Somebody better spread the news that Baltimore was the epicenter of several gigantic “bring them into the city” events this year. The greatest soccer player of our lifetime. The biggest country music artist in America did two nights. So did the biggest K-Pop act in the world. And the two biggest rugby clubs in the world left behind big tourist money. Our sports business professor Marty Conway takes Nestor to school on how this incredible Charm City summer of Messi, Wallen, New Zealand and South Africa and BTS and J-Love packed ’em in.

The discussion examined Baltimore’s opportunity to become a major destination for sports and entertainment events, alongside risks facing the Ravens’ international strategy and the Orioles’ business.

Event Growth

• M&T Bank Stadium hosted or is scheduled to host major events involving Messi, BTS, Morgan Wallen, rugby, international soccer, Chris Brown, and Usher.
• Stadium lease extensions and state funding increased incentives to attract non-football events.
• Baltimore may benefit from a gap between Philadelphia and Washington, especially while Washington’s stadium is in poor condition.

Tourism Gaps

• Rugby and BTS generated significant hotel, restaurant, and regional tourism activity, but city and state agencies did not visibly coordinate promotion.
• Could weak event-marketing coordination undermine bids for the 2031 Rugby World Cup and future women’s soccer events?

Business Risks

• The Ravens’ game in Brazil highlighted concerns about field conditions, player safety, travel, and the limits of presenting an international game as a local Baltimore experience.
• The Orioles’ declining performance and expected baseball labor conflict could reduce attendance, sponsorship, staffing stability, and long-term planning.
• Can baseball reach a long-term labor agreement without a salary cap or extended disruption?

• Provide transportation to the Springsteen event (@Marty Conway)

Baltimore Event Economy

• Recent and upcoming stadium events included BTS, Morgan Wallen, Messi, rugby, international soccer, Chris Brown, and Usher.
• Lease extensions and public funding created stronger incentives for the Ravens organization to pursue non-football revenue.
• Baltimore is positioned between Philadelphia and Washington as a potential event market.

Tourism and Coordination

• Visitors traveled from across the United States and internationally for concerts and rugby.
• Hotels, restaurants, airports, and surrounding counties benefited from event-driven tourism.
• The discussion identified a lack of visible coordination from city, state, and tourism organizations.
• The 2031 Rugby World Cup and future women’s soccer events were cited as major opportunities.

International Football

• The Ravens’ Brazil game raised concerns about stadium construction, grass quality, climate, player safety, and travel.
• The NFL is expanding international scheduling and individual broadcast windows.
• Potential future markets discussed included France, Australia, the United Kingdom, the UAE, and other locations.

Orioles Business

• Baltimore’s small-market status was challenged by the success of Milwaukee and Tampa Bay.
• Sustained winning, attendance, sponsorship, and reinvestment were described as essential.
• The Orioles’ ownership and leadership were questioned amid poor performance and limited public confidence.

Baseball Labor

• A lockout was viewed as likely if negotiations fail.
• The central dispute may involve salary-cap mechanisms, cost certainty, free agency, luxury taxes, and revenue distribution.
• Labor uncertainty could affect players, owners, employees, sponsors, ticket holders, and media partners.

Nestor Aparicio 0:01
Welcome home. We are WNST AM 1570 Towson, Baltimore. We call this thing Baltimore positive. It is a big week around here. The Baltimore Ravens are in Rio de Janeiro. The Orioles are wrapping up what is left of their season, and maybe what’s left of baseball at this point before the work stoppage and the labor discord begins. Luke will be out in Owings Mills. I will be doing the Maryland Crab Cake Tour on Thursday at State Fair Breakfast Edition. Former big leaguer Casper Wells will join me. Alan McCallum. We’re gonna talk baseball in off season. Also, our 28th anniversary, which I’m enjoying immensely. Talking rock and roll this week. It is all things Kiss, which is why I’m gonna have the Kiss Face Bird with me from the Maryland Lottery on Thursday at State Fair, we’ll also be at at Pizza Johns on Friday, the second of October next week. Hopefully, after a Raven victory in Rio this week, lots of things going on. The city’s been alive. We had a home game on Sunday. We had rugby last week. We had BTS in here earlier this year, and this guy follows the business not just of sports, but the business of business and the business of cities, and how sports and entertainment affect all of these things. We call him the good professor of all things sports business at Georgetown University, but I sort of know him as a Baltimore Orioles executive of many years back in the glory era when this thing back here behind me was built when they used to play some playoff games back here, Marty Conway rejoins us here as fall comes, and you know you and I are friends off the field with Springsteen and stuff. And by the way, Springsteen’s way up on the list of 28. You’ll want to check that out sometime around the holidays. But I, I, you reached to me a couple weeks ago, and I reached to you and back and forth. You love when BTS comes here and brings this weird K-pop thing and and takes a stadium and turns it into something Taylor Swift, whatever it would be, country show, Jay Z, whatever it is. You love that part of this, but even more so when the biggest rugby match in North American history apparently showed up here a week and a half ago. The I have rugby people in my life. You know, Doctor Steve Elliot over at LA Chiropractic runs a Chesapeake rug, and he was in on me on this all blacks, all blacks, and the team from South Africa and all that. And then I had an accelerant meeting on Thursday morning at the Renaissance last week, the day that they were all in town, and it was all Euros everywhere in the Renaissance downtown Baltimore. And I had my Maryland lottery cup with the flag on it, beautiful Maryland flag. And hey, fella, what is what is that color that you have on that cup there? And I’m like, it’s our state flag. I see it everywhere. I saw it over the harbor yesterday. I’m like, what are you doing here? They’re like, here for the rugby match, mate. And I’m like, oh, rugby tourism. I live in Towson. I wouldn’t have known it, Marty. How are you, man?

