Lying in bed on the night of our wedding reception, my wife and I were exhausted.

It was 3 a.m. and we were sitting going through all of our envelopes with cards, checks, notes -- you know the "wedding gift" drill.

And we got kind of emotional and started talking about our marriage and how the night had gone. And I said that the coolest part of the whole experience for me was gathering all of our best people, all of our best friends and relatives, and putting them under a roof for one night and allowing them to laugh and drink and eat and mingle.

I said it was like one giant "All Star Game" -- the night when we bring our best of the best together for a night of celebration.

Funny, on the biggest night of my adult life -- my wedding night -- in the most tender moment possible, I wind up making a baseball reference to the whole experience.

And it's probably apropos because when I look at the pictures now, and see all of the people in those pictures -- my personal self-described "All-Star team" -- every one of them either came to me either directly or once-removed from baseball.

Especially the really important people who've been in my life since before I was on the radio. They were all people who were older and wiser than me and took me in and made me their de facto "little" brother.

Tom Kapp and I met in 1985. He was my health teacher at Dundalk Community College. Hundreds of baseball games later and most ballparks in the country later, he was the best man at my wedding. He was my first business advisor, my first marketing helper, my first ballpark reporter. If there's no Tom, there IS no WNST -- period! Tom loved Graig Nettles, Fran Tarkenton and "Sudden" Sam McDowell. He also absolutely LOVED baseball and its history and its strategy.

And if he wasn't the first person to believe in me and bet on me, and not against me, it was Don Mohler, who was my Dundalk High School guidance counselor in 1982. We watched in agony as the O's fell to the Brewers during the first month of our relationship, but it was only the beginning of a beautiful friendship, much of it centered around the nation's pastime. Throughout high school he always encouraged me to "be the next Chris Thomas (Chris Thomas was MY GUY when I was in high school!)." He was part of my first "Sports Huddle" in 1992 on WITH-AM 1230, he still calls and plays my conscience once a week, and now, 24 years later, we spend holidays together and he sits with me at every Ravens' home game. His baseball experience all came with his Mom, strangely enough, who was one of the biggest O's fans I'd ever met.

Dave Meurer was one of Kapp's baseball/idiot/friends. In him, I finally found a guy who was louder than me, more obnoxious than me and I figured keeping him around would take the heat off of me, especially after sitting through just one Kansas City Royals-Orioles game on 33rd Street in the late-1980's. Once we went to that ballgame and laughed our asses off all night -- and especially going with a guy who really knew and loved baseball and its history just like I did -- you just KNEW you had to be friends with that guy!

Mike Ricigliano was a funny sports cartoonist who I met at Sportsf1rst in 1984 when I was 15 with a pregnant girlfriend. I vividly remember our first conversation, because he was so considerate and non-judgmental at a time in my life when I was a complete pariah to most people. Not only is he our staff cartoonist at WNST (and he works cheap!), but I can't tell you how many games we've been to, events we've shared and laughs we've had through baseball, football, travel and sports over these 22 years. He was literally in my bedroom during the Oilers' infamous collapse against HIS Buffalo Bills in 1993 and did the sauciest private cartoon in my collection. (He was in my bedroom because that's where the giant-screen TV was and he had the stones to actually show up when the Bills were losing 35-3 at halftime!) He is also the one person in the world who I can honestly say I've never heard a bad word about. He only has friends and everyone loves Ricig!

His son Tup, also, is responsible for first calling me "Nasty"

And even THAT is a "baseball story" through and through.

When Eddie Murray first was dealt to Los Angeles, I still had an Eddie "thing." I loved Eddie Murray right up until the time I actually met him, which is how any Baltimore kid who grew up to be a media member might feel.

Eddie's first and closest approach to 33rd Street as a National Leaguer and a Dodger came in May at The Vet. On that Sunday afternoon of that series, I needed to be in the house!

I took my 4-year old son up to the game that day. Eddie Murray hit two homers and drove in five runs in a 9-0 rout of "my" Phillies.

I came back into The Evening Sun newsroom that Sunday evening lamenting how badly the Phillies and their pitching sucked.

