With the Baltimore Ravens returning to Indianapolis to start a 31st season in the Charm City, Nestor reached to longtime St. Louis sportswriter Jeff Gordon, who was a colleague at The News American in March 1984 when the Mayflower vans came to Owings Mills. It left quite an impression on a young sportswriter from Detroit, who was in Baltimore learning the craft of local journalism under the fire of an Orioles World Series parade and an NFL team disappearing in the middle of the night. Let Gordo educate you…

The discussion examined the Baltimore Colts’ 1984 relocation, the influence of ownership on sports franchises, and the financial and labor challenges facing professional baseball.

Colts Relocation

• Jeff recalled covering Bob Irsay’s intoxicated airport press conference and the community impact of the Colts leaving Baltimore.
• The relocation was attributed to a combination of poor ownership, Baltimore’s reluctance to fund a new stadium, and Indianapolis’s Hoosier Dome strategy.

Ownership Models

• The speakers compared franchise moves involving the Colts, Rams, Cardinals, Browns, and Ravens, concluding that ownership decisions strongly shape fan relationships and franchise stability.
• They contrasted community-oriented legacy ownership with today’s billionaire and private-equity ownership model.

Baseball Challenges

• Jeff expects a difficult labor negotiation involving earlier free-agency access, higher minimum salaries, revenue sharing, luxury-tax limits, and a salary floor.
• Open questions: Can baseball create competitive balance despite major revenue differences? Can MLB fix local television access and attract younger fans without compromising the game’s identity?

• Organize and attend the Baltimore sportswriters reunion at the Guinness Factory on Saturday, October 3, including Jeff Gordon and other former colleagues. (@Nestor Aparicio)
• Take Jeff Gordon on a Baltimore food tour during his visit, including crab cake stops at Koco’s, Costas, Faidley’s, and other planned restaurants. (@Nestor Aparicio)

Colts Departure

• Jeff’s memories of covering Bob Irsay and the airport press conference.
• The Colts’ importance to Baltimore’s culture and the effect of the move on fans.
• Stadium financing, Mayor Schaefer’s position, and Indianapolis’s effort to acquire a franchise.

Franchise Ownership

• Comparisons among the Colts, Rams, Cardinals, Browns, Ravens, and Orioles.
• The transition from legacy owners to wealthy individual and private-equity ownership.
• How ownership affects competitive investment, community ties, and relocation risk.

Baseball Economics

• The Cardinals’ rebuilding timeline and the possibility of a 2028-focused plan.
• Revenue disparities between large- and small-market teams.
• Proposed labor solutions: salary floor, revenue sharing, earlier player earnings, and limits on luxury-tax avoidance.

Fan Engagement

• Local television fragmentation and the need for broader access to games.
• Declining participation and affordability concerns in youth baseball.
• Potential lessons from the Savannah Bananas, Brewers, and Guardians in attracting younger audiences.

Sports Memories

• Jeff’s notable events included the Rams’ Super Bowl run, David Freese’s World Series performance, Villanova’s upset of Georgetown, and Theismann’s injury.

Nestor Aparicio 0:01
Welcome home. We are WNST AM 1570 Towson, Baltimore. We call this thing Baltimore Positive. I don’t know if this segment’s going to be too too positive. It’s positive that I’m getting together with one of my original chums from 42 years ago and coworker of not just Mike Resigliano with me and many many others that I went on to, but Jeff Gordon is about to join us right now. We’re gonna be getting together and having crab cakes. He and I in a couple of weeks when we get our Baltimore Sports Raider reunion together with Stan Rapaport and Molly Dunham Glassman. But I’ll have these Ravens scratch offs giveaway several times between now and then. I’ll be at State Fair on the west side of town on the 24th. Obviously, cost us in this week, and our friends at GBMC are going to be upset that I’m getting a fried crab cake this week. But I am, and also Farn and Durham are keeping us very, very comfortable because they are the comfort guys. Jeff Gordon made me comfortable when I was 15 years old, and he was like a big grunt. How old were you when you worked at the News American? You were in your early 20s. Everybody was right. Yeah,

Jeff Gordon 1:00
yeah. I was early 20s. I was probably so. I graduated in college in ’79, and I guess that was about ’83 that I got there. And yeah, it was. I was still a kid. Had no idea what I was doing, and it was a chance for me to grow up. And with the help of some of the folks you mentioned there, like Molly and Stan, had a chance to do that. It was painful, but we, by the time I left, I was a, I was, I was more prepared for sure. We had so much fun, though, man. Those were interesting times, but one of the topics that you want to hit on today, man, was not so much fun.

Nestor Aparicio 1:33
Well, we’re playing the Colts, and that’s always weird for me and people my age, and it’s not weird anymore that like Luke, who’s covered the football team for me professionally for 17 years now, 18 years. Luke and I’ve been together. He has no association to it other than his dad, right? And my kid was born in 1984, right? You, however, were part of chronicling it, leaving on a staff where it wasn’t just the biggest story in the city; it was the biggest story in the country, right? When it happened, and I don’t know that I’ve gotten your memories. I mean, I’ve I’ve talked to lots of folks about it. I haven’t talked to Bernie about it or who was there that night, but like John Eisenberg have talked about it at length, and he calls our era this era, you and Bernie and everything you went through, and saying it was the golden age of sports writing. So I guess that’s what this reunion’s going to be in a couple weeks is the golden age of sports writing. But that story was larger than life, and I think that that’s the part of it that as we get into this, yeah, there’s Ursay and the third generation, and we’ll get and nobody cares so much except people really much older than me at this point that are so ah screw the earthy like all that that went on for 40 years. But like you covered it, man, and it was like, it you were in your early 20s trying to process it too because it was a really big deal to move a franchise then.

Jeff Gordon 2:56
Yeah, it was the whole thing was you know just so unfortunate. You know I think when you know Bob Ursay being the ultimate unhinged character, right? So my biggest memory was the that news conference at the airport when Bob was absolutely hammered, and he was saying all that crazy stuff. And you know he is he was going to you know making the threats that he followed through on, and in fact I still use as my one of my Facebook, you know, I guess the avatar is me, you know, taking notes while Bob is spewing all this nonsense, this reeking of alcohol. And this is right

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Nestor Aparicio 3:31
at the gate, the airport gate. He called it Azurona. I’m in Azurona. Is that the one you were at?