Marty Conway 2:45
I’m good. You’re right. Living in Towson, you wouldn’t have known. That’s funny. I do appreciate. Yeah. Look, if you go back to July, there was two sold-out Morgan Wallen concerts at the at the stadium. Oh,

Nestor Aparicio 2:58
dude, I made fun of that, and I got I got hammered by Harford. Yeah. Oh my god. There were,

Marty Conway 3:02
and there were two BTS shows, and then you mentioned the rugby, and there’s a international soccer match upcoming between Mexico and Colombia, and then obviously there’ll be a Chris Brown and Usher show as well. But why is

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Nestor Aparicio 3:18
all that happening all of a sudden? I mean, the Ravens don’t own that anymore, do they? Or they Ravens don’t? Well,

Marty Conway 3:22
well, no. They have with that with those dollars that came from the state several years ago that got invested in that was a return for extending their lease by another 30 years, I think. Each each club, each team was able to qualify for $600 million once they signed those lease extensions. That money was was approved by the state legislature a few years ago. So they, Ravens, excuse me. They get a bigger

Nestor Aparicio 3:51
cut. But clear your throat. By the way, Marty Conway’s here. Um, they get a bigger cut these days, right? I think he remembered you telling me that a couple.

Marty Conway 3:58
They do right. So it’s in everybody’s best interest now to have more activities there on non-football games, and so starting this July, the groups got very aggressive with opening up, opening themselves up to promoters, show promoters, and others who wanted to bring these concerts and events to to the stadium. Also, keep in mind that while the stadium in Washington, the current Northwest Field, is in incredibly poor repair prior to a new stadium going up in 2030 or 2031, there’s a window of opportunity here for Baltimore to be the location between Philadelphia and say Charlotte, North Carolina, to bring in these you know high quality events and opportunities, who are literally looking for places where they can land and monetize, you know, generate the most return from their opportunity there. Well, this

Nestor Aparicio 4:54
week alone, Ed Sheeran was up in Philly, didn’t play here. Next week, AC/DC is playing up there. Didn’t play here, right? So, like, and I’m going to AC/DC, and I know people went to Ed Sheeran. Metallica has played, and they’ve played here. But regionally, when these bigger acts come, AC/DC played in DC two years ago. They’ll skip Baltimore to go to Philly. That’s sort of the way it works, right? I mean, once Jay Z plays here, Usher plays here, he won’t play DC, right?

Marty Conway 5:22
Well, yeah, I think Usher and Chris Brown played Philadelphia at some point. I don’t remember if they played Washington. Same thing with Bruno Mars.

Nestor Aparicio 5:28
Bruno Mars also played both of the stadiums and didn’t play in both, right?

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Marty Conway 5:32
Yes. So it’s an opportunity for the city, the state, to take that facility now and be a revenue generator that can attract the kind of dollars that Philadelphia and Washington locations could attract for their artists, because if once they go on the road, you know their expenses are significant, and so they need to be in places where number one, they know that they can get the return, they can sell the most amount of tickets, and all those different things that go with it. And you’re right. Baltimore, for the last few years, has been flown over or driven trailer trucks past on their way to Philadelphia or Washington to do it. So, you know, who do you left

Nestor Aparicio 6:11
out? Messi, Messi played here this summer too.

Marty Conway 6:13
Exactly right. I mean,

Nestor Aparicio 6:14
like Messi’s been there, BTS has been there, Morgan Wallen’s been there. The biggest rugby match in the like, and I mean the biggest stars in the world are coming here, like literally, right?