Ricig always hand-delivered his cartoon to the office on Calvert Street on Sunday nights and we'd always catch up on whatever life was bringing us at that point. I told him about the game and Eddie, and off the cuff, told him there was no way he could give me the first names of the five chumps that the Phillies used on the mound that afternoon.

He said he could. I made a bet that I'd baby sit his kids for a night if he could.

I pulled up the boxscore, gave him the last names (which I'm still mostly unfamiliar with) and he rattled off four of the names quite easily.

Alex Madrid was the starter, who lasted 3 and 2/3 innings. Randy O'Neal, Gordon Dillard and Greg Harris rolled off his tongue as well.

The final arsonist, who gave up four earned runs on three hits and two homers including one to Murray in just one inning of work also had a last name: Frohwirth.

But, after a pregnant pause, he made a wild guess: "Todd," he said.

Damn! I'd been had, so I made the phone call to his wife Terri and set up a summer Saturday night to hang out with his kids (who I liked but who were complete terrors when I was around) and combine a Saturday night as a single Dad with my son, Barry, who was a little younger than his two boys, Steve and Tup.

I arrived, settled into the Ricig's humble abode in Northeast Baltimore and Terri had food already bought, prepped and ready to grill. Chicken wings, burgers, dogs, cold beer in the fridge and the ballgame was on in a couple of hours. They also provided the phone number to the local pizza shop for delivery, just in case.

I was doing a good deed, spending time with my son, entertaining him on a Saturday night and I could get some peace and quiet in the basement watching the ballgame on a summer Saturday night.

Somehow, the wings caught on fire on the grill, which blazed out of control. The kids were screaming and hungry, I was missing the damned game and I sent them all to bed early so I could watch baseball in peace and quiet.

From that evening on, I was simply known to Ricig's kids as "NASTY NESTOR."

Oh, and here's the footnote of interest: Todd Frohwirth actually became a friend of mine three seasons later when he pitched for the Orioles at Camden Yards. We even went to an NCAA Tournament basketball session together in St. Petersburg during the spring training of 1994 with Mike Mussina, who was Frohwirth's roommate on the road during his first seasons in Baltimore.

Every one of my employees and all of the people you hear here at WNST are my extended family, really, and I hope that comes across our airwaves on a daily basis. And every one of them came to me through sports and every one of them shared the exact same kind of childhood: we all grew up in a household where the O's games were on every night.

Each member of the WNST staff filled out an extensive survey of Birdland questions and submitted personal baseball photos. They photos are VERY embarrassing and the Orioles' survey answers might surprise you. (CLICK HERE IF YOU'D LIKE TO READ THE STORIES OF BOB HAYNIE OR SEE FUNNY PICTURES OF RAY BACHMAN!!!)

To me, it's a perquisite to have a job on the air at WNST. If you don't have the history with the Orioles in Baltimore, to me you just aren't qualified to host sports radio in the Charm City.

Because all of my friends KNOW the history of the Orioles better than they know their own family tree. And if my friends know more about baseball and the Orioles than my hosts do, then we'd be out of touch with the reality of our listeners, who all lived through the "Magic" years like my friends and I did.

Or maybe, we'd be a lot like the Orioles are: out of touch with the reality of this city!

And even those friends in those wedding night pictures who I didn't go to games with, I at least have one baseball memory with them or one shared experience that involves the sport. I've either gone to a game with them, seen a game in their city or have ignored them one evening with one eye on a TV set to watch a baseball game.

There were 300 people in the room on my wedding night and EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM came to me, in one way or another, through baseball!

WITHOUT BASEBALL, THESE PEOPLE WOULDN'T BE IN MY LIFE!

It's the single most common ingredient in virtually every long-term relationship in my life before 1998.

Honestly, if you were a girl I met who didn't either like baseball or WANT to like baseball, you had no shot with me. Football, I might be able to tolerate (but probably not!) It's only played a couple days a week for a couple months of the year. But baseball IS my summer. EVERY night, just like Cal!

When I was syndicated I was dating the most beautiful girl I'd ever seen. Met her in Jamaica. She was 23, blonde, blue-eyed, Swedish, lived in Manhattan and spoke four languages. She was 5-feet-2, 108 pounds, and had a natural full-C cup if you're a match.com surfer.

