Telling four decades of the history of local high school sports

No one has covered local high school sports longer or better than Gary Adornato, who joins Nestor at Koco’s Pub and updates us on the modern journalism and news gathering being done on the prep circuit in the era of NIL, and with college sports in disarray and kids focusing on one sport far earlier. We’ve come a long way since the “All Metro” pages of The Baltimore Sun back in the 1980s…

Gary Adornato, a longtime high school sports insider, discussed his career evolution from the Baltimore Sun to digital sports journalism. He highlighted his role in creating high school sports websites, including the MIA and Varsity Sports Network, which he sold to the Baltimore Banner. Adornato also shared his transition to Sports Illustrated, where he manages a team covering high school sports nationwide. He emphasized the impact of NIL deals on high school athletes and the growing importance of digital media in sports journalism. The conversation also touched on the changes in high school sports coverage and the rise of women’s sports.

Gary Adornato’s Career Journey and Early Days in Journalism

• Nestor Aparicio introduces Gary Adornato, mentioning their long-standing friendship and collaboration.
• Gary shares his early career, starting at the Baltimore Sun and working with Sam Davis and Bill Glover.
• Nestor recalls Gary’s role in organizing desktop publishing for his promotional materials.
• Gary talks about forming a sports marketing company with Matt Marzullo and their collaboration with Nestor.

Transition to High School Sports Journalism

• Gary discusses his transition from the Baltimore Sun to covering high school sports.
• He shares a story about covering a high school football game and getting his first byline in the Baltimore Sun.
• Nestor reminisces about his own journalism journey, working with Kathy Frazier and other notable editors.
• Gary talks about the challenges and rewards of covering high school sports, including a memorable story with David Simon.

Impact of Digital Media on High School Sports Coverage

• Gary explains how he and Matt Marzullo started a sports marketing company that evolved with the digital age.
• He describes their work with the MIA (Maryland Interscholastic Athletic Association) and the challenges of managing high school sports websites.
• Nestor and Gary discuss the decline of traditional newspapers and the rise of digital platforms.
• Gary shares his experience with Digital Sports and the challenges of selling franchises for high school sports websites.

Founding Varsity Sports Network

• Gary talks about starting Varsity Sports Network and its success in covering high school sports.
• He mentions the challenges of managing young writers and the importance of real-time score updates.
• Nestor and Gary discuss the impact of social media on high school sports coverage.
• Gary shares his experience of selling Varsity Sports Network to the Baltimore Banner and his subsequent work with SB Live Sports.

Current Role at Sports Illustrated

• Gary explains his current role at Sports Illustrated, managing a team of writers across the country.
• He discusses the differences between covering high school and professional sports, especially in football.
• Nestor and Gary talk about the impact of NIL (Name, Image, and Likeness) deals on high school athletes.
• Gary shares his observations on the changing landscape of high school sports and the increasing focus on social media and image.

Evolution of Women’s Sports and Title IX

• Nestor and Gary discuss the significant growth of women’s sports, especially in basketball.
• Gary highlights the impact of Title IX and the increased opportunities for female athletes.
• They talk about the rise of female athletes like Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese and their influence on women’s sports.
• Gary shares his experiences covering high school women’s basketball and the changes he has witnessed over the years.

Impact of Digital Media on High School Sports Coverage

• Gary discusses the challenges of getting real-time scores and updates from high school sports events.
• He shares his strategies for working with state associations and partners to improve coverage.
• Nestor and Gary talk about the potential for young journalists to emerge from high school newspapers.
• Gary reflects on his experiences recruiting and managing young writers and the importance of mentorship.

Personal Reflections and Future Plans

• Gary shares his personal journey and the impact of his work on high school sports coverage.
• He reflects on the changes in the journalism industry and the importance of staying relevant.
• Nestor and Gary discuss the future of high school sports coverage and the role of digital media.
• Gary expresses his gratitude for the opportunities and experiences he has had in his career.

Final Thoughts and Farewell

• Nestor and Gary wrap up their conversation, reflecting on their long-standing friendship and collaboration.
• Gary shares his current location and future plans, including his work with SB Live Sports and Sports Illustrated.
• Nestor thanks Gary for his contributions to high school sports journalism and his support over the years.
• They conclude the segment with a light-hearted discussion about their favorite Maryland treasures and local cuisine.