Marty Conway 6:24
And when I reached out to you, the point was: Have you read much about it other than the game day stories? Unfortunately, not. I’m not really sure why the community at large, the city, the visit Baltimore, etc. I haven’t seen more coalescing around that story, the rugby match in particular, because soon the there’ll be a stadium awarding, city awarding for the 2031 Rugby World Cup, which is a really big deal around the world. It’s one of the three or four largest in scope and scale events behind the Winter Summer Olympics, FIFA Men’s World Cup, Women’s World Cup, etc.

Nestor Aparicio 7:02
We get that really.

Marty Conway 7:03
The Rugby World Cup could be a big thing. It is

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Nestor Aparicio 7:05
very

Marty Conway 7:05
big thing. It’s played in the fall, so you’d have to shuffle that around football schedules. But if you’re looking at those two teams now, the Meg, you know, the size of South Africa and New Zealand, those are the top two teams in terms of historically winning percentage in global rugby, and they move that game here from other locations. Why? Because they could make more money. Each team brought in around another $90 million from that event, which is significant. And so, you know, it’s one two. That that match historically goes back to, you know there were movies made about that New Zealand South Africa rugby, and you saw I happened to be coming into the city that morning after the event, flying in. The airport was filled with green and yellow. Those were all South Africa fans who have emigrated to this country, and they were living in Columbus and all throughout places in the Midwest, all came here, and as you said, you saw them for a couple of days ahead of time in the hotels in downtown. I drove past

Nestor Aparicio 8:09
the stadium the day BTS was playing there, the second show. Just I had to drop my wife off the airport. I came that way, dude. There were 1000s of people, kids downtown, and and every restaurateur I know, my my friends at Amici said it was unbelievable. But more than that, the rugby thing became a White Marsh Towson airport thing because of of the hotels. Every hotel in this area was full last week with rugby people, and I like to your point. I didn’t know that was happening. I didn’t see signs up at at Loony saying “Welcome rugby fan, you know what I mean. Like it just didn’t exist. You know what I mean? Yeah.

Marty Conway 8:45
And I don’t think that bodes well for trying to get events like that as part of, say, the Rugby World Cup or or the Women’s World Cup, for example, which will also be coming in the early 2030 s. So I’m not sure what’s at play or what the strategy is or the lack of organization, or or whatever that strategic construct is, but it was definitely missing over the last several months, and I’m not sure why that’s the case. I’m not sure if anybody at the state or city level, or those agencies that are part of it, recognize that, or or maybe chose not to, whatever it was. But in that time period, there’s been hundreds of 1000s of people who have emigrated to M&T Bank Stadium and to watch those events and to participate.

Nestor Aparicio 9:28
Different kinds of people, right? Yeah, and Morgan Walla thing and a BTS thing and a rugby thing and a Messi thing are different than whatever was there Sunday, which is the pretty much same Ravens fans that have been coming for years, right?

Marty Conway 9:39
And I would also call your attention to the BTS shows, which were Monday and a Tuesday night. To understand, that’s not a Friday Saturday sellout. That’s a Monday Tuesday. The other thing about the BTS shows, if I’m not mistaken, they only were here in the United States in seven cities as part of their world tour. So Baltimore was one of their seven cities that they chose to. Come to so. Hey, look!

Nestor Aparicio 10:02
I’m a tourist, and this is a good time to talk about Rio. Because by the way, Marty Conway’s here in Georgia. I don’t want to cut you off, but I’m gonna say like I’m about the tourist in Brazil for Rush, right? I’m not going for football this week. I’ve been down there. I went to see the Rolling Stones. I saw you too there 20 years ago. But part of my rock and roll. This be part of the stories I’ll be telling next couple weeks, sharing some of the videos and pictures and stuff like that, but I’m going to tourist with Rush in Curitiba, Brazil, in Belo Horizonte. These places that I only know from Olympics and from World Cup because they built stadia there. Rush is playing outdoor stadia in Brazil. They’re playing soccer stadiums. I didn’t know any of this, but I’m going to be that guy in the same way that we saw tons of Asian tourists here running around with BTS because this is one of seven places to see them. If you want to see Russia and Brazil, you got four chances. You know what I mean? You go where they’re playing, and I don’t want to go to Rio again, so I’m not going. But like in a general sense, the same thing would be said for people who tourists, rugby, BTS, even Morgan Wallens is. I mean, there are people probably from 20 states that were here for Morgan Wallen those two days, right? Literally.

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Marty Conway 11:07
Yeah, no question. So, you know, again, I look at the going forward. Like, what are the opportunities now, and what are the stories that can be told, and how do you tell them? Where do you tell them, et cetera? And I just didn’t see it. I wondered out loud why that was the case. But yes, those are impactful. You know, hotel stays, restaurants, all the things that you mentioned are visible in terms of the help to the economy that the city and the surrounding counties desperately need at this time when it when it’s tough to go. So as you mentioned, now the focus turns to Brazil, where the the Ravens are scheduled to play the Cowboys in Rio at the Manakana Stadium, which is probably one of the world’s most famous football stadiums in you know in in all of global football. So have you been to Rio, right? I have, yeah,

Nestor Aparicio 11:58
yeah. Have you been to America?

