:14
Conway is our guest. Marty, I remember we would just get together and just talk about mass and money for years and years and years and years, because it was such a, not just a source of contention, and Peter in the league, and Peter would fight with anybody but anything. So it didn’t even, this is just, was the was the biggest thing to fight about at the time, because it was so much money, and two cities and two franchises, and, you know, especially during the the teen years, where both teams were pretty good. I follow this at a pretty good level, not your level, the PhD level, but I’m almost like the next level down, having done this for 33 years. And I know what the Zip Dry cleaning ads look like, and the wise markets, my plant, my client and friends, Royal farms. I see mutual sponsors. I know what they pay. I saw the T row and the price on the on the patch and the like all of that, I’m trying to figure out the money that used to look like, hundreds of millions of dollars that was coming from cable companies 20 years ago that funded all of this to now and sky boxes and parking and revenue and ancillary and selling hot dogs and like all The things that teams need to do to create revenue and Birdland memberships and just all of it right, where the revenue comes from. You teach classes in this, I’m a really good student in your class over the course of 30 years. I’m a 30 year student on this. I am trying to figure out their level of uncertainty. And quite frankly, ask people like you, who are you reading on this? Who’s, who’s writing the white paper on the change, global change in the industry, from cable television to internet that, let’s be honest, it ate up the music industry. I mean, this, give me a dozen industries. It ate up hardware stores when Walmart came out, you know, like we could talk about, like, true paradigm shifts in any industry in business, and the revenue side of this, and where the revenue used to come from, I don’t know, osmosis. It comes up from the street. It comes from the cable bill. Now these people have to figure out how to be a television network, which John boy had 20 years in Peter 20 years, and they couldn’t figure out how to get their spring training games on TV and get a sponsor to pay for it in fan base that would be interested in it, and even thinking of it as brand building that would help them sell tickets and widgets and whatever knots. I don’t know what Katie Griggs knows. I mean, you know, most people in your seat that that know of the industry think this, this is an industry higher of you know, an upwardly mobile woman who was in the soccer industry that went to Seattle, that knows business, that no sports, that knows how to tie all this together. I know she probably don’t know a whole lot about Baltimore, and I always think of baseball as being this totally local thing when you do. It as well as anybody’s ever done it. I’ll give you full credit on that. You Latino the era. I get Charlie Steinberg. I get all these people, Janet, Marie, the people of your era that built Camden Yards that really, that didn’t come out of a box, dude. I saw the pictures back in the 70s. No one went to Orioles games. 79 it happened. There was a magic thing. It involved am radio, of all things, and Charlie Akman and and the Johnny Walker shit that we there was a thing. There was a hawk, right? I don’t know those 10,000 empty seats, Marty, I haven’t had you on since then. What did you make of that? Because I people think I hate the Orioles and I love the Orioles. You know that? And now that Peter’s got like, I don’t have any. There’s nothing for me to hey, you know, there’s nothing for me to dislike. It bothered me as a citizen. It bothered me if this guy’s not a good guy, and he wants to make excuses about why things don’t work here and why we don’t have money and why we can’t afford good things. And when Luke and I literally got into a fight on the air about, like, hold on, these dudes are billionaires. Don’t tell me they can’t amortize one so to 50 million a year over the next 10 years. Just put the money in and just say, You know what? We bought the thing on the cheaper getting $600 million from the government. Things could be worth 4.2 billion as we figure it, once the casino gets added and we do the porch and everybody else pays for everything else we can pay for the baseball players for the next couple of years. I’m 74 years old. I want to win. I literally just, that’s flipping of me. I know I wouldn’t go into a nice room over at the warehouse of Mr. Rubenstein and say all that, but like, what? What are we going to what is this? You know, and I would agree with you, Mr. Rubenstein doesn’t want to hear about uncertainty any more than Mr. Angelo’s wanted to be here about the uncertainty of a baseball stoppage in 1994 any more than Mr. Bush wanted to hear from it from you at the time, right? But like, this is new, and this industry is a mess right now, you would agree with that, right? Well,
