Nick from Abingdon wants to talk Ravens, maybe offer a few suggestions for the Orioles. He's maneuvering through early-morning traffic, usually the wrong place and time to satisfy a sports jones. But with a flip of his cell phone, his opinions are spewed over the airwaves between gulps of coffee.
For listeners of WKDB, this sort of jock chatter is music to the ears.
Most recently a children's network station, 1570-AM was given a drastic makeover by Nestor Aparicio, the 30-year-old Dundalk native with the sharp tongue and grand visions. His all-sports station, the first in Baltimore, made its debut at 8: 15 a.m. on Aug. 3, breaking new ground and opening a series of debates between Aparicio's band of fiercely loyal followers and his many critics.
Everything from WKDB's signal to its programming and on-air personalities is up for grabs. When it comes to Aparicio, a tireless self-promoter who attracts controversy like static cling, there's never a middle of the road.
If you love him, you praise his work ethic, his bold attempts at trying something different and his rise through the broadcast ranks. If you dislike him, you say he has a distorted view of his popularity and belongs at a station that once catered to kids, and wait to applaud his failure.
It's too soon to say whether Aparicio's venture has been a hit or miss since ratings don't come out for at least another month. And they won't provide an accurate read of WKDB's appeal because the station started up in the middle of a 12-week ratings book and inherits numbers from its failed predecessor.
But Steve Hennessey, the station's director of sales and promotions, finds encouragement in the 30 to 35 new sponsors that have come aboard since early August, joining a similar number that followed Aparicio from WWLG.
"And all with different degrees of deals," Hennessey said. "Most are a minimum of 13 weeks. Some signed on for half a year. We've got a couple yearlong deals in negotiations. I thought the response would be good, but it's been overwhelming. We're getting feelers from ad agencies we've never heard from before, and people that we've been trying to get to sponsor the show now all of a sudden are interested."
Aparicio, a former member of the sports staffs at the Baltimore News American and The Sun, had been at WWLG for five years, anchoring the afternoon drive-time slot but uncertain of his future after the station was sold Aug. 1 to WCBM's Nick Mangione.
"I was thrust in a position where you take stock of your life and ask, 'What am I going to do?' " he said. "One of the big reasons we did this was to stave off elimination, because if I stay at the other station, I don't know what happens. I don't have a contract. Here, I can control my own destiny."
Finding a new home
In need of advice, Aparicio turned to Paul Kopelke, who had been his general manager at WITH and WWLG. Kopelke was hired as a consultant and instructed to find another station.
Kopelke knew just the place, a brick rancher in Towson sitting on 3 1/2 acres tucked back off a winding, tree-lined road wide enough to fit one vehicle. The rooms were filthy from months of neglect, and the facility wasn't set up for sports programming. There was no system to take calls, no televisions, no Internet access.
"There were cobwebs, dirt, a lot of old stuff lying around, finger paints on the wall," said Aparicio, who has furnished the club basement with workout equipment, a big-screen TV, a pool table and rock 'n' roll memorabilia.
"It was very humbling for me to come in here and be very excited and see someone else's dream gone. It's sort of like cleaning out somebody's closet who died."
The only sign of life was a small computer in one corner that played the same songs continuously while the station changed hands. Aparicio took possession in July, leasing the station with the first option to buy.
"And we intend to buy," he said.
Aparicio's detractors wonder how he could afford to move in, let alone buy it. While not disclosing costs, Aparicio said his many purchases included a satellite dish, sound board, audio equipment and furniture.
"I wound up the last couple years making more money than I could spend," he said. "I had a nest egg, and this is where my nest egg went. You save money to do something with it in life. I've worked hard, I've made some money, I've put some money away, and then this opportunity happened. That's the truth. Nothing more and nothing less.
"I've heard either that I have a backer or that I'm loaded. Neither one is really true."
Neither, he says, is the perception that his signal is so weak it can be heard only by camping under the tower. That's more accurate at night, when a 5,000-watt signal powers down to 237 so it doesn't infringe on another station that's been in the market longer.
During a summer function held by the Ravens, one of Aparicio's competitors approached Randy "The Swami" Sonderman, who joins Spiro Morekas each morning between 7 and 10 a.m., and asked: "If a tree falls in the woods and there's nobody around, does it make a sound?"
"I didn't think it was some sort of Buddhist question," Sonderman said.