Jeff Gordon 3:35
Yeah, it was. It was a mess, and you know, and I got that. I pulled that screenshot off of the a great ESPN bit on a great little mini documentary on the the Colts marching band, which continued to march on after the team left. And so, I guess for me, what I found was most compelling was what the Colts meant to the community. And of course, you know we work with John Stedman, Steady, chronicled the great years of the Colts franchise, and he was this monumental figure in Baltimore, and such an authoritative voice on it. The historian of the franchise, really of its great days. But people like you and people like Bernie Miklus, who grew up, you know, there, and this was part of your life, part of your culture, and I, you know, I was a, I was originally from Detroit, great sports town, a lot like Baltimore, but really didn’t have a team that was as ingrained in the culture as the Colts were in in Baltimore. So for me, being an outsider and doing a lot of the stories where you’re talking to fans and you’re trying to, you know, get their emotions, and you had been in Baltimore

Nestor Aparicio 4:43
six months at the time, right? Literally, you were like really, you were just a kid on the street trying to be a sports writer, right? Literally, right,

Jeff Gordon 4:49
and it’s all new, you know. And the team wasn’t very good, but you know, and then hadn’t been very good for a while, and and so I had to. What I learned was just how much this franchise meant to the people and how terrible all this. Was and what a what a bad thing that was that you could get stuck with a terrible owner and have really no no control over. Now I will say that you know back then Mayor Schaefer did not want to get and play in the stadium game, which was you know understandable because the stadium games never really turned out to be a financial win for cities, but it was the reality of the time, right, and he didn’t want to go there, and so that was all part of this this story as well, and him holding out on not not going down the stadium road, and cities having the

Nestor Aparicio 5:31
stones to put money out to try to steal teams. I mean, that’s what the Hoosier Dome was. It was designed to steal a team, just which one, right? Literally,

Jeff Gordon 5:40
yeah, and that became more norm. That became you know franchise stealing, and so of course, you know subsequently I go on like Bernie did to St. Louis, same type of deal, bad owner. You know he goes out to Arizona, leaves the city without its football team. It’s just because again the city didn’t want to build him a stadium. So this was a there were so many layers to this, but I think I come back to the main thing. I come back to was the and in how much the team meant to the city, how much it was, how much of a part of the fabric of the city it was, and then of course, and it can never

Nestor Aparicio 6:14
be that way again. By the way, I can tell you that we’re in our 31st year of the Ravens. The Ravens felt like that for five minutes, when Modell sold it, it it really the last 20 years, the Harbaugh era. Brian understood all of that. Brian walked around Memorial Stadium. He understood that connection. This franchise doesn’t want that. It just wants your money, like you know what I mean. And you’ve now done how many free? You did Baltimore leaving, and you were here, and then you then soon left and went to St. Louis, where then you then covered losing a team, stealing the Rams, and lived long enough to watch them screw you and go back to L.A. Right? Like, so you’ve done four, right? In and out, right?

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Jeff Gordon 6:58
Yeah, it’s and it’s funny because you know having that perspective, you know, when the Rams left, it’s like, well, we stole their team; they just took it back. You know, the owner took it back, and and he really it, which was it, and you know, just made sense for them to do that. Like the other moves that happened were just to me just dumb. You know, the football Cardinals going out to Arizona where they played in Sun Devil Stadium for a long time, and just fans rotted in the in the seats, waiting for Bill Bidwell’s son to take over the team and make sense of it all. You know, Modell. I mean, the Browns meant everything to Cleveland, and then you had a terrible owner. He couldn’t run his own business, and he had a chance. Baltimore wised up about bringing a team in, and so here he comes. So I guess the theme of it was early on. It was just bad owners, right? I mean, Ursay was a train wreck. Jimmy Ursay was a nice enough guy at the time, Nestor. We, I think Birdie really liked him. He was just a young guy in his 20s playing the guitar, and you know, being a you know just a regular dude, he really couldn’t control his father. Well, I think ultimately did a good job for the franchise in in Indy. It’s so sad what happened with his his life, but what a terrible owner his his dad was. Modell just a terrible owner, unfortunately. Yeah, I spent time

Nestor Aparicio 8:13
with Jimmy during my during my time. I got to know him. He invited me to some of those things that he did. He and I would always talk music. He knew I was a Baltimore guy. He knew he sat and did an hour with me of 2009. I never ran it on the radio. I was doing a book. I had a book idea, Jeff. By the way, Jeff Gordon is our guest, longtime sports writer in St. Louis. My one-time mentor and friend in 1984-85 here, along with Bob Paston and John Hawkins and Molly Dunham and Stan Rapaport and just so many really, really Ron Wenig, Tom Cousins, just so many foundational people in my life. All of you are still in my life, and I’m blessed for that. That all of you come and and you all have taught me so much about all of this. But like we all learned this hard scrabble the hard way as a fan to say like these are businesses. These are not necessarily good people or better people because they’re rich or they have this Rolex or that car in a general. And obviously demons and all of that. But when they’re the kid and they they they they they’re born into it. David Modell a little bit certainly, and David is a guy I’ve never had a negative word for Jeff because he never lied to me. Like never, David Modell was honest to me to the day he died, and offered to come down and hold my hand while my wife was dying the first time. You know, like David was a good man, and out of that, you’ve already disparaged Modell. He couldn’t run the business, but that’s sort of the that’s the reputation of all of this, but Jim Irsay through all of this and his demons and all that, no one of that era, you the any of the reporters, even Steady, I mean you call Tiger Bob’s the devil incarnate, you know, but Jimmy, everybody had a soft spot for Jimmy. And Jimmy lived his whole life with collecting guitars and doing good things in Indianapolis and fighting the stigma of a mental health addiction. But clearly, was a lifelong addict and had real problems through all of it. But everybody sort of loved Jimmy left the world a better place. Can we say that as we beat up on Bob? Right?

Jeff Gordon 10:20
No, no, absolutely, and I agree. I mean, Jimmy was was was a like I said, he was just a great guy, and when we knew him, and he just stayed that guy. And anybody who befriends Hunter S. Thompson, right? You know, just a guy who who who just got the fans. You know, he was a guy who you know had was just he’s the kind of owner you want, you know. He enjoyed life. Unfortunately, like I said, we you know he could not get past some of the the addiction, which ultimately claimed him, and had all these terrible health problems at the end. But just a great guy, and you know the kind of owner that the NFL needed, right? And it’s a shame that it couldn’t happen in in Baltimore because he would have been a fabulous owner, he would have gotten the Baltimore Colts fan. He would have been embraced by the community. We all we all loved the fans would have loved the guy if they had a chance. If he was the front man and not his father, imagine how things would have been different.