Marty Conway 11:55
it’s like I said, I would reiterate, that it’s going through a transition period that really reflects what consumer behaviors are, right? Consumer behaviors now, particularly reality check in some way, right, maybe, yeah, the world, particularly American consumers, are going through a process where they don’t really want to bundle anything, unless they have to right. 25 years ago, there was bundles all over. You got your cable bundle. You got music through a bundle. You got all these things, season tickets to a bundle too, exactly. And so now we’ve been disaggregating things. You know, music is disaggregating into singles and one download information books are now in in essays and chapters, not in books, things like that, and that’s reflected in consumer behavior, certainly in sports. We talked about this before, the idea of marketing a season ticket is dead. The idea of marketing a membership to your organization is very much alive. What’s in that membership? It’s quite likely 10 or 12 or 20 games, perhaps it also includes food and beverage, other merchandise components, and then the consumer decides how that money gets allocated. I only want eight games, and I want these particular eight games. And so that’s the challenges that every organization is going through. Is that reflection of consumer behavior ever since 2007 when Steve Jobs invented the Steve Jobs brought the iPhone to the market, and in 2007 Facebook disaggregated from being a just something that you could get at a university level in the last 1817, or 18 years, that just continues to evolve. That’s what they’re they’re facing that the organizations that are doing well have to be built on the business is built on sustained success on the field. That doesn’t mean making the playoffs a year and being out of it for three and being in it again. It means being in that playoff picture all the way through now, the Orioles have done something unique. They’ve made the playoffs two straight years, which, in the scheme of baseball economics, you’re working against the cycle. I mean, obviously the Houston Astros won seven or eight straight division titles, but you see that, you know, the the Yankees and the Dodgers, they hadn’t been in the World Series in almost 40 years, facing each other. That’s how the industry is set up to turn people over. So that’s the challenge that they face, and how they present that to consumers is important. I would say this on the signing every year there’s a Juan Soto type player, you know, a Mike Trout, or somebody else that looks like they’re coming upon free agency. But in the age of analytics today, if you cover Juan Soto’s name and just look at his resume, you’d have to say if, if Juan Soto is going to go from, you know, $23 million annually average value, to 48 or 53 or more than that, the question is, are you going to get more production because you’re. Paying them twice as much. And I think the answer over the last 20 years analytically, is no, and so that’s the sort of risk. Now, is that a splashy signing that might drive some initial interest, but then the back half of that contract is usually when teams get penalized because you have to go out 10 years. And you saw it with Justin Verlander in Houston. Once Justin Verlander started to age, he aged rapidly, and that’s the kind of thing that in a market the size of a mid level market, you get punished for that. Now, Steve Cohen in New York, he can probably do that all day long and still get competitive, but in the mid markets, that’s probably not the kind of signing that you’re going to be able to hang your hat on, other than winning the press conference and getting, you know, 1000 new signups the next two days after the press conference. Marty
Nestor Aparicio 15:53