Marty Conway 12:00
I do have. Yep, yep. Talk about when it was. I

Nestor Aparicio 12:03
didn’t go there. When I went to Rio, the Stones played the beach for free in 2000. It’s the biggest concert in the history of the world. I was there. It’s gonna be on my my one of the reasons I’m doing this crazy countdown. And I saw you two playing Sao Paulo at Morumby Stadium, which is a different stadium than where Russia’s playing. That’s like this big, giant, huge looks like it’s 100 years old. Americana, I know of it. Have seen it for fans that are going down. I was trying to explain this to Leonard Rask and to see what a city of that size looks like. It’s unlike the scope of when you fly over top of anything you’d ever seen in North America. It’s a different kind of vibe. But being down there and touristing down there, double-edged sword for me. I was I just thought of David Modell a minute ago because I was thinking you know the things you’re talking about with BTS and Morgan Wallen and rugby matches and and the greatest soccer player of our lifetime, Messi, not not Pele, but Messi of our lifetime played here this summer. That would have been what David Modell would have been selling to me back with Baker and and Bob Eller 30 years ago about why the stadium matters, why it’s more important than just having a football team.

Marty Conway 13:12
Yeah,

Nestor Aparicio 13:13
let me pick it the other way, Marty. Marty of the Orioles of selling local sponsorships to Oriole fans here when the Colts left Baltimore and they screed. They screed Baltimore, and give us the ball. I, by the way, I shared my Saints press pass from 1992 from Give Baltimore the ball on Sunday. So it’s kind of all coming together. But the whole notion of me pimping out for the Modell family and the football thing here was, this is our team. It’s a local team. It’s a Baltimore team. It’s a shot. It’s at the barn. It’s at the old 4100 club. It’s Johnny U. It’s our. When you start taking teams and playing them in Rio and still trying to sell this to me, blow purple smoke up my rectum. That this is a local effort. I mean, we’ve really jumped the shark completely on playing a home game in Rio where they can’t figure the field out. We don’t know whether Lamar’s not going to turn his ankle down there, or from the Cowboys’ perspective, what they’re going to go through. They’ve reached this out and they want to make it as good as it is here, but they we’re a couple days out on this, Marty, and we don’t even know if the grass is going to grow this week, Americana. Right. So the NFL, for all their money and all their wealth and all the things they’re trying to own, and boy, I don’t know, man. This this international football thing. When five days out, Raskin’s got 10 grand into a trip, and he’s not even sure if they’re going to play the game.

Marty Conway 14:31
Yeah, no, it definitely it look it exposes the weaknesses in something like that because whether you’re you know Formula One or NFL football, you’re trying to take your you know your event, your activities to places where there’s some things you just are difficult to control, and one of the things about Brazil, and this was the case of the World Cup as well, the conditions at the stadium, construction, and you know grounds and all that are just not the same. It’s not the same level, and so even. The NFL can send people down there and stay for months and do planning. Football, soccer matches down there are played on some of the worst conditions that you could imagine, and so as a result, there’s just an expectation that things won’t be perfect. And I think and the

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Nestor Aparicio 15:17
NFL is a perfect league, right?

Marty Conway 15:19
Exactly, right. They expect all those things. We had this a few years ago in Mexico City, where the turf was coming up, and there were issues with that. So a lot of it has to do with climate, and and the kind of professional ground staff. NHL has experienced this with trying to put ice in places that are difficult to maintain, and as much technology and engineering as you can apply, there are just some things about the environment that you can’t control, and I think that’s what the NFL is facing here. A few days out, I believe they’re completely committed and need to go and will go. But I do think that the how do you make the grass

Nestor Aparicio 15:53
better in four days, dude? If you’re playing, I

Marty Conway 15:55
do. I do think the NFLPA will have its objections loudly about the playing conditions, and perhaps there’ll be some players that would have been scheduled to come back from injury or rehab that will not play this weekend for fear of the risk of being on, let’s say, non nonterra firma, whatever that Latin phrase would be for that.

Nestor Aparicio 16:15
What changes the game? It certainly changes how Lamar’s feeling about this week. Then he gets down on the grass, and even psychosomatic. I mean, hearing how bad it’s going to be, then you get there, and it it clearly. I think we could both sit here and say it’s not going to be what they played on on Sunday here against the Saints, and they no, it’s

Marty Conway 16:31
definitely not. And but it’s also not going to be what the Eagles played in, I think Nashville, where the turf temperature was like 150 degrees. So, playing playing field playing conditions right now for the NFLPA are probably one of their first or second largest issues.