Nestor Aparicio 11:12
You had Arch Schleister, didn’t you? At the end, did you? You did all that. I mean, they they they were very like, just in a general sense, from the Elway thing to the Schleister thing to Frank Cush to the drunk owner to the fans loving them so much to Indianapolis stealing them and Roselle being you know not really wanting this to happen but in a and and Al Davis had already done it like as a 24 year old sports writer man you had a lot of, you had a lot of meat on you and Bernie. You know, you you got your chops writing about this really significant thing that happened, right?

Jeff Gordon 11:50
Yeah, and this is you know the franchise was was not blessed. You know, it kind of reminded me some of the stuff we ran into in in St. Louis with the Cardinals, where they draft a kicker that you know out of college, he really couldn’t kick field goals without a tee. You know, just couldn’t. You know, it was a problem because he couldn’t bring the tee with him from college. Or they drafted a quarterback had no peripheral vision based on his one performance in an All Star game. So yeah, you know, and you know, I I didn’t dislike Frank Koch. You seemed like you know he’s this guy coming in from college, you know, had that you know approach which didn’t really work, and but you know it was just he was kind of stuck too, right? With this with this thing, and remember the Baltimore Stars coming in and rattling the cage, you know, with back in the USFL days, Chuck Fusino,

Nestor Aparicio 12:41
right? Peterson, more. Mora, Jim Mora, right?

Jeff Gordon 12:44
Yeah, Jim Mora, yeah, and those crew and a good, good coach and a good franchise, a good ended up playing in Annapolis. But you know, with Hollywood Peterson being a totally different guy from what we experienced with the NFL, they had so much confidence, and you know, it just was, you know just it’s so sad that you had a franchise was in a bad place, a bad owner, a mayor that was was not going to build the stadium, and you know and just how Bob got the franchise in the first place under weird circumstances, right? And not sure would have gone any better had had Rosenblum kept the team and not made the trade because we saw what happened with the the Rams.

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Nestor Aparicio 13:23
Jeff Gordon is here. He has been my lifelong friend in sports. So you know, I’ll get all deep with you and say, what have we learned here through all of this? What would your I would say this if my son, who’s now in his 40s, had a son and that or daughter and came to me and they’re 1516, and said, “Hey, I want to be a sports writer. I want to be a sports media person. I look, our one-time colleague Mark Hyman runs the Maryland, and he and I are at odds all the time. He’s telling me about all these great opportunities in journalism and stuff, and I feel like that’s that’s not great journalism to me. But I’m out on the streets trying to do it every day. Jeff, they they took my press credentials right like I’ve only done this for four decades I own an FCC license I’ve written books on the team I’m sort of the ultimate historian on the Baltimore Ravens ask anybody I’ll sit in any room with that and um there it’s just a different level of what the media is what these teams are how much money they get and you sit in St. Louis where there ain’t no football this weekend, and and really, there ain’t never going to be no football there again, right? Like it’s done in St. Louis. The dream has died twice, right?

Jeff Gordon 14:29
Yeah, the only way they would get a team, and it’s it couldn’t be a, it’s got to be just a really unlikely scenario, would be if there was some really, really, really, really rich guy who was going to just go over the top of any objection from the NFL and and also pay for a stadium himself or herself. If that person was so powerful, had so much money, and that ultimately could just go over the top of objections, that’s the only way, right? Because ultimately billionaires. And do that sort of thing, and you know. Well, their

Nestor Aparicio 15:03
next move is Europe, right? Period, right? Like they’re they’re thinking on a different level than Pete Rozelle and Art Modell and Bob Er say and that crew. They didn’t think about the game that way or the business that way. We’re in a whole different dude. We’re playing in Brazil in three weeks, right? Like literally here, right?

Jeff Gordon 15:20
Yeah, the one guy that would have bought the the Rams and and keep the franchise here, Shad Khan, ended up going down and buying the Jaguars. But and they built, they’ve supported the team well enough. But he would he would be the guy that would want to put a team in London because he grew up there, and you know he would be a guy that could pull that off if if they ever wanted to move the team or put a team in London. A guy like that would do it. Yeah, St. Louis has had its time, and it just it would just take an extraordinary circumstance because you know the biggest thing about the industry now is look at who’s owning these franchises. You know the days there’s little by little the legacy owners are gone. Even the good legacy owners, you know the Rooney’s would be a good legacy owner, but the world is different now. A lesser legacy owner like the Brown family, the world changed. It’s a these franchises are worth billions. The people with the resources, you know, don’t need public support. You can use a little public help, but they have so much money. That’s the ownership now. You look at what franchises franchises are selling for. You know it’s insane, and the world of the guy who just got the got the team in the 60s or the 50s or the 40s or whatever, and just stayed with it while it gained all this appreciation. Man, now it’s private equity. Now it’s all these billionaires, and it’s just like like you said about the Ravens. It’s all business now, man.