Conway is our guest. He’s the good professor of all things sports and business, and the long time Industry Insider and a real player with the Orioles back in the 80s, 90s, and the rangers and Major League Baseball, as well as AOL and a whole bunch of other places, and still teaching at Georgetown, the mass in Exodus. And when this is all over with, and what markets decide to stay, yes, network or Nesson, and what’s decide to be the MLB House network, and what the Orioles should be, and what the national should be, and what they will be to maximize all of their values, to raise all the boats, even Tampa and Sacramento at this point, right, soon to be Vegas. I think the the television money thing as it used to be. I don’t know that any of us can think about what it’s going to be, because it was always something else. Where should my mind be on this? And I asked this because I’ve asked this of a lot of baseball fans, right? And people hit me all the time. Am I getting my press pass back or whatever. It always goes down a different river of so you got tickets. You got season tickets. Now I don’t have to do how often you go. Now, I’m not buying the bird mail, and I’m not giving them too great. I’m it’s like, go. Do you go to Merriweather, yeah. But I don’t buy the subscription. You know what I mean, like in the old days, right? And I’m thinking to myself, Okay, how are they going to distribute the games. And how is that related to your fandom? That? And I think of the kiss army in 1978 you remember that, but I think maybe more modern, the Pearl Jam fan clubs, the really good affinity fan clubs that really provide extra value, whether it’s my Southwest Airlines, passenger free with me, friends, flight, whatever, the thing is that sports is yearning toward and I, and I keep saying this, Marty, every time one of these smarmy sobs gets in front of me that sits in a job that you used to sit in, that now, sits there. They come to me with gold plated this, and VIP that, and extra special sauce here, and it’s going to be two grand to go to like I don’t know that they have to speak to Dundalk, but I always think of it in those terms. Now, in regard to when they had 10,000 empty seats for a playoff game and tickets for 10 bucks, 12 bucks, and they couldn’t give them away. And when they come back to me with all of the top shelf stuff, they’re going to do the thing that worries me absolutely the most, and I think if my mother were still alive, is, how does she get the 162 games on the television so she can wear her hat and at least be a fan and buy a t shirt and maybe go down there once in a while or whatever, because, to me, this restrictive stuff they’ve done where I can’t find the games they don’t want me to find the games where the NFL is putting games on Thursday nights that I can’t find Apple TV. They have really made it like I don’t need to watch the game tonight. I’ll watch it when they decide I watch it when they give it to me. I ain’t giving them nothing. And my buddy really woke me up to this from Arkansas. We did a piece over at Pizza John’s with my friend John, who’s a Baltimore guy, but he’s lived in Arkansas, running the Clinton Library for 25 years. He told his old story, you can go watch it. But I said to him, you’re a really big Oriole fan. Do you get the games? He’s like, Nah. I just, you know, follow him on Twitter and, you know, whatever. And I’m like, No, dude, you don’t even, like, why wouldn’t they want to get you to give them 99 bucks, whatever the number is to say I’ve got every game anywhere I wanted on my Binky, Yankee Inky, or on my, my, you know, sitting in the toilet, wherever I’m a flight, Airport, in the car wherever I want the game I can have the Ocean City I’m driving the beach like they just they better think this through. And I guess I’m vomiting all over you in some weird way, just to say, like, make this easy. I already love the games. Don’t, don’t, don’t. Start treating the consumers the way you’ve. You to nasty Nestor, the sports radio guy, and say, We don’t want you here. No, no, no, no, no. Like, I need to watch the games, man, and you need to make it so it’s not $400 a year, because Luke’s Mother’s not paying that. And I don’t know how that goes into bird land. And in this like, I’m gonna buy 12 games this year. I’m gonna buy 13 games. You’re gonna get 600 bucks for me, whatever it is for sitting in the upper deck. You got to give me the games, man, I got to advocate, yeah, like, and I don’t. They don’t think about it that way. Marty, that you know that they don’t. They think, How can we restrict it more and make you jump across a hoop? And I just keep thinking, my mother’s 80 years old and I’m almost 80 years old, and I’m not. I just, I’m gonna do what my buddy in Arkansas did, and just say, Yeah, where the hat once in a while, but I watch the games. Why would I do that? You know? Yeah,
Marty Conway 20:44
so I can distill that down into one word, and that’s simply reach. If you look at what sports organizations are doing today, it’s about reach. So let me start by saying the NFL is the most successful sports enterprise in the US, and maybe even you could say, arguably, in the world, there might only be a couple of others that that rise to that level. Most
Nestor Aparicio 21:07
Americans build their calendar around
Marty Conway 21:09