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

High school sports, Gary Adornato, NIL deals, digital sports, Varsity Sports Network, Baltimore Sun, high school journalism, Sports Illustrated, SB Live Sports, high school recognition, scholarships, lacrosse, women’s sports, Title IX, Maryland lottery.

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SPEAKERS

Gary Adornato, Nestor Aparicio

Nestor Aparicio  00:00

Welcome home. We are W, N, S T am 1570 Towson, Baltimore. We are Baltimore, positive. We are here at Koco’s Pub in beautiful laraville, doing a Maryland crab cake tour. Man, I’ve been here like five hours doing radio, and I got to get me some cream of crab soup. I got to get me some coconut shrimp. We’re getting down this my final guest, other than Marcella. We’re gonna have Marcella Come on, but she lets me eat during the segment. So Meantime, Gary adonado is here. It’s all brought to you by our friends at the Maryland lottery. At these Maryland treasures, there’s four of them. I got horses, I got bridges, I got boardwalks. I’ve got birds and animals and mollusks and crustaceans, which we tend to eat here at Koco’s. It’s all brought to you by GBMC, as well as our friends at Farnan and Dermer. They are the comfort guys for HVAC and for plumbing, you need them. For plumbing, you need them bad, especially if you have a pipe burst, the way I did two weeks ago. Make sure you keep them nearby. This guy’s been nearby for me for about 42 years. Did we ever work together like the Dundalk Eagle? Is that like with the beginning, without you and me? I think 84

Gary Adornato  01:01

I think I was a few years ahead of you. I got out of the newspaper business. Our careers kind of dovetailed in a way

Nestor Aparicio  01:09

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where you get out of the way and let me in.

Gary Adornato  01:10

Yeah, no, not quite. But I was at the sun. And then I think when I left the sun, I went to work for Mike Warren, who you work for, as well, of course. Then I left him after four years and got worked somewhere else in marketing before I got back into journalism and covering high schools.

Nestor Aparicio  01:28

You were in the publishing space in 2001 when the Ravens won Super Bowl. 35 you did the type setting for Purple Rain. One, you literally organized it desktop publishing for me at that point, you taught me with the little barcode on the side. Man, I sure tried to anyway.

Gary Adornato  01:47

So if you recall, we had a mutual friend still, I guess he’s still a mutual friend. Matt marzolo, sure. Matt press, yes. So Matt and I formed a little company that I was doing graphic design work in the sports space. He was doing printing. So we had this idea that we’ll start a sports marketing company together, and might have been a little bit before we started that. But he introduced me to you. I helped you with some of your promotional material for the station. Back in the day, the logo, all that the logo, you were the first

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Nestor Aparicio  02:21

guy I knew that had a computer. Yeah, you’re the guy came from the hot metal type that, you know, I would go to your house right over in seven quarts, yeah, and you had your, you take me up to your little, your loft bedroom, yeah, you had a computer there, and you put together Purple Rain one for me. So I mean, but I think of you as the high school guy. So when I’m thinking to you, I think of a guy who really ran hard in the high school journalism reporting space in a way that I admired, coming from that with Kathy Frazier at the news American, and with Mike Faribault and Sam Davis at the sun and you know, everything that I cut my teeth on, but I didn’t know where the clicks were coming from, and certainly from the paper. It’s like, we’ll put adonado and Aparicio, put the last names in the paper, and everybody, every parent at curly will buy it, right? Cardinal Gibbons, yeah.

Gary Adornato  03:15

So when I, when I was still in college at Towson University, before I even graduated, I got a job at the Baltimore Sun sports department, initially, just working on the desk on Friday nights, answering the phones, putting box scores in the paper. I worked for Sam Davis and Bill Glover at the time, and

Nestor Aparicio  03:33

we called him stringers sure

Gary Adornato  03:34

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stringers, Mike Preston and I started the same day together covering high school sports. My break, as you would have it, I was 81

Nestor Aparicio  03:43

maybe 8182 in there, sure.

Gary Adornato  03:45

I graduated. Force, it might have been 8283 okay, yeah.