Nestor Aparicio 16:44
Jeff Gordon is here. He’s covered sports in St. Louis, Missouri, St. Louis, where I haven’t been in a while. Last time I was out there, I think I saw Springsteen. I saw the Stones at the at the Dome, and I know Foo Fighters and AC/DC got there together this week too. So good stuff happening out there. But you’re still on the beat. You still have a Substack. I see you. You really like hockey. I mean, and I. I guess your Detroit roots would be into that as well. But you do blues stuff. But let’s talk Cardinals just for a second and baseball. And you just mentioned new ownership. We’ve. I’m reading Ken Bellson’s book on the NFL every day. Is Sunday, and I got about 200 pages, and I had him on last month. And there’s a quote in there from a Jets like team president or general manager like 30 years ago when Dan Snyder bought the Washington Football franchise, and it was kind of a snide comment at one of the owners’ meetings toward a reporter that was like the next guy’s always worse. So if you don’t like the owner you got, hang in. The next guy will be worse. Certainly, that’s the case from Modell to Bishati, as I see it. Certainly, that was the case for everybody from Hoffberger that got to Angelo’s. We have new people here. Guy says he’s from Baltimore, grew up here, not really from here, doesn’t really have anything here. There’s no infrastructure. Angelo’s burned the thing to the ground, and here we have always looked to St. Louis. All of all of the people that ever ran this thing, Buck Showalter, McPhail, all looked at the Cardinals as being this what the Orioles could be if they could ever grow. If Angelo’s would ever die, and we get a real owner. We could make the Orioles what the Cardinals are, and now the Cardinals are kind of like part of bringing Elias in was there was a Cardinal connection and all that. We’re eight years into that, and that tank’s dry. It is amazing how ownership affects all of this, and I wrote a book, probably quoted you somewhere in there about certainly Rick Hummel probably on the baseball side about Angelo’s called the Peter Principles and him wrecking the team and fundamentally wrecking it. The first thing that wrecked it, and it’s chapter one, not paragraph one, but certainly page one, is Dewitt was going to own the Orioles, like that’s the way it was supposed to go down, Dewitt had the deal done. It was in the paper. It was reported, and Angelo’s lost his mind and got involved. Dewitt’s been the owner in St. Louis all these years on your whole watch. Let’s talk about the Cardinals and baseball and the strike, which you understand. And Bernie had. We’ve now been through a couple of those as well in baseball-only cities. You know, we’re both at one point we were baseball only cities to deal with baseball work stoppages. You and I forgot more about this because we’ve had to learn it like the back of our hands for 50 years. Because labor in baseball has been at the heart of all of it, and that’s the big zit that’s about to pop again this off season, right?

Jeff Gordon 19:39
Yeah, I think you know. I just keep calling the the situation with the Cardinals and their rebuild as Project 2028 because they’re clearly focused on the year after whatever happens next year, right? So they’re built, they’re lining up their whole roster that way to try to get the franchise back on track, and they’re rightfully overlooking next year because everybody anticipates some sort of work stoppage initiating. By the owners, the question that baseball’s grappling with is how do you operate within a in a realm where the franchise revenues are so different, where there’s such a gap between the major markets and the lesser markets, and on top of that, you’ve got again, and we talk about billionaire owners and private equity guys who have all the money in the world come in and and do what they’ve done with the Dodgers, as an example, right? So nobody’s going

Nestor Aparicio 20:27
broke during this thing. Where literally 40 years ago, Bud Selig’s rubbing his nickels together in Milwaukee, trying to figure it out, right? Like literally, right? I mean, there really were owners who were not supremely wealthy. I mean, Jacobs was in receivership here, like you know. So, like, I would, but this time around, they think that’s the knockout punch, right? Rubinstein and Araghetti never lost a fight in their life. These guys, right? They get into these these battles with the the the the workers, right? Literally, right?

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Jeff Gordon 20:59
Well, the thing is that you know you you don’t have to lose money now unless you’re just stupid. And interestingly, it’s a weird time for the owners to try to take a stand because several owners refuse to spend any money at all, and they’re not forced to. The system there’s so there’s so much wrong with the current system, and it allows the the pirates to spend a bare minimum and just live off the revenue sharing money and not and never and be fine. If nobody ever came to a game, they’d be fine because they can live off the revenue sharing because they don’t spend on players. So the owners, you know, they don’t lose money and franchise appreciations are through the roof, as Scott Boris always points out to Super Agent. Now, having said that, there’s a middle ground to reach where you get better competitive balance by making all teams spend a certain amount, at least a certain amount of money, creating a salary floor. And as far as the salary cap goes, it can’t be a hard cap because there’s just too much difference. You can’t make the Dodgers play by the same rules as the Pittsburgh Pirates. So then, what have you

Nestor Aparicio 22:01
really solved?

Jeff Gordon 22:03
Right. So all you can do is you can create more balance, and to me, there’s a better deal for the players to be made because the super agents have always wanted collective bargaining agreements that made the top guys incredibly wealthy and gutted the middle class veterans, and while at the same time, the young guys were also very limited in what they could make. It was like a the the current system works for like 2% of the the players. The young players are screwed, and the middle class veterans are are don’t. You know who’s really screwed?

Nestor Aparicio 22:38
Pitchers who don’t who can’t stay healthy the first five years, and we got this kid Batista here throwing 100 miles an hour, lights out. Should have been a 20 million dollar closer. Blew his arm out. He ain’t gonna make 20 cents.

Jeff Gordon 22:50
No, and he’s done. His his prime, you know, his his earning years came and went. He didn’t make any money. And the miners, you make no money. So yeah, I mean they’ve and they’ve gutted the miners,

Nestor Aparicio 22:59
by the way, too, right? So they’ve done all that. So I’ve got these guys up here looking like the bad news bears because they can’t field the ground ball,

Jeff Gordon 23:06
right? Because they they diminish the size of the minors so they don’t have as many people under contract. It’s a cost cutting thing because they were being forced to pay guys more. They were violating wage and hour laws with what how little they were paying the minor league players. Gamble soup, peanut

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Nestor Aparicio 23:22
butter, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for per diem, $5 per diem. Go to McDonald’s. Yeah,

Jeff Gordon 23:27
yeah, it was crazy. So they said, “Oh, we’ll fix that. We’ll just eliminate a bunch of those lower levels. And of course, like you say, now some guys end up in the minors and they don’t know what the cutoff guy is. Well, you know, Jeff,