it, right? Because what they’ve done every time they do new media relationships contracts, the one thing that doesn’t change is reach and so that. What does that mean is that if you’re a Ravens fan or Packers fan, there’s a greater than a greater than 50% chance that on any given day you’ll be able to see your team play. What do I mean? All right, so on Thursday night, when they’ve sold this package to Amazon Prime, right? The same thing used to happen when it was on NFL Network. The NFL allows that local team to package that game to a local channel, whether it’s W, M, a, r, t, v2, channel 11 or channel 13. So while the game is being sent to the rest of the country via a streaming app, locally, I can just flip on my television and I can get it right. And that pretty much works on Sunday afternoon, Monday Night Football the same way it’s available as a package. So if you don’t have cable, you’re able to see the game, right? They’ve been able to do that both ways. That’s about reach, and what baseball had gotten themselves into is almost the opposite of that, with 180 degrees away where the regional television networks, the xfinities, the Comcast, like I said, they had such strong contracts that the only way that you could get that game in that territory, from Ocean City to York, Pennsylvania, was to subscribe to your local cable operator and then pay the 10 bucks a month for the sports package to get it. Those contracts were iron clad, and they were really hard to get out of. Now what you’re seeing is, as those agreements start to age and become available for renewal, or they don’t renew them, they’re peeling away. Teams are peeling away. Major League Baseball is peeling away the ability to say, okay, you can still get it through to your Xfinity subscription, but you can also get it through a direct to consumer app. But the number one thing that teams are starting to go back to, and I think this is huge for both Baltimore and Washington, is you’ve got to get back to have some games on the over the air network locally, so that every opening day, at least opening day, because that’s what was the religion of Baltimore, was to say w m, A R, or maybe it’s going to be W B, A L, or whoever it is. That’s where you’ll be able to see the biggest games, whether it’s opening day, some certain Sundays or whatever it is, because that sort of reach feeds your your mother, you other, your guy in Arkansas, some way to get that, get that game to those people. Because the one thing that we learned through the last election, from a business standpoint, forget the political piece, is the amount of money that was still spent on over the air, broadcast and network television, far exceeded anything that people spent on social and digital. Why it’s still the place? That’s why the Super Bowl is on, on on a network like ABC or NBC, it’s still about the biggest audience that you can get is still sitting in front of a television. Maybe it’s, you know, a smart TV, etc, but it’s still the easiest way to get your product in front of the people that you want to get it in front of.
Nestor Aparicio 24:25
I remember they put that playoff game that Miami can’t sit playoff game on, that peacock thing and like, you know, it just, they’re they restricted a lot of people out of bars. You just, a lot of you go out to to a bar to put an Oreo game on. It’s it, you know, they need that they they have to have the bar owners having it on. That’s part of what you talk about, the reach where it becomes of the Orioles are playing tonight, not what happens with me, with and I’m wearing my state fair shirt. I mean, the terms played Oregon to they played the number one team in the country two weeks ago. I figured it out at 630 when I was. On the couch five minutes before the game start, because, literally, it just doesn’t come to me. Like it’s not on my social media. I guess my friends aren’t talking about it, however, goofball screwed the algorithm up with the X thing I like. It just doesn’t come to you. And I think that that’s a that’s like, hockey was always like that some sort of tertiary off in the distance. You have to go find it like a light boy, the baseball team here in this new ownership for this market, in this environment, and what Lamar represents and all of that, let alone what they’re trying to do with the racetrack at Preakness and these other sports things. And I mentioned Maryland already, and where the caps and the wizards and these other entities that still think we got Baltimore, the games are on. Yeah, nobody’s watching them, and nobody’s subscribing to them. I remember when the monumental peoples exactly own just came to me and said, We’re gonna get subscriptions for minor league hockey and minor league football. I’m like, No, you’re not. And I’m worried, with the Orioles 10,000 seats, you have anything you would say on those empty seats. So if you were working there, well,