After the story is retold, Aparicio said: "You can hear us in Hershey, Pa. We had a caller the other day up in Harrisburg. Our signal's really big in Westminster. But then you go south of the [BWI] airport for a couple miles and it goes away. We also have a little pocket in Glen Burnie where 1590 bleeds in for one mile. But the signal hasn't been an issue at all."
In the Rome mold
Most of WKDB's hours are filled with syndicated programming, the most notable being the wildly popular "Jim Rome Show" that runs from noon until 4 p.m. Rome's smash-mouth, in-your-face approach to radio broadcasting blends seamlessly with Aparicio, an unabashed fan cut from the same cloth.
Rome once provoked former NFL quarterback Jim Everett into slugging him during an interview. Aparicio, embraced by the Ravens, can't get most of the Orioles to do his show and drew the ire of Rafael Palmeiro and Roberto Alomar last year after questioning their manhood for not starting against then-Seattle pitcher Randy Johnson. With bats in hand, the two players began walking toward Aparicio before cooler heads prevailed -- a scene that Rome surely would have appreciated.
Other slots on WKDB are occupied by Chicago's One-On-One Sports. Local programming includes Aparicio's Sports Forum and Morekas' show Monday through Friday, both of which can be heard on the Internet, and golf and professional wrestling segments on the weekends.
With winter approaching and daylight hours growing scarce, Aparicio will move his show from the afternoon to mornings later this month, after Morekas signs off.
"The thing I've noticed the most in the morning is I'm hearing voices I've never heard on sports talk," said Morekas, who had been with Aparicio at WWLG. "The majority of our calls are cell phones, so there are people driving to work who never had the opportunity to talk about sports in the morning. And now they do."
"We get a pretty educated caller," added Sonderman. "We're getting 40- to 50-year old men who are professionals who aren't calling these other sports talk shows because their issues weren't addressed or they didn't have enough time. They're not used to saying what they have to say in 30 seconds. We don't rush them. They're more comfortable with us."
'Not a perfect world'
The operation is running more smoothly than the first day, when Rome's show couldn't be aired due to problems with the satellite feed, and adjustments were needed on the audio board because of poor sound quality.
"We do have challenges here," Aparicio said, pointing specifically to the signal's decline at night. "It's not a perfect world, but then again, it wasn't a perfect world when I started."
The extent of WKDB's team programming has been three Maryland football games that couldn't be aired on WBAL because of baseball commitments. Aparicio and Kopelke downplay the significance of not having more live sports broadcasts, like WBAL has with the Orioles and WJFK with the Ravens, saying the return isn't worth the costs.
Ken Stevens, the vice president and general manager at WJFK, naturally disagrees. "It's important. It's the difference between doing it and talking about it," he said.
"Most of the audience interest is in hearing the games or seeing them on television, not sitting around talking about them. The fact is, the people who are interested enough in sports to listen to somebody expressing their personal opinion about it, or a caller's personal opinion for hours on end, is pretty limited. But the number of people interested in hearing Ravens games on radio is extraordinary. There's a reason why play-by-play sports costs so much, and why having somebody on for an hour talking about sports costs nothing. There's sort of a relative value there."
Even so, Stevens offers this glimmer of hope for WKDB: "Baltimore can and will support an all-sports radio station. It's certainly a big enough market with enough revenue and enough of a fan base. It can be done, but it's not easy."
Can it be done by WKDB? "I think it's going to be a very difficult task, if not impossible," said WBAL station manager Jeff Beauchamp.
"The three big issues are lack of good signal coverage, lack of financial resources to attract the top-notch talent you need, and the lack of play-by-play rights. It's documented across the country that you really do need the rights to some big play-by-play events. The stations that try to embark on an all-sports format and don't have play-by-play rights, most of them have failed or have no impact on the respective ratings in their markets. [Aparicio's] got a couple counts that are going to make it real difficult for him."
Aparicio, in turn, points to advantages he believes will tilt the scale in his favor.
"We started this thing without one drop of red ink," he said. "Everything you see here is paid for except the house and the license. We're solvent, we're liquid. We have clients, we have listeners, we have everything you need to make this thing work."
Added Kopelke: "What you bet on here is Nestor. I wouldn't in a million years bet on all-sports. This will work because Nestor is the most successful marketer I've ever seen in my life. He can do anything. We saw these call letters in more places the first five weeks than I saw WLG's call letters in five years. Everybody's talking about it. I think we'll beat some substantial AM's within six months.
"Nestor has gone from 10 cents to 10 million dollars. We've had some bad ideas, but we've never done anything in Baltimore radio that hasn't worked. This will absolutely work."
Pub Date: 10/15/98