Nestor Aparicio 23:37
the thing for me on the revenue side and the money side, and I keep I look, I have the best guest that I can possibly find on my show, including you, by the way. Jeff Gordon is here from St. Louis. If you’re listening on the radio side, if you need to look Jeff Gordon up, he’s not the race car. My wife said the race car driver. I’m like, no, no, Jeff. My Jeff Gordon. So if you can look him up, but the the money side of this that I find the most fascinating, and I’ve asked a few people who know Manfred. I said, “Look, if I could sit here with the smartest person in baseball and say, ‘What does an ideal revenue model look like? Not just for the owners. I’m talking about being agnostic here, being like a real commissioner, looking out for the fans, looking out for the owners, the best interest of the game, their revenue, their business sales, the digital-all parts of this stadium revenue, getting people to the games, getting their batteries built where they can build apartments and steal money from everybody, like they do in Atlanta, and you know that’s their that’s their wet dream for all of these. What does it look like for a customer, me wanting to buy tickets, media. How do I subscribe to the games right now? This Apple, Amazon, Masson. This game’s at noon. This game’s on the Apple. This game’s on at 11 in the morning. Like doing all of the same thing the NFL does on Wednesday and Thursday night, screwing me around. And I think to myself with baseball. I haven’t met anybody that can explain to me how the Orioles’ business is going to operate three to five years from now to be able to afford Pete Alonso because they’re getting a couple 1000 people at the ballpark right now. The media model’s kind of falling apart-not kind of-it has. The sport’s so old and white here. I’m assuming it’s sort of that way in St. Louis as well. They have a lot of problems that they never acknowledge. All they tell, oh, we got attendance is up. This is up. This the pitch clock. The box. I love the box. I love the pitch clock. I love the got rid of the shift. I don’t even hate the analytics. I what I hate the strikeouts. But like in a general sense, I don’t get any sense from even Mari Brown, business people. I’ve had Kurt Badenhausen on, John Iran, people that cover business and cover the sport of baseball. Nobody can explain to me. The NFL’s got their ish together. They’re going to go to Europe. They’re going to play games. They’re going to get stick this 18th game up their ass. They’re going to. They know what they’re doing when it comes explaining baseball to people. I don’t have anybody that can explain it to me, Jeff. And maybe in St. Louis they have more of a vision for the Cardinals because you say this thing’s a mess here right now with these new owners and Elias and the work stoppage and the failures of the Andersons and the Rudrage. I mean, this thing’s really teetering here, and I keep thinking to myself, “What’s going to be your offer to the customers that I give you 1000 bucks this year, and I get the cable television package, I get a ball cap, I get a ticket, I get whatever it is, because they’ve done a really poor job of engaging fans here with buying in. You know, the thing you found when the Colts left is people felt like it was a part of their family. It’s it’s over with for that. They’re gonna have to like sing for their supper here, and I think baseball in general, in places outside of like L.A. and I think St. Louis is one of those places where I’ve always felt like you roll the ball out, and the Cardinals are gonna do good, and then the Orioles went in there a couple weeks ago, and I’m like, there. I mean, the Cardinals are not like super healthy as you would see it, right? Or am I wrong?

Jeff Gordon 27:08
Well, they’re again, they’re they hope to be super healthy in 2028. I mean, they’re basically franchises that are not in Los Angeles or New York are going to have to try to take the Tampa Bay Rays baseball model, not the business model, because of the terrible stadium there. They’re trying to finally replace. I guess if I could find a model franchise for Baltimore for St. Louis, and and St. Louis hired people away from the the Guardians. The Guardians would be the model franchise. They used to like Baltimore. They built a new stadium like Baltimore. They were jamming the place for a while. Like Baltimore, they fell on hard times and had trouble being consistently good. Although they’ve become more resourceful, and like Milwaukee, another model franchise, where what they do in these franchises is you just stress young players, stress energy of the young players, develop you put all your talent, put a lot of your resources in developing young players, find value in the in the corners of the of the marketplace and play with energy, play with a modest payroll, churn those guys and try to stay in the chase year to year. Don’t don’t don’t ever think you’re going to sign a guy to a giant contract. It’s not happening. You don’t have to. It’s baseball. You don’t need those guys. You can play a decent brand of baseball if you’re really smart and you can play to your market size, but you have to be smart. You know, you have to put the emphasis in areas to try to find an advantage where people to beat the people who simply spend to solve problems. You’ve got to be able to solve problems on a budget. So it’s challenging, and as far as that goes, you know things that baseball can do: clean up the local TV situation, create some access so out-of-market people can can buy games. There’s so much that if Major League Baseball can can take total control of local TV as a starting point, because the regional sports networks mostly died. If that could, that would be a great starting point. You know, beyond that, Nestor, you don’t want to turn into Savannah bananas, but you look at they fill the stadium, and it’s over the top, but it fills the stadium, and young people like it. So, I don’t know. Do you take some of that? Is there any of that you can take in your game presentation to try to get younger people. You got to let the Latin

Nestor Aparicio 29:24
guys flip the bats now, right? I mean, there’s there’s there’s a little bit of that music and the rock. I mean, I sort of hate the Oriole games now, where they have an MC and they’re you know whooping people up between innings and stuff. I just I’m an old guy. Get off my lawn, but at some point, it’s not really turning anybody else on either, right? You know what I mean. Whatever they’re doing, it isn’t working on or off the field here. And we’re about to have a work stoppage. And you and I have lived through all of this. And I don’t know a better guy. I’d have asked in you if you’ve been watching this 45 years like me. I always tell the story. You’re in St. Louis. I told I’d had Howard Balzer on the other day talking some football. One of your composures. I actually hit Bob Costas this week too. He and I chatted briefly because he broadcast the first Ravens game, which was 30 years ago this week that the Ravens were born 30 years ago this week, so the St. Louis thing. My dad canceled the sporting news in 1981 because he was so pissed about the strike, and it and the sporting news didn’t have box scores anymore. We got a couple of them, and it was thin. And my dad’s like, “I’m canceling. So my dad took it out on the sporting news. Poor poor guys over at Lindbergh Boulevard, and but I don’t know that fans are pissed. You know I’m on my 20th anniversary next week, Gordo, of the walkout I did on Angelo’s “Free the Birds, my big double middle finger to Peter was was September 21st, 2006, and I’m writing a 20th anniversary piece for that for next week about what have we really done here? The franchise is way worse disrepair than it was 20 years ago. Still eating off of Brooks and Boog and the 66 Orioles. The Cardinals have that too. The Cardinals have this really rich history, but I I don’t know that does any of that matter anymore. And and I would say the other part of this, and I’m asking you as the old timer? What’s going to happen with the labor fight? You’ve been through a couple of these, and does it matter to St. Louis that they don’t have an opening day in April and they’ll play games in June and the diehards will come running back? I said that to Luke this morning. I’m like, you do know that when this show ends next week, you’re going to be the one boo-hooing in April when there’s no baseball. When do you think they’re going to turn the spigot bad? I mean, everybody predicts this to be awful in the spring, right?

Jeff Gordon 31:45
Right. Well, look, look. I’ve you know I I bargain contracts all the time because I I was president of a local union bargain. Just wrapped up another one, the Kansas City paper. You know, so I bargained. There’s a deal to be made. It’s not going to be a hard salary cap. They are going to give younger players. They have to give younger players quicker access to free agency. They have to give them quicker access to arbitration. They have to raise the minimum pay again. They have to put harder limits on you know greater revenue sharing luxury tax measures in place. They’ve got to make teams in exchange for that spend. They got to create a salary floor so teams will invest in players. So they’ll sign. What will that look like? By the way,

Nestor Aparicio 32:33
what what what will the Pirates have to spend? What what becomes reasonable at this moment? Because it’ll shift, right?