Marty Conway 26:02
a couple of things. First of all, obviously, Major League Baseball owns the playoffs. The teams don’t. And I think the the difference for me, and the way I was sort of contrasting, is that a year ago, the Orioles won the Division, it was very clear they were going to win the division, or they got down to the end. You also had a one week period between the end of the season and the first home game that they played in the playoffs, because they had won the Division and they were hosting in the wild card round. You win that wild card, you know? I think in this case, they clinched it three or four days or so before the end of the season, and they played on either Tuesday or Wednesday, and so that time period, and it’s just not excuse, I just think, from the standpoint of rationalizing how you get tickets out and at what price and how that works. You know, when it’s not clear that you’re going to make the playoffs or that you might be a wild card, you don’t have people buying just because they need to buy in the two weeks prior to that, and now, all of a sudden, you clinch, and now you have three or four days to do that. I think that’s where, whether you’re in Kansas City or St Louis or Baltimore or Pittsburgh, those first wild card games, unless it’s the first time you’ve been in the playoffs in the last 10 or 20 years. You know, it’s just a fact that matter, it was
Nestor Aparicio 27:21
a bad look. I mean, it really like I a bad optics. We haven’t had enough playoff games around here to not be caring about playoff games. And it says to me, you what it says to me, Marty, and what it should say to them is, they have a lot of work to do. And if I worked in there and I were Larry Latino, I have my foot up. Everybody’s ass in the office, right? And, you know, because you work there, and you’ve all of you have told me, man, it was a high bar around there. I didn’t think you know not to be too profane, but I take this shit personally. You know what I mean? Like, as a fan, I think you know what I mean. Like, my the Baltimore and me got that going, and I’m like, I hope that hurts your feelings more than it hurts mine. And it got and I got my dander up. It’s got my Charlie Ekman up. You know what I mean? Hey,
Marty Conway 28:04
anytime, let’s be honest, anytime on a Sunday afternoon at Mt Bank Stadium, or Monday night or whatever it is, anytime there are seats not filled. Now, regular season baseball is something else, because it’s 81 games, but at the peak, mountain top games, playoffs, you know, Friday, Saturday, whatever it is. If you’re not at capacity, you probably should have somebody with their foot up the rear end to say, why aren’t we? Especially if we’re in a competitive team building situation,
Nestor Aparicio 28:34
it wasn’t normal here for a long time. You I mean, we can all admit that, right? I mean, there’s nothing normal, and that’s why I’m trying to reset like that wasn’t normal. 10,000 empty seats should not be normal. That should not be acceptable.
Marty Conway 28:50
No, I’m sure that it probably, like I said, I’m not making a rational excuse. I’m telling you how, how actually tickets go on sale, and how you do that. But, like I said, having said that, the best thing that the organization can do is put themselves in a circumstance where sustained success every September, there’s a pennant race in Baltimore, right? No, no exceptions, no questions. It’s happened in places like Houston. It happens in other places. If you look at the market of San Diego, what’s been going on there the last few years? It’s a rabid fan base now in San Diego, and they would have had 10,000 seats on a playoff game available 10 or 15 years ago. So like I said, there’s no there’s no excuse for it. And I don’t think it’s a good look, but I do think there’s a difference between clinching a, you know, a first round by by winning the division and getting in three days before for your second straight playoff appearance on a Friday and opening on Wednesday. Oh, by the way, for a day game. So those are some of the things that go into it. But yeah, you want to have that bar bar set high. Where you’re turning away people at the end of the season because you have your playoffs sold and secured, and to do that, that’s where it stands. They need the all star game here in a couple of years. They need some of those other things to come along, to build that foundation into the franchise, from an economic standpoint, that they can be able to go out and make late season moves and not have to worry about what that impact is to the payroll and the, you know, the deficit of the team, you know, two or three years later.