Nestor Aparicio  03:48

Around there, Gary lambrick was also part of that. I worked with him at the he

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Gary Adornato  03:52

came a few years later. Gary was a classmate of mine at curly so I know Gary Well, but my big break and getting a chance to write a lot started. I went to a Saturday afternoon football game at my high school curly. They were playing Calvert Hall, who was number one in the Sun paper speed amen on that team. Dave Amen was a freshman at curly when I was a senior. Okay, so, and we got him the wrestle. I could tell you that whole story. He was he was a great wrestler, but he was reluctant at first. But anyway, curly upsets Calvert Hall and the sun wasn’t covering it. Didn’t have anybody there, so I made a phone call. Said, Do you guys want a story? Yeah, our number one team got beat. So I did that story, and then I probably did like, another 300 bylines over the next few years before I left, I got the right a front page story with David Simon. It was kind of a breaking news type of thing where I was just the cub reporter they sent out to grab some interviews, but I was pretty cool, because he later turned out to be the starter he is. And it just led to, like you said, more than 40 years of doing

Nestor Aparicio  04:59

this stuff, you would. Henneman died last year. I went looking through my clips, you know, and I have a big box of things. And my favorite piece I ever wrote at the paper, I had a couple that were pretty cool with Dr J covered his last game, like all that, but I did a piece on Mike beleke’s family when he was pitching for the cubs in 87 playoffs, 89 with world of thrill and all that. And, you know, it’s Dundalk delivery, and there’s Jim hennemann’s column next to my thing, and they died. I saw that I’m in man, you know, they’re above that was Ken Rosenthal’s wrote the game story. And I’m thinking, Man, I had the lead front page takeout piece on a day when these Hall of Fame writers were around me. I mean, there’s something I’m writing for the paper that really, I’m still really proud of, that part of my history and where I came from that make me the journalist that I am did not. I would just say it nicely, not. I have a bullshit detector, being a journalist of who, what, where, why, when that. I am very grateful that I was given at a young age by grown ups, by editors.

Gary Adornato  06:09

Yeah, I got the chance to work with guys like Cameron Snyder, Bill free, Kevin cowherd. One of the greatest guys who really took a lot of time with young writers was Jim Jackson. Jimmy Jackson, yep. Jimmy Jackson, all of his

Nestor Aparicio  06:23

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kids listen to show Hi Jackson.

Gary Adornato  06:24

Are all great guys. So and then Sam and Bill and working with Mike Preston, were three great years. A lot of fun. Did a lot of fun things. Back in the day, we didn’t have computers. VDT had little green type, yeah, but I didn’t even have that. I remember one night I was covering a swim meet at Hopkins, ended around 1111, 30 at night. I’m wandering looking for a phone booth. Anybody out there know what they are? And I phone in my story. You gotta go to the CVP. Well, it was, it was in the gym at Hopkins. I’m in a hallway in a pay phone. I i I dictate my story, I get out, and then the hallways locked on both ends, and it’s midnight now, you got locked inside, locked into Hopkins. You know, I called my wife at the time and told her, I don’t know what I’m getting out of here. Finally, three o’clock in the morning, a security guard came by. So what are you doing here? I got locked in, so you let me out, but those are the kind of stories you you get in this business that nobody knows about.

Nestor Aparicio  07:26

Well, Gary adonado is our guest. You know, digital sports and high school sports, and the last time I saw you was at the McCormick event up in Hunt Valley. That scholar athlete was something that I did with McCormick in 1984 with Jack Bicknell. And you’re just the high school part of the glue that held this together, whether it’s been soccer, whether it’s been swimming, you know, we’ve had great, great athletes here, Cal Ripken playing baseball, all of the Dunbar High School basketball. I mean, just a really rich tradition of High School Sports. Here you dedicated large stretches your life to cover that, on behalf of parents and on behalf of kids, to give them ink recognition, maybe in some cases, some recognition, to get them scholarships back in the day before the N i l game,

Gary Adornato  08:22

I had no idea this is going to be my path. When I mentioned earlier about Matt and I starting a sports marketing company that kind of was starting to take off, but it got derailed by 911 because all the sponsorship money that was fueling it sort of dried up. But one of the clients we picked up during that time was the MIA, the private school league here in Baltimore, and they had a, it was very beginning days of websites, and they had a very rudimentary website, and they asked us if we could do anything with it. So I, having had that experience, writing for the sun, covering high school sports, started doing some stories on it, and we broke the server three or four times because of the traffic. People crave that kind of information, and the papers had already, even at that time, started to

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Nestor Aparicio  09:13

decline sometimes in the other those kinds of Yeah.