Nestor Aparicio 16:46
And then once it rains in the middle of the game in Tampa, you get what you get anyway, right?

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Marty Conway 16:49
They want to get it all to grass, do away with turf. But yes, back to the point about these international exposures, whether it’s Brazil, Spain, other places, England, other places that they trying to play or want to play Australia, they’re really difficult things to deal with. Like you said, the NFL expects conditions to be perfect no matter where they play, but they’re finding it less so as they move around the world.

Nestor Aparicio 17:14
Marty Conway’s here from a where the NFL wants to play, and where they will play, and where they won’t play in the NBA with Shanghai and and different laws and different Abu Dhabi, Saudi Arabia, what we’re seeing with Live, all these things you’ve dealt with in the soccer community. You’ve been over there riding camels at various points, right? And and where’s left for the NFL? They played in Ireland, they played in Germany, they played Spain. You know they play. they they’re gonna play a lot in Germany and the UK. They’re gonna go over to Australia as often as they want. I guess at this point, they’ve been to Tokyo, but I don’t think that they feel like that’s a real market for them. I mean, it wasn’t when I was over there. I couldn’t even get the games. When I’ve been I’ve been to Asia twice in the middle of football season, and there ain’t no such thing as the NFL. They can they can bullshit you all they want, but I couldn’t even get the game in Seoul. I had to get my kid to show it on on a FaceTime. I couldn’t even buy it in Seoul, South Korea, where there’s 50 million people when they have Olympics and they have World Cups, and they just there are some places they’re focused on, and they don’t have to speak English or look like us because everybody’s gonna speak Portuguese this week. You know, so I it is fascinating places they want to go versus places they don’t smell money, like Toronto or Vancouver somehow.

Marty Conway 18:28
Yeah, it’s all. I think the Saints may be playing in France this year, if I’m not mistaken. I think this is the year, if not this year, the next year. They’ve they’ve made a connection with the French market, but I think the obvious place where they’d like to go, given the conditions, would be the UAE. I think whether it’s Abu Dhabi or Dubai, if that could be ever worked out, I believe wrestling’s been

Nestor Aparicio 18:52
there, right? Like rock stars, you know.

Marty Conway 18:54
Yeah,

Nestor Aparicio 18:55
most people, the NBA’s played games there, right?

Marty Conway 18:58
They have. Yeah, yeah. I mean, everybody

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Nestor Aparicio 18:59
goes there now, even though they they don’t like women and like all of that, yeah, I think there’s a

Marty Conway 19:04
sense in the UAE that there’s more moderation on that as opposed to Saudi Arabia or some of the other neighboring countries. Dubai, for example, is much more Western. Abu Dhabi has its more Western exposures to it. So while there will be criticisms on that, I think there’ll be less criticisms, but if you were saying where’s a place that’s

Nestor Aparicio 19:24
money there, right? That’s why the World Cup went to Qatar, right? There’s a lot of money there, right?

Marty Conway 19:28
The local promoters, the local government, and the NFL would love to find a way to be there if they could, whether that’s the first game of a season because you’ve got additional travel time. So just as they played in Australia and gave the Rams and 40 Niners that additional time. That’s probably where they would have to go during the middle of the season or early in the season. Probably not likely there, but maybe as a first game of the year. I think that’s excuse me a target.

Nestor Aparicio 19:53
Mark Conway’s here. He is the good professor of all things sports business at Georgetown University and is our defending champion. There’s. Me straight talking out of a tree on all things sports business here. The the other part of this, I think, for me is the localization part of there. There is no more there is no more local for the for the NFL or the Ravens, right? They can play that game that we represent Baltimore and all that. But this really is a hodgepodge of 32 international organizations moving freely around the planet at this point, right? Like, literally. I mean, that’s what this is. It can’t be portrayed as anything else, right?

Marty Conway 20:28
Well, look at it this way: on opening opening week and opening Sunday, if I’m not mistaken, for before the 425 games, because there were evening games as well. I think there were six games played between Wednesday, Thursday, a few at 1o’clock. My point being is they’re taking that traditional 1o’clock, 4o’clock Sunday windows that we all grew up with, and they’re dispersing that as widely as possible, taking those games from being on top of each other and regionalizing them to, you know, we’re getting the game in Baltimore and Jacksonville’s getting the game. I can’t bet on a game

Nestor Aparicio 21:05
if I got to watch four at a time, right? Like literally, right? So spreading