8

Jeff Gordon 32:41
All right. So I would say you know based on and this and this would require additional revenue sharing from the big markets to the smaller markets. But I got to think you’ve got to today’s game. Realistically, if you got to spend 100 to 125 million, you know you can’t spend 41 million on players, and it’s not sustainable. You know you just can’t always start a bunch of rookies and and guys who are at the end, which has been their model. So you’ve got to find a structure that that works. You you can’t realistically rein in Steve Cohen if he wants to spend money on the Mets, or the guys who own the Dodgers if they want to spend money. It’s America. There’s a limit to how much you can constrain it, but so I see.

Nestor Aparicio 33:23
I hadn’t thought nobody said that on the air to me yet. That like I have always thought like the Dodgers and the Yankees are going to have to agree because there really should be a range. It should be

Jeff Gordon 33:35
right. It

Nestor Aparicio 33:35
should be 150 to 180, or you know like that, and they all should have to spend it. And the math adds up to make Bora’s happy because that’s the NFL model. That’s the North American sports model that works to create competitive balance in a way that when you start talking to me about, well, we got to do it the Rays way. No offense, Gordo, I love you. That’s a bullshit model from go from the beginning, it’s broken. The Garden of Eden is that you’ve already got the original sin of you’re allowing the Dodgers and Yankees and Mets to be superior. So once once you’ve done that, you’re creating a cast system that, to me as a fan, that’ll never work. I mean, it’ll it’ll it’ll band. It’s a band aid, and they’re going to go to war. They’re going to go to hell for a band aid next year. And I still don’t necessarily think that makes the Pirates more competitive. And it certainly doesn’t rein in the Dodgers from stealing any player they want from the Pirates. Like literally, right?

Jeff Gordon 34:36
Right. No, I don’t think you’ll ever really fix that. That the problem is the revenues are just so different, right? I mean, they’re just all different worlds. You’re never going to be able to equalize franchise revenues the way you can in the NFL. The NFL is so successful. There’s so much money, shared money. You could be, and there’s only so many games. So, no matter how stupid you are, you’re going to make money. As an NFL owner, your team can be terrible. You’re making money. Your your team is terrible. Your franchise keeps going up in value. It’s you cannot fail if you own an NFL franchise. Your fans could suffer, but you as an owner can’t fail. Baseball, there’s too much of a range. We’re going to see that happen increasingly in hockey because the rosters are big, like baseball. The markets are varied, and now that there’s money coming into that league, you’re going to see a real separation that really can’t be fixed easily with a with an agreement among the owners. Basketball’s a little different because you just if you get you get a couple of guys, you can win the whole thing, and and that’s how you know the Oklahoma cities of the world can compete. It’s how the Milwaukee’s or the world can compete. But they are

Nestor Aparicio 35:43
spending the same amount of money. Otherwise, they could. The Green Bay Packers could never compete with the New York Giants or the L.A. Rams at this point. It just wouldn’t happen. And so you’re talking about that with the St. Louis Blues, who are very much going to be a bottom third team in the NHL, and that’s in a league with Winnipeg and Edmonton and some other places, just because of population density, right? Like that’s when a team would move to Houston because there’s just more people there, and they got a hockey team in Utah now, in Salt Lake City. I mean, I’m just looking at it and saying, how does that register with the New York Rangers or the Toronto Maple Leafs, who kind of have countries, you know, or or even the Flyers, who were something for a minute, or the Penguins who became something, but like that’ll kill the structure of the NHL if the worst teams can’t win. If Carolina can’t win because they’re, I mean, and look, Tampa’s become like a thing, Miami’s a thing in the NHL, St. Louis has kind of got left behind in to some degree, and all the Canadian cities will get left behind based on the dollar at some point, right?

Jeff Gordon 36:49
Right. Well, I think there was a until probably this year, the Blues have been able to spend all the way to the salary cap, and the the reason they were is that the league was not as successful as the other major franchises. There was a crisis across the league. The players and the owners had to come together to create a system that equalized revenues, that create a revenue share model between the players and the owners, a way to regulate that. Their salary cap became frozen for a number of years because of the pandemic, and really they just put restrictor plates on what players can make and payrolls, and to make sure that this revenue share worked for the owners and the players because everybody was suffering, the whole league was suffering. What happens now is prosperity comes to the league. There are going to be some franchises that are making some real money. That’s going to change the overall model and put a strain on this collective. Like the reason the NHL had a collective where the Blues could win the Stanley Cup and other teams could could take a run at it, like Carolina, you know, in Raleigh, North Carolina, they can win a couple cups because things were so bad. The system they created a collective was a very socialist arrangement, really, between the players and the owners. That’s what it has to

8

Nestor Aparicio 38:08
be. I mean, Art Modell said that all the time. We’re a bunch of really conservative Republicans that come in here, and we need to have a socialistic system so that the NFL can flourish, and one day these franchises will be worth $10 billion because they are right. Like literally, that’s the reason that league has flourished to me, along with the violence and yeah, the restricted part of like I’ll get into we the colors. The NFL’s done a lot of things right, you know. Baseball’s done a lot of things wrong, dude. Like you know, literally to put themselves in this position where they’re sort of the ass end of all of this, and they’re about to go to war 30 years later. Actually, 50 years later, but you know what I mean. Like baseball’s never gotten this right, and they’re going to have another bandaid. As at any everything we’re talking about here, you’re giving me the sensible play and all of that, but it’s still a band aid. It’s still not going to fix