Gary Adornato  09:16

Dundalk eagles, yeah. So we eventually took that Mia site. There was a bigger company, you mentioned, digital sports, bought it out. I went to work for digital sports. Spent four years there learning this industry. Guys come from like the

Nestor Aparicio  09:30

Jiffy Lube background or something. Ed Kelly,

Gary Adornato  09:32

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who was the CEO, was one of the original founders of Jiffy. He was their franchise guy, and he had his vision for digital sports was to sell franchises for high school websites everywhere. It doesn’t quite work that way. Though. You can’t have 12 high school sports websites in Baltimore all trying to go to Jiffy Lube or a bank or whatever for sponsorship. They only want to deal with one person in a market. So I. Um, he gave me the reign to, like, run Baltimore as a regular DMA, and we did really, really well with that. Eventually, it was very

Nestor Aparicio  10:09

successful for that period of time.

Gary Adornato  10:11

I left and started my own thing, varsity sports network, and I had that for 12 years, and that’s what I

Nestor Aparicio  10:16

remember the best. You were really the only one in that space, doing that work and and a gospel to anybody whose kid played ball like literally right during that period of time, you tried to make it ubiquitous to the beltway in and around everything that Baltimore Sun, all metro was right before

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Gary Adornato  10:35

that, the New York we worked really, really hard. We had that great connection with the private school. So we got a lot of information from, you know, your Calvert halls and loyola’s and St Joe’s and curlies all the big schools people up. But we, we worked really hard. The guys, I had Derek Tony and Joe diblasi And sure, dozens of other people wrote for councilman, the good councilman, Joe. Yeah, yeah. Still around, still doing great. So that’s how it grew. And we just lot of long nights, lot of hard work trying to make sure we got every single score on the website. We’re trying to get the

Nestor Aparicio  11:08

coaches to care enough to report their scores. That was always a big issue at the sun for me to make sure we get and once Twitter came along, it became a little bit like when Dundalk was playing in a regional football game 10 years ago, I could get, I could look online and see they’re up eight to six at halftime. Or, you know, whatever it was there became a real time endeavor for your

Gary Adornato  11:30

business as well. Yeah, it’s still a challenge, like, even with what I’m doing now, getting scores, getting them in real time. I mean, we’re constantly working on ways to do that, working with partners, the state associations or whatever. But, you know, back when high

Nestor Aparicio  11:47

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schools had newspapers, I always thought there’d be a little Nestor Aparicio or Kevin Eck at Dundalk high that would, you know, want to report their scores, or Bill Gates.

Gary Adornato  11:56

I recruited a few of those. I mean, some worked out. Some I was waiting for a story at 1011, o’clock at night, and they didn’t even go to the game because their parents grounded them or whatever, but they didn’t think the call to tell me that. But so it’s a it’s a lot of management when you work with the young guys, but sure, some of them turn out to be really good, and they’re working in this space even

Nestor Aparicio  12:17

to this day. What are you doing? You’re at Sports

Gary Adornato  12:18

Illustrated, yeah.

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Nestor Aparicio  12:20

So what happened to varsity? Give me the

Gary Adornato  12:22

varsity sports network in 2022 I sold it to the Baltimore banner. You even probably don’t, maybe not remember you had a role in that. You introduced me to Chris Gorman, mts

Nestor Aparicio  12:33

empty yesterday. Yeah.

Gary Adornato  12:34

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Okay, yeah. So the deal was, you know, they I

Nestor Aparicio  12:38

helped you. That’s nice, you actually no one. You helped me in Purple Rain. One I think you Well, I think Gary helped me with my book. And you think of me. You’re like, hey, Nestor helped me with it. Jazz are good, sure. Or even 21 years later,

Gary Adornato  12:51

there you go. So they bought the site, or they bought the content, and my team went over and we did high school sports for them for a year. And at the same time, I was talking with a company called SB live sports. And they’re nationwide. They have two sides of their business. They have an editorial side, and they have the data side we were just talking about. They have a data hub. They collect scores, distribute them

Nestor Aparicio  13:15

to other media companies, SB Nation, prior to that, no,

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Gary Adornato  13:17

that’s different. Different. Something used to be scoreboard live, and they shortened SB, live. Okay, so SB live. They brought me on board to start their operations on the East Coast. And I basically built editorial teams in Florida, Georgia, all throughout the Southfield, high schools, high school sports, especially, especially football, where it’s really big. And so after the one year, deal was up at the banner. I left and did this full time. We eventually got the contract to do the high school sports for Sports Illustrated. And after I was there two years, I got elevated to run the whole thing. So I have writers all over the country that I manage. And is it

Nestor Aparicio  13:57

football, basketball? Is it

Gary Adornato  13:58

all sports? It’s all sports, but football is the majority of our truck sure that’s that’s the big fish in this game. On the national level, you’ve got to cover it differently than you do high school. I mean, local

Nestor Aparicio  14:11

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you’re not, certainly different than used to with the N i L. I mean, is it different? Oh, that’s a different job than it was eight years ago,

Gary Adornato  14:16

seven years storyline, yeah, sure. Not only two kids getting n i l deals to go on and playing college, but they’re getting nio deals locally in while they’re still in high school. That’s it’s legal in like 37 states.