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Marty Conway 21:09
that out, I think that’s clearly where you see strategically where they’re going is to create individual windows for each of these games and finding ways to play on Wednesdays, Thursdays, you know, a couple on Sunday afternoon. I think they’ll keep. It’s like college athletics when they moved away from the noon football game kickoff. Right, everybody was playing at noon on Saturday. College basketball was playing on Saturday afternoons. Television has had their say, and in order to pay back those kind of rights fees, you’ve got to give those more individual windows for them to draw wider audiences, and not sharing the audience with three, four, or five other games occurring. So, you know, Thanksgiving Day, the day after Thanksgiving, maybe even the day before Thanksgiving in the future. Finding individual windows is the NFL strategy, and you’ll see other leagues do the same thing to try to spread that so that you can get more telecasters, more streamers involved, and they have their window whether it’s a Thursday night, Wednesday night, whatever it is. That’s what they look for.

Nestor Aparicio 22:14
The 49ers went over to Australia to try to make you know make some hay and get some rest, and they kick their ass, and the Rams try to sneak in and out. It’s amazing. We call it sports science and all that. And they two franchises in the same league with the same information saw it completely two different ways and attack attacked it differently and had two completely different outcomes. It is kind of wild to watch that happen in real time, especially when it’s the Rams, right?

Marty Conway 22:38
Yeah. Well, no, that’s I said. There’s several sides to the science component about sleep and nutrition and all those. So, as many as psychologists and sports nutrition people that there are, there are philosophies and theories about that. Because look, at the end of the day, this is about competitive advantage. No matter what you’re talking about, whether it’s a salary cap or nutrition or coaching or psychology or facilities, it’s about competitive advantage. If you’re buying into a professional sports team today, you’re buying into win and win sustainably because that’s where the return on investment is. Not selling season tickets to 81 games across that. It’s about other things. It’s about being consistently in the playoffs. If you look at the Milwaukee Brewers who are in town recently, that’s the model for small markets to build a consistent winner, and and hopefully you can hold that together and at least get into the playoffs like Tampa Bay, and then you can compete with New York, Boston, the Dodgers, etc. That’s the expectation that people are looking for.

Nestor Aparicio 23:38
See, you’re even better than John Martin in the lottery, getting me into a segue. You already took us to baseball. Marty Conway is here. Your first love was baseball out of Syracuse, New York, and working for the Orioles for many, many years, and the Texas Rangers with the Bush family. I’m just going to give you the floor. I mean, we’re here, right? I mean, the Orioles are where they are. They have arrived in last place at the end of all of this, Elias Albernaz, the players, Henderson-we could do all the on-the-field stuff we want. Luke and I do that every day. He likes to stay on the field. When I have you here, I like to go off the field. They still haven’t gotten their all-star game. They have labor dis incredible discord about to happen, and it feels to me three years now, Marty. And by the way, today is the 20th anniversary of Free the Birds. Today, September 21st, as we record this, I’m I I did Free the Birds for David Rubenstein, for Michael Arregatti, for the new owners, the next owners to be better three years into this. I give you I I’m John McCaining, a double John McCaining, and um, I don’t know if these people are equipped. These billionaires to, in any way, make this thing better, perceived to make it better, even PR it to make it better. The Michaeliah’s conundrum that they have here about about leadership and their empty seats and their empty soul and the fact that they’re in last place, like. This is really different than when I had you on in March, as to what the what we thought this could have been. Yep.

Marty Conway 25:07
Yeah. Look, I call your attention to the record. I think they’ve won, you know, 75 games, something around that, right around, roughly around that, 10 games difference if they’re winning 85 to 87 to 89 versus 75 to 78 to 79. When you look at baseball over 162 games, this is why I enjoy it so much. It’s the nuances and the level of detail that go back months prior to how you build your roster and what you put that together. Because incrementally, it’s just how you play the game. Again, I go back to the Milwaukee Brewers with Pat Murphy, who was a college coach at Notre Dame, spent his time. Now he’s a manager of the Brewers. If you look at the way they play the game, the details, defense, base running, fielding, even pitching, it’s it’s such a organizational behavior that I think that’s the difference, and I think that’s when you look at the Orioles now. Look, in the past, two years out of the playoffs, people would have said, “Okay, here’s what we’re working on. We’re rebuilding, etc. That window has passed, and now I say this as an NFL team or a Major League Baseball team: you cannot afford to be out of the playoffs for more than for two years or more. It’s just it’s debilitating to your fan base. It’s debilitating to your ticket sales. You know, I said this earlier. You have to be all in every year, whatever that takes. The rebuilding periods now, people’s attitudes are are less tolerant with their rebuilding, especially Orioles fans that have

Nestor Aparicio 26:43
been through this already, right? Yeah,

Marty Conway 26:44
or that you’re a small market. You know, again, Milwaukee disproves the whole concept. Tampa disproves the whole concept. They’re both in first place. They’re both competing for the best record in the American League, and they’re both tiny markets. Maybe even in Tampa’s case, smaller than Baltimore, and so there’s literally now no excuse. You have to be sustainably winning in order to build those revenues that you plow back into it. Like I said, sponsorship, advance ticket sales, media components, drawing attention, attraction, and all that. It’s the difference between drawing 1.8 to 1.9 million and 2.4 to 2.5 million. There’s an extra 500,000 tickets out there between home and visitors coming to your stadium that you need to be getting every year.