Nestor Aparicio 30:31
Yeah, I guess the reason I get chippy about it and all, and I’ll shave up look nice next time we get together for crab cake at the non crab cake, me cheese, we’ll get a bond. It’s just I sense what I would hope Mr. Arrogy and Mr. Rubenstein sense is real potential here, right? Like, that’s why they bought there’s real potential here. You know, I went out talk to Mr. Rubenstein. I But he doesn’t know much about baseball, Marty, and we’ll talk about that a little later. Like I sensed all of it from the night we were there, the way he spoke about it. And traditionally, teams tend to operate what they make, they spend, you know, on payroll. And I’m thinking that won’t be enough here, you know what I mean, not in the next five years. I don’t think they can make enough to greatly alter the payroll. I don’t think there’s a mass in money tree like i That worries me a little bit, that you said they’re mid market. They’re mid market. Mr. Angelos, like to say they were small market. This is a time to figure out what they are, and I think you and I will have a focus on that. And look, I know time short, come have a crab cake with me during the holiday, or even upon a rotundo, whatever you want. Man, if you’re shellfish and tolerant, I get your cheeseburger whatever you want. We’ll get you some meat posts. Marty Conway is the good professor of all things, of sports business at Georgetown, and just in a general sense, next time we get together, we got a lot of things to talk about. But you love baseball. I love baseball. I’ll end on this. There is a lot of potential here, right? You would agree with that.
Marty Conway 31:57
I think that’s why there was more people interested in the franchise, as opposed to less. If you’re an investment, if you’re an investor, you want to buy the best asset at the lowest price, right? And so that happened to be in Baltimore. There’s no question. And I’ve said this before, when I was working in the game, we looked at franchises in Detroit and Boston, big, big, big cities, big markets, where they were underperforming. And you’d say, My gosh, if somebody could just take over that team and Boston or wherever, and Latino and his group did that, you can maximize and go beyond because this is not faithful Arkansas, right? This is Baltimore. Like I said, it’s not a small market. It’s a, it’s a, it’s a mid market. I mean, it has some questions, but maybe Baltimore City is shrinking in terms of population, but the surrounding area between biotech and other things is growing, and so this is a it might be a mid market, but it’s a growth market for sure. And that’s why I think that investors like Rubenstein and Eric Getty and others looked at that and said, there’s real potential here for us to get a return on our investment in five years and seven years and 10 years into, like I said, Put this franchise in a position where it can be sustained success for a decade, because then you can build on those things when you make the playoffs repeatedly, or when you’re in the playoff hunt, you know, that’s what’s built, you know, that’s what’s built at Mt Bank Stadium. Is every year the team looks at the the market says, I think they have a chance, and so that’s what drives a lot of the interest, whether they do or don’t at the end of the season, that’s up to the players, but you’ve got to be able to have that sort of feeling in the fan base that we can do this. I’m going to put money down in August, when I’m in April, because I feel confident that I will be in a good position at that point. I’m just interested
Nestor Aparicio 33:38
in Mr. Big pants and all this money, whether they’re going to spend nose on nose, or whether they’re going to be 20 million, over 50 million, over 100 million. I’m talking about the first five years to say we bought the thing for 1,000,000,008 we’ll put an extra 100 million a year into it, literally hundreds, a half a billion. We’ll sell it for 3.5 and like at the end, we’ll have a good time, and maybe we’ll win and and we’ll be Mr. Big pants, and we’ll be a big we’ll play like a big market, San Diego, right? Other places like, that’s possible here and I and that, I don’t think it’s likely, but I think they they could invest more. After 30 years of feeling like we could do less, I want to see more. I want to feel more. That’s the Baltimore me. Marty Conway, the good professor from Georgetown. We’ll get back after this. At least we won’t be talking about Mr. Angelos and mass and money ever again. I hope at least anyway, go get your Birdland memberships out there and enjoy the off season. I am Nestor. We are W, N, S, D. Am 1570 Towson, Baltimore. We never stop talking Baltimore positive, even though sometimes it doesn’t sound like it. You.