Nestor Aparicio  14:32

Now. Do you have any editorial on that? It is dangerous, good, bad, different. What you’re seeing with parents, how you’re seeing the change from a recruitment standpoint. So, you

Gary Adornato  14:44

know, yeah, I think kids today are spending more time focused on their image, their social footprint, sure, and not spending as much time being the best quarterback or the best do. Shortstop that they can be. They’re trying to get that hot hit and get get that n i L, money, and a lot of that is being handed out, not just because you’re the best athlete, but because you can bring eyeballs to

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Nestor Aparicio  15:13

a product. Well, good looking girls doing things, clearly, it is caught on. And I don’t mean only fans, I mean girls that are volleyball players or basketball players who happen to be attractive or soccer Sure, they are being fronted for businesses, right?

Gary Adornato  15:29

I mean period, one of the top volleyball players and WNBA players in the country is the one of the cover models on Sports Illustrated

Nestor Aparicio  15:39

these WNBA players. They show up now what they’re wearing, the fashion when they roll in. It’s the same as the football players on Sunday morning, I guess. But they’re women’s sports. And I would say girls sports from your perspective, covering high school, but female sports in general, that to me, has been the biggest story of the last 10 years. Oh yeah, in regard to Caitlin Clark and money that may be on the high school level, I covered High School women’s basket, well, girls basketball 40 years ago, and it was about scholarships and Jack Crandall teaching girls how to spend the baseball or the softball and getting scholarships. At that point, it’s all different level of money now for young people, but certainly the title nine was something women were just fighting to be able to go to college and have a team to play for sure. Now there’s real money in women’s sports, absolutely.

Gary Adornato  16:33

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I mean, on the college level, you’re especially in basketball, it’s right up there with the men get

Nestor Aparicio  16:39

well and I even the brackets with the NCAA tournament. I had a couple people say, I don’t care about the men’s brackets. I’m into the

Gary Adornato  16:46

women’s brackets. And that was made special by not only Caitlin Clark, but her rivalry with Baltimore’s on ANGEL Reese,

Nestor Aparicio  16:53

yeah, Baltimore connection. I saw Angel dribble over Coppin State when she came in with LSU and Kim Mulkey a couple years ago. And and then Dawn Stanley came in this year with South Carolina to play a conference. So the women’s side of that my Coppin partnership. I mean, I’ve seen two of the biggest programs there are. I mean, if there was a Duke and a UCLA of the women’s side, they have both played a cop in the

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Gary Adornato  17:14

last three years. Yeah, that’s amazing that they got them to come in.

Nestor Aparicio  17:18

Well, it’s also the angel Reese part of like you being someone at the high school level, giving oxygen to high school players at that point. I mean, even going back to like, Carmelo Anthony playing a Towson Catholic, right? Like those were those kinds of sensations that we had here, that you have to have the best of the best to have that like Dunbar was here back in the 80s. I mean,

Gary Adornato  17:38

there’s always surprises. But I remember coming home from games all throughout my career and saying, I just interviewed a millionaire tonight, because you knew these certain players were going to go on. You know, Emmanuel quickly, Jalen Smith, when they were both McDonald’s all Americans and one of the best high school sports stories in Baltimore was also ended up being one of the most tragic was a keel car. I mean, they called him the Crime Stopper for good reason, because crime stopped in the city as everybody went to watch him play, when he was playing at Patterson. And you know, he did, he didn’t make it on the next level. He ran into some personal issues and stuff. But boy,

Nestor Aparicio  18:19

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was he a talent. Well, you go back to me, and you would skip wise. I mean, we can go through all of the names of all of the players in the amatucci era and the Bob Wade era that’s been, you know, written about with the Dunbar, the poet, poets and all I’ve lived through all that. I mean, I saw Sam Cassell, and then Bob Wade goes to Maryland. High school sports has always been this training ground and breeding ground good reporters. I mean, where I got my start, at the Dundalk eagle and working for Sam Davison and being a pub reporter and doing all that, it’s all different now, with the banner in the sun and local newspapers all online.