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Nestor Aparicio 27:31
You don’t like to be critical of any of this. I mean, you you’re above the fray, which is what I love about you and appreciate about you. Is not just as a friend, but as a a true expert in this stuff. Like beyond even the way you play on the radio and the way you teach it. Where are you with the Rubenstein Arigati thing? I mean, you’re an Oriole. You have an Oriole heart. Yeah. Like you want them.

Marty Conway 27:50
Yeah. I’m

Nestor Aparicio 27:51
watching this professionally, Marty, and I’m watching their National Hispanic Boujah the other night, and I’m watching Christian night, Jewish night, Muslim night, UMBC night, Coppin night, you know, Black College night, Towson night, Dundalk night. I mean, just on and on and on and on. And a milk the cow night. You know, we’re gonna have relish night, ketchup night, mustard night, all of that. Like, I, I don’t know if I’m an executive. First off, I’m executive with yours. I’m resigning right now because they’re about to go into a labor situation, I got to feed my family, and you’ve been through that several times at the beginning of your career in ’81, ’80 in ’94. When you’re, I mean, like this is really bad, bad stuff for the entire industry. Whether you’re selling ads at ESPN for baseball or Fox or trying to figure this out, and we’re trying to go into this celebratory part, right? We got playoffs starting next week. Playoffs. Somebody’s going to win. You hope it’s not the Dodgers or the Yankees, right? You hope it’s a smaller market. Make it interesting, but they want Dodgers and Yankees because that’s where the money is for them. I, yeah, I don’t, I don’t know what they’re doing right now. What Rubinstein and Araghetti would look at this and say all is well. We’re billionaires, or whether they care, or who cares a lot. I guess Katie Griggs cares a lot. Mark Fine and Don Robacks and these people they brought in, but like the bad news is they’re in control of none of this any more than you and George Bush were in 1994 or Hofberger was in ’81. Like it is, this thing takes a life of its own. This labor thing and the amount of anxiety and angst that goes into this at every level for everyone that works for Katie Griggs and Mark Fine and the people in these these baseball teams, let alone the players and the things we think about for what a pitcher is going to go through in this off season. These organizations are really going to be taxed, all of them, and especially the ones that don’t have a lot of money, and the ones that are always sweating out every season ticket.

Marty Conway 29:45
Yeah, no, having gone through this a few times, you’re right to mention that it’s about the preservation of cash. I think that most organizations would be okay. I say into the midwinter, into December, or. January, I think what you’ll see as this goes further, more stories about organizations freezing pay, certainly freezing pay increases, freezing open headcounts, freezing the kinds of investments that you would normally make in the off season. Because keep in mind, there’s two things that are going to happen: either people are going to season ticket holders or others are going to hang on to their money longer. Maybe sponsors will pay less during this time period because of the uncertainty of when their activity is going to return. And so it’s difficult for individuals. It’s difficult for their families, who you know are. And again, like you said, some people will leave the industry because they just can’t count on the players and owners to come together. You know the NFL has 10-year labor deals, NBA has 10-year labor deals. The last couple of labor deals in Major League Baseball have been five years. Well, in labor for five years, you’re barely getting the new deal implemented in year two, and at the end of year three, you’re starting to think about two years ahead of the next labor deal to do it. So they need long-term peace. They need a 10-year labor deal that can allow the rest of the business to to stabilize and then to flourish. Because yes, the the Orioles would like to soon host the Major League Baseball All-Star Game in 2030 or whatever that year is likely to be. There’s going to be time to make those announcements soon. Next year is 2027, so it’s a really difficult time for for not just the players or the owners, but the management teams and the individuals at the coordinator manager levels who will see an economic hit for this. And I think that’s the stuff that doesn’t get written about or talked about enough, and and what both owners and players should be doing for those folks who actually make the games work-ushers, ticket takers, you know, ticket sellers on a daily basis. Those are the folks whose stories need to be told.

Nestor Aparicio 31:55
Yeah, and that’s the thing where, like, Katie Griggs leaves a soccer business to come to the baseball business at a point in her career, you just think it’s going to be there, and everybody that worked in the baseball business thinks it’s going to be there. And you and I have been around long enough to know, like, this is going to be a rough winter to be to be giving have given your life to being in the baseball business.