Jeff Gordon 38:57
the virus. But it’s not, and I don’t know that it’ll ever be fixable. You’re never going to have NFL level revenues. You’ve got huge rosters. You play a million games. Pitchers blow up left and right, and it’s just the reality of it. It’s on the other hand, any team can win. You can beat the Dodgers. Just have to play better for a week, and it’s quite possible that that could happen. But it’s just it’s just a different business, right? So the NFL could do all this because it’s so successful. The NHL did all this stuff that was great because it was so unsuccessful. When you’re in the middle, where some franchises are doing really well and some aren’t, it’s hard to get that sort of collective. It’s easy when everybody’s when there’s so much money to split up, and it’s easy when the whole league is struggling. It’s that in between that’s nasty, and the NBA is getting to the point where it’s so successful that it can it can be that more of a collective vibe because everybody’s doing well, franchise values are soaring, the league’s doing great. So it’s baseball’s got a lot of issues, man. You got to play so. Many games with so many players, and it’s a slow pace. It’s a more traditional game. It doesn’t translate to the modern world where the short attention span and and the way people want to action, action, action. It’s a tough sell, and then you bring in all the other things. You know the fact that a huge it’s Latin people like Latin players like it, and African American players, they can’t really get involved because the money is so high in terms of playing at the grassroots level. And even, even with your your white ball player, unless you’re a rich suburban kid, you can’t play baseball in any sort of meaningful feeder league because it’s it’s just such a it’s such a you know it’s such a screwed up system. So there’s a million things that baseball has to look at: access to the sport, developing players from all demographics. You know, figuring out how to get more excitement in the product, in the presentation. I don’t want to sit there in a small park when it’s 110 degrees in St. Louis and have the video guy, video board guy, go! Everybody clap your hands 417 times during the game. Everybody clap your. No, I mean my kids. You know, my grandkids now sweltering. He can’t sit there for more than 10 minutes in this heat. The game’s you know ponderous, even with the changes. It’s challenging, man. I love the game

Nestor Aparicio 41:23
at home, Gordo, because of the box. The box this year has changed the game for me in the way I watch it. I’ve gone to four or five games this year. I went to the All Star game. I was credentialed in Philadelphia. The box makes it better. Like what? And I like Jim Palmer and Ben McDonald called most of the games here, which is great too. Kevin Brown, I mean, the games are good on TV, but in a general sense, the box is the game. It’s the strike zone for me. That’s made me like baseball better on TV.

Jeff Gordon 41:50
Well, it’s. I think it’s better that they’re going to start weeding out terrible umpires who just can’t get. I think the the ball strike challenge is is a good thing because you’re going to get rid of the bad umpires, which they’re they’re weeding out, and that’s a good thing. But yeah, I think you know the pace of play attempts are good. I think they’ve made efforts. I think we’re gonna get back to guys trying to make more contact and not not all swinging for the fence, so there won’t just be strikeouts. The three true outcomes was really horrible for the game. I think we’re seeing people put speed. You know the good thing about this model I talked about, like the Guardians and the Brewers. You know, here’s what the Brewers do: they have guys steal bases. They they they they defend well. They hustle. They run. They run it. They run player game action stuff. They’re not just paying a bunch of guys a trillion dollars to see if they can hit home runs. They actually try to play the game, dude. I find that if you just

Nestor Aparicio 42:45
press the other team to play defense,

Jeff Gordon 42:48
yeah, they

Nestor Aparicio 42:48
they can’t run a rundown.

8

Jeff Gordon 42:50
Yeah, in general, like

Nestor Aparicio 42:51
literally, just challenge. You know, you want to take third base on the the the single to left field. Go ahead. He can’t. He can’t throw the ball on the bag. You know these guys throw the ball from the outfield. Just it, it. I swear to you, Gordo. I’ve watched baseball my whole life. This particular team this year, and I’m not the only one that sees it. Plenty of people see it on social media. It is bad news, Bears, and I don’t just mean that they make two or three errors or whatever. I’m talking about just if you watch the game, there’s six to eight times a night, where they’re bobbling balls, throwing to the wrong base, throwing all. I mean, it’s sometimes that they get the out and it doesn’t cost them. But in a general sense, I’ve never seen anything like it, where they’re only drafting guys that can hit home runs here, and they strike at just all the things you’re talking about. The outcomes, it’s it’s not an attractive brand to baseball what we’ve seen here in Baltimore this year. And what’s going to be even more unattractive is when they shut the sport down on the off season. So I’m doing my 28th anniversary, by the way, and having old friends on. Jeff Gordon is here, not the race car driver, the legendary four decade sports writer in St. Louis, Missouri. He is a former colleague of mine at the Baltimore News American, and was standing by when Tiger Bob moved the Baltimore Colts to Indianapolis. And because we’re playing the Indianapolis Colts, and because I’ve been trying to, I tried to get you on before the Cardinal thing, but you were doing vacation and all of that stuff. And then we have a Sports Raider reunion coming up here in Baltimore a couple weeks. It’s the weekend that the Springsteen concerts happening down at at Merriweather, but is there anything you want to say about the golden age of sports writing? Because I’m doing the 28th anniversary, and because of the baseball work stoppage, I keep wanting to call it a strike, and it’s the wrong word. I don’t want to use the wrong word. Work stoppage, labor discord. I’ve leaned into my music history, and you remember me as a 15-year-old running around chasing Getty Lee, chasing sticks, chasing Ario Speedwagon, Jimmy Page called in on the phone, Scott Labarre, all those cousins, all those guys who went out to Sacramento, Maury, all those guys from our our background, Wenig. I’m still a rock and roll guy, Gordo. And a friend of mine asked me a couple weeks ago how many concerts I’d seen and what my favorite concert is and like all of that stuff. I mean, you’re a sports writer, and I have to think out loud like my favorite sporting event, or but what’s the greatest sporting event you ever saw? Because people are asking me about concerts.

Jeff Gordon 45:19
Yeah, well, I think you know the the whole season with the the Rams when they came out of nowhere and won the Super Bowl and the the game with the tackle at the end, you know just the game came right down to the final play that and the Rams won a Super Bowl that was pretty amazing. There was a I’d have to put that on the top of the list. While in Baltimore, I saw Villanova’s upset of Georgetown because I was covering Georgetown to a degree. But you know, just while I was in Baltimore, I saw a lot of cool things. I wouldn’t say it was the greatest event I saw, but I was there when Theismann got his leg snapped like a wishbone. You know, I saw David Robinson making people look ridiculous in the Colonial Athletic Association, and I was up in Syracuse when they knocked off the Orangemen, and he was just phenomenal. I think he took Ronnie Cycly apart that night, so I saw a lot of cool stuff in Baltimore. But you know, personally, you know, I’ve seen some teams win World Championships in all three of the franchises in St. Louis on my watch. There, the Cardinals football Cardinals left pretty quickly, but that’s pretty cool. The greatest show on turf capped by that Super Bowl. That was pretty. That would have to be number one. Game six of the World Series, the David Freese game, go to 11 when the Texas Rangers were one pitch away from the from winning the whole thing. Did the Red Sox

Nestor Aparicio 46:39
win the World Series in St. Louis that time.