Gary Adornato  18:57

I mean, the sun still prints, but you got to wonder how long that’ll last. Or, you know, we saw the Washington Post give up sports. It’s crazy.

Nestor Aparicio  19:06

Dave shiner, and a couple weeks ago, it’s unbelievable.

Gary Adornato  19:09

Yeah. So it’s now left to more independent, smaller outlets to do it, and some do it well, some probably don’t have the highest standards that we might want to see. So people have to be more discerning about where they’re going to get their information, not

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Nestor Aparicio  19:26

going to get any typos. At Gary adonato is reset in your book at Purple Rain one. Gary adonato is my guest. He’s with Sports Illustrated these days after a long, successful run doing high school sports here, first digital sports and then at the varsity network. As many of you, if you had children anytime in the last 20 years, coach is probably calling into Gary so Sports Illustrated thing, this is your happy, happy place with this Sure.

Gary Adornato  19:51

I mean, I’ve been with, I still am an employee of SB live sports, but we’re contract, but we work very closely with the Sports Illustrated. The staff, they they’re published by a company called minute media. Minute media has the contract from the owner of Sports Illustrated to actually do the publishing. So they make all the deals, and it’s, it’s part of what they call the on si network. So si has its main platform, and then it has these generalized sites for like, every NFL team has its own site with its own publishing team, every NBA team, every MLB team, and we do their high schools. And because all those other sites have competition from all over the place, from other publishers, and we, we really don’t have that kind of we’re the highest traffic site one Si, which is wonderful,

Nestor Aparicio  20:47

and especially in a niche where, I mean, like around here, in covering sports, you’d say, well, football would be bigger in Ohio or Pennsylvania or Texas or Florida. Lacrosse was always something here. And I think soccer too. You know, we have a rich tradition of soccer players here, with going back to Darryl G and Reynolds, and 40 years ago and swimming didn’t have the high school thing with the Phelps is and those people. But the lacrosse part of what you were doing here for years, La Crosse was always a major thing

Gary Adornato  21:20

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here, right? Lacrosse still is a major thing. It’s, it’s not a sport I played when I was young, so I had to learn it as I got into journalism. But it’s so exciting. I mean, the things that those guys can do with like, you talk about a hockey

Nestor Aparicio  21:37

player, she never carried a stick. I was a baseball player. Yeah, me too. So I Yeah, we just didn’t

Gary Adornato  21:41

play lacrosse. That’s right. My my uncle, however, is he’s passed now. Is Carl runk, who was Towson coach for ever, and one of the great personalities around town. He was a great football player in his day. To it,

Nestor Aparicio  21:54

Patterson, great Tony Seaman, would always grab me and say, You like hockey? You got to be a lacrosse. Get the same sport, you know, all right, Tony, you know, yeah, just by

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Gary Adornato  22:04

covering the MIA. And you go to the championship night, and they have the three conferences playing back to back. So the C Conference takes field in the okay. They’re okay. They’re average players. And then you get to the B conference, and the passes are sharper, and then you get to the A and these guys are shooting the ball 120 miles an hour, and there are all the kids that are going on to play at a high level college. And even now professionally, it’s a great sport. I just didn’t have the perspective, like many other sports, of having played it at some point. I always wondered

Nestor Aparicio  22:39

how it would catch on in Denver or Notre Dame or Chicago, because it was always at Upstate New York, Long Island, Baltimore, little bit on Tobacco Road for the college side. It’s it’s much

Gary Adornato  22:50

more national. It’s huge in Southern California, Texas, Florida, Ohio, Colorado,

Nestor Aparicio  22:58

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and it wasn’t that way 25

Gary Adornato  23:01

but a lot of guys that played here have gone out and become the evangelist of the sport. And they’ve, they’ve coaching high school teams or forming clubs. And it’s, it’s a sport kids enjoy. It’s, you know, we went through that whole era where everybody said baseball is boring. Was never boring to me. I mean, I watch every pitch and try to figure the strategy and stuff, but, you know, people that didn’t get enough time playing it or an education, they were looking for something more fast paced, and in the springtime, lacrosse is that answer for the for

Nestor Aparicio  23:35

those people, yeah, just, you know, I didn’t, I’ve been to Final Fours. I it’s just not, I didn’t gravitate to it the same way. Maybe I didn’t gravitate to NASCAR or, you know, you know, like, But baseball, you know, they made baseball better with his abs. Man, yeah, I like it.