Marty Conway 32:14
Yeah, no, I think, like I said, December comes. That’s the lockout period. I think that’s almost a given, the lockout place, unless they can extend and they’re still talking, some point they will, and then comes the question in mid January: Are we going to open spring training? When do we open it? How we open it? That’s really when the negotiations get serious. Well, you and

Nestor Aparicio 32:33
I could sit here right now. We know what they’re going to fight over, right? We’re going to fight over breaking the union and whether we’re going to have cost certainty and the owners absolutely positively have to have it. We’ll break that damn union, and the players like you never get it. You never get it, and that’s where we are right now. Let’s start the fight, right? Like literally, and we’re 5060, years into this at this point.

8

Marty Conway 32:50
Yeah, there’s there’s no chance that the players are going to agree to an overt salary cap. You say

Nestor Aparicio 32:56
that right away, right? Like because you’ve been around here, and and anytime I negotiate or talk to anybody, they’re like, “Well, the owners are going to try to get the hard cap in. How hard are they going to try? They’re going to shut the game down? I don’t know. They’re really wealthy. They’re a lot wealthier than the Art Modells and the Peter Angeloses were having to reach into their own kitty 3040, years ago. Right? We’re at a different level of a. At least my perception is David Rubenstein and Michael Araghetti don’t care about any of the Marty Conways or Katie Griggs’s working in these places, and they just need to absolutely get cost certainty for the way they think they can run this industry, and it has nothing to do with Marvin Miller or George Steinbrenner anymore. Like that’s the part you and I have this institutional knowledge of 50 years of doing this, and a media knowledge of it, but I don’t know where they are right now, and where the really big money pants guys like Robinstein and Aragueti that are way new to this party, how far they’re willing to go.

Marty Conway 33:53
Well, what the players will tell you is, don’t ask us for cost certainty. Talk to your top markets for cost certainty because that’s really the difference. Fight amongst

Nestor Aparicio 34:00
yourselves, right? And

Marty Conway 34:01
the way that Bud Seelig handled it in the past was he would go and penalize those big spending teams to subsidize the lower spending teams or the smaller market teams, and the players just kind of sat back and said, “Y’all work it out for yourselves. But here we are, and and again, understand that if there’s any discussion of a salary cap, some of the current players are going to call Don Fear, who worked for Marvin Miller, and Don Fear is going to come in and give them a 30-minute discussion about how hard Marvin Miller and Curt Flood and other people worked on behalf of the players. And there’s just no reason for you to give in to that sort of opportunity because they won’t shut the game down over this. They will figure out a way to manage, like I said, between the large markets and the small markets. I think ultimately. So I said this a couple of months ago, maybe on your show. I don’t think the owners ultimately are going to get a salary cap. Why? Because they’ve talked so much about it. Typically in negotiations, the thing that you want most, you don’t talk the most about. Do I think they want something else from the players that they can substitute for that? I think that’s probably the case. Whether that is shorter free agency period, accelerating things so that the market itself works its way out, and then they can do between themselves. They can work out a luxury tax. They can work out the NBA has now something called the second apron, which is kind of where owners don’t want to go into now because the penalties are so severe. So, I mean, you do understand that owners are willing to lose up to a certain amount because they expect it to get it back in the sale. But look at the Dodgers; they’re owned by somebody that was overtly, you know, having financial troubles in the other sports, and so maybe all is not well with some of these high spending teams, and maybe that will come to pass. There’s a lot of money deferred in baseball right now that owners have deferred amongst the players. You know, Shohei Ohtani took a long-term deferred deal, so so did Chris Davis

Nestor Aparicio 35:57
and Bobby Benia. Exactly, right? Yeah. So I think

Marty Conway 36:00
there’s some of that going on, which is why I think it will get really complex. Back to my point, really difficult for markets like Milwaukee, Baltimore, Tampa, Pittsburgh, Kansas City, places like that, where the margin for error financially is much smaller than it is in New York or Chicago or L.A. or even Atlanta right now in terms of the cash that comes in.

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Nestor Aparicio 36:19
Well, the high holy holiday baseball playoffs begins next week. You and I’ll be watching. Marty Conway is the good professor of all things business and has educated us. Class dismissed. Always appreciate you, Marty. Springsteen, october 3, right second, whatever it is, over here on the spirit. I gotta get tickets. Somebody get me tickets. Get me tickets. Get me tickets. I can’t get. I’ll give

Marty Conway 36:37
you a ride. I’ll I’ll be your Uber for the day.

Nestor Aparicio 36:39
You know what my wife said? She’s like, do what you always do. Just go sit in the woods and listen to it. I’m like, good idea. He’s Marty. I’m Nestor back from where we’re Baltimore. Positive. Stay with us.