Jeff Gordon 46:42
Yeah, I saw that, and then what was funny about that was the the movie they made about the Red Sox fan, and they they jumped on the field actor, and the actress jumped on the field and got filmed as part of that celebration. Actually, at the live at that game, you know what? You know, here the Cardinal fans were like, “This is true. So many Cardinal fans went to the Red Sox fan next to him, said, “Hey, welcome to the club. Welcome to the club. So

Nestor Aparicio 47:09
you’re allowed to win. I mean, Cardinals won. They won a little bit with Whitey and and Larusa. I was just gonna say, man, you’ve been out there 40 years, and I think about the legends, what you’ve missed here, right? Like I would talk about Ray Lewis and Joe Flacco, and you know the Buck Showalter era was kind of fun here for a minute too, and different things that we’ve had here from Ed Reed, and we’ve had two Super Bowl championships here. But man, you and Bernie went out to St. Louis 40 years ago with Bob Bastin, my first boss. I’ll send you down a skipjack game with Robbie, and gave me my chance in life, really. And you guys too took you out to St. Louis and gave you bigfalutin jobs at the post, the dispatch back there in the day. But the Cardinals, all the way through on the baseball side, really a royal franchise in a lot of ways. And the Muses and the Brocks and those guys hanging around like we have Palmer and and and Brooks and all of that. We have Ripken here. I mentioned Ripken here. I mean, all of that. Ripken was just getting going when you left 8586, right? So, but St. Louis, you’ve had Gretzky come through there, right? I mean, Hull. I mean, just all really Majerus, right? You’ve you’ve had really cool things happen there, but the Rams, all those I had Howard on. I mean, all those guys going to the Hall of Fame, the Kurt Warner story, and Vermeil, and all of that. It it’s it has been a rich time to be the golden age of sports writers for both of us over the last 40. It’s been great stories to tell in both of our towns, right?

Jeff Gordon 48:39
Yeah, this was I was very fortunate, you know, because I retired about a year ago. But you think about the things you saw, and you know, you know, not all of it pleasant, but the boy that that Rams run, and then the the really 20 years of the Cardinals being very good, and the Blues finally winning the cup, and you know, having a couple of exciting runs during that time, but then to finally out of nowhere go on a run, just like the Rams out of nowhere went on a run, and and really for sports fans everywhere, it can happen. I know you’re sitting there in Baltimore thinking, no, it can’t happen with the Orioles. No, it can. It can teams can come out of nowhere. I mean, the 80 what was that 2006 Cardinals team had was finished with 83 victories, won the whole thing. It can happen, you know. Anthony Reyes, future firefighter, outduels Justin Verlander. It happens in baseball, right? So I have seen that happen. Teams out of nowhere winning the whole thing, and I’ve seen it multiple times. So if there’s any hope for your listeners, people viewing this, the video, it it it can happen. It does happen. It just, you know, I hope it happens for people there while they can still enjoy it.

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Nestor Aparicio 49:45
Well, if anybody wants to come down and commiserate with a whole bunch of old sports writers, we’re going to be getting together down at the Guinness Factory in a couple weeks, and on the third, which is the Power to the People Day. You know, I was hoping that we would be interrupted by Oriole playoff baseball, but that’s not going to be the case on Saturday. October the third. Jeff Gordon is our guest. Tell everybody what you’re doing at Substack and all that. And I hope I’ve inspired you a little bit to, you know, I like inspiring writers to write things, and it’s what you do. And telling stories is what we’ve done all of our lives. And even writing about these glory errors and telling these stories, there’s only so many of us that can do it, and it’s a small number, and it gets smaller every day.

Jeff Gordon 50:24
Yeah, we were very fortunate. I mean, you know, going back in the old days with the Washington Post at its prime, the Evening Sun, the Morning Sun, the News American. It was just crazy how many how many just super talented people were working. It’s changed. The media world’s changed. A lot of people who you know, it’s just so such a proliferation that anybody can gain a voice and gain some traction. But for me, it’s just a hobby and Gordo Zone on Substack. I don’t. I do three or four newsletters a week just as a hobby to keep busy and just I got a few followers and I really don’t care how many people do it. It’s I don’t charge anything because I don’t want to have to work too hard. So, but

Nestor Aparicio 51:08
a man with no responsibilities-that’s what I want to be in life.

Jeff Gordon 51:11
I finally got to that point. Just I’m gonna turn 70 this year, and it was no way you’re

Nestor Aparicio 51:15
70, dude. Look at you, man. You look great.

Jeff Gordon 51:19
Well, you know, for now, but you’ll see. I’m probably by the time I come to Baltimore, I’ll probably age more dramatically for two more weeks. So, I’ll give you beer; it’ll

Nestor Aparicio 51:28
make you younger.

8

Jeff Gordon 51:29
I’m looking for. I’m going to load up on crab cakes when I get there, man.

Nestor Aparicio 51:32
Oh, I got you handled, Jeff Gordon. Now, thank you for saying that. I will take you on the total tour, man. I’ll take you from Koco’s to Costas. I’ll take. I’m taking Pizza Johns, get you some peach. I’ll take. I’m all ready. I’m all on board. Take you to Fadley’s over to Fishmonger’s daughter over to Gaytonsville. Set you all up. Jeff Gordon’s been my friend for 42 years. You know, this has been a great month. Racig has sat in with me. I’ve had Howard Balls are on. I am doing my 28 primary bands and rock and roll artists that have shaped me. Number 28 on the list this week is Kiss, so I’m really looking forward to that. And we’re going to be counting them down like Casey Kasem for our 28th anniversary. I’m going to be doing the Maryland Crab Cake Tour at Costas this week. We’re going to be at Koco’s in a couple of weeks. I’m going to be at State Fair for breakfast in Catonsville on the 24th. Back to Fishmonger’s Daughter twice before the holidays as well. It’s all brought to you by our friends at the Maryland Lottery. I have Raven scratch-offs as well as our partners at GBMC and Farnin and Dermer. Thanks to all of our great guests around here. It’s football season. I’m loving the storytelling that we’re doing around here, and a very, very appreciative to Baltimore Magazine for saying I’ve reinvented myself, but we still do sports better than anybody. I am Nestor. We are WNSTAM 1570 Tass in Baltimore, and we never stop talking. Baltimore, positive. Stay with us.