Gary Adornato  23:53

The game’s gotten better. I think I enjoy it. I think they should give them more challenges.

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Nestor Aparicio  23:57

I said they had good three, but I

Gary Adornato  23:59

think we might go to five some point, yeah, well, they’ve talked about the possibility of just calling every pitch automatically. I don’t know. We get to

Nestor Aparicio  24:06

have an umpire, get have a judge. You get to have some friction. I like taking the judges off of American Idol. You wouldn’t want to do that. I don’t know. I agree. Gary Adenauer is here. He’s covered high school sports for a long, long time. You can find him at Sports Illustrated. Where else can they

Gary Adornato  24:20

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find you? Pretty much there. It’s a si.com backslash High School. You still live here in the county, right? I live in Hartford County, Harford County.

Nestor Aparicio  24:28

Now you’ve left us in Perry Hall.

Gary Adornato  24:31

Well, I was there 35 years. I got remarried five years ago, and we moved up there. Well, good for you.

Nestor Aparicio  24:37

I’m glad you’re happy. It’s really good to see you. Gary adamato, I’ve known him for four decades. Matt Marzullo, where you been, where you hide now’s Matt

8

Gary Adornato  24:44

doing he’s doing good. He’s running a company.

Nestor Aparicio  24:48

He’s on LinkedIn every now and Matt, remember the little guys that gave you a hard time printing the nasty newsletter. I had to break the nasty newsletter out a couple weeks ago. John Miller came back to town with the Giants. And I I couldn’t find my pictures, but I remembered I did a whole page in the newsletter on when he came to my studio. So I found that I put it out on Facebook so no friends like old friends. Man, 30 years ago, he

Gary Adornato  25:10

was still is a great talent.

Nestor Aparicio  25:13

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Matt Marzullo, my friend the junior press I used to. Man, I was such a nightmare for you publisher guys, about that, typos and stuff. I apologize if I was ever a jerk. Yeah, I know I was.

Gary Adornato  25:24

You know, the bit, the hardest part of your book was you had two pictures you liked for the cover. They were basically the same picture. It was you Billick and Marvin Lewis and David Modell. I was David and Billick wasn’t in him, all right. Well, one of the photos Marvin’s,

Nestor Aparicio  25:42

Marvin’s eyes were shut, so

Gary Adornato  25:45

I had to figure out how to take his face off one of the photos and put it on the

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Nestor Aparicio  25:48

one you like. Now you stated, Gemini,

Gary Adornato  25:51

it is AI is incredible.

Nestor Aparicio  25:53

Yeah, the picture on the cover of Purple Rain was Photoshop, because Marvin’s eyes were shut like this. And then we had another one. Was eyes were open, but David was a little bit cloudy, and you morphed it like you pre photoshopped, Photoshop?

Gary Adornato  26:06

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Well, I had Photoshop. That’s how 2001

Nestor Aparicio  26:09

they had Photoshop they did. Yeah, adonado is a genius about this stuff. That’s why he did my book. So if you see Gary, I don’t know his name in Purple Rain one, it’s because he helped me out. I’m gonna help him out with the crab cake. We’re at Koco’s Pub. It’s all brought to you by brought to you by the Maryland lottery. So you want a Key Bridge, you want board walk, you want horses, or do you want crabs and crustaceans in mollusks?

Gary Adornato  26:31

I’ll do boardwalks. It’s a beach.

Nestor Aparicio  26:33

All right. You go to Ocean Dan, Ocean City, Maryland. It’s all brought to you by our friends at the Maryland lottery of Maryland treasures to give away. We will be at Pizza John’s in Essex on the first we will be at Planet Fitness and Timonium on the seventh, 13th, we’re back at families at Lexington market for the crab races, and the 21st will be at the fishmonger’s daughter, new location in Catonsville. Back for more from Koco’s. I’m going to track down Marcella. I’m going to get some coconut shrimp, I’m going to get me a Greek salad. I’m gonna get some cream of crab soup. I just gave you all the special weapons that you need here at Koco’s Pub beyond the crab cakes, which are legendary. Back for more on Baltimore positive. Stay with us.