I did a show in Manhattan for Sporting News Radio, pretty much whenever I wanted to go. She looked like a cross between Anna Kournikova and Tiger Woods' wife. She was NO JOKE, if you get my drift!

I met her in September, visited her in October during the World Series (and its always a good bet you'll be in New York in October if you like baseball). We dated here and there all winter, went to Vegas, had some fun. In April, baseball returned.

I went to Gotham to do some shows at Mickey Mantle's for a Yankees-Red Sox series. I took her to Yankee Stadium, enthused about teaching her the finer points of the game.

It was, quite frankly, like teaching a Martian baseball. Or probably like teaching me cricket.

To her a "strike" was a punch. To her a "ball" was an object. To her an "out" was something you did the to trash. To her an "inning" was a strange pronunciation for a slang navel.

She laughed AT baseball for nine innings, didn't understand a THING.

Nor did she want to.

It was a RED SOX-YANKEES GAME AT YANKEE STADIUM!

Needless to say, she could have had the bedside technique of Jenna Jameson, the willpower of Pamela Anderson, the class and skill of Sheryl Crow and the intellect and beauty of Queen Noor, but if she didn't know baseball or CARE to know baseball, she just wasn't getting the ring.

Ah, well, I still have the pictures, right?

(Incidentally, and this has nothing to do with baseball but everything to do with my Swedish supermodel-looking baseball hater, the final straw came one night when we were watching Bob Costas' late night celebrity talk show on NBC. Hugh Hefner was the guest. She turned to me, looked me in the eye and said: "Who's Hugh Hefner?"

Game, set, match!

Then there were my younger days, before I fully understood women.

I once met a girl at Eastpoint Mall. She was a tall, hot, redhead who worked in the Hutzler's where my bank was located. We flirted, made a first date. I took her to the Rusty Scupper (which was a MAJOR splurge for me then, but it's where she insisted on going and I tried to be a good date). The dinner ended around 9-ish so we jumped in the car, put the O's game on and, lo and behold, Eric Bell was throwing a no hitter at the Metrodome in Minnesota.

I immediately pointed the car through the Fort McHenry tunnel and rushed back to Kane Street to get in front of a television.

She was a little frustrated, but I figured she'd understand because she was from Baltimore (again, I was 18 at the time, and I just thought everyone in the world thought baseball and a potential no-hitter was as important as I thought it was!). We got back to my place, where I immediately threw the game on and Bell was into the eighth inning and rolling against the Twins in Minneapolis.

This "date" of mine got antsy, and decided she was going to get up and dance in front of the television in order to block my view and get more attention. Finally she just stood in the way with her arms folded and she refused to budge, while I was looking left and right trying to move her so I could see.

She thought she was being amusing. I thought she was being an idiot!

Moments later, in the ninth inning, Bell gave up a hit, and I suddenly "acquired" a tremendous headache so I "had to take her home."

I was so pissed off that I actually missed the hit that I could barely speak to her "while my head throbbed." Fifty bucks on dinner, I missed most of the game, she was a lousy date AND the Orioles blew the no-hitter and damn-near lost the game in the ninth, when they surrendered four runs and held on to win, 5-4.

It was our last conversation.

Needless to say, any woman who would stand between a man and an Orioles' no-hitter was a woman who was NOT worthy of a second date.

But, sometimes, when I let my guard down, my good fortune and this city's finest female baseball fans would shock me.

One time, I met a girl at a Monday Night Light show of mine at The Barn in 1999. She was a stunningly beautiful blonde and we struck up a conversation. She said she liked baseball, but she didn't have a clue who I was or what I did, which I always preferred. I said I had a "connection" to get O's tickets if she wanted to go to a game. We were hanging out on our first date and discussing sports and she said was a "huge baseball fan" and that I could "ask her anything."

Now, that's a pretty bold thing to say to me. Do you have any idea how many girls I've met in a bar who tell me that they "know" sports (the number is literally in the Wilt Chamberlain range!) and what they mean is that they "like" sports. And there's nothing wrong with that! There's NOTHING cooler to me than a beautiful women who likes sports -- specifically baseball, football or hockey!

But there is a difference for a sports talk show host whose life is wrapped around knowing EVERYTHING about sports, not just taking a casual interest.

So, this was a pretty well-rehearsed routine of "Stump the girl I'm on a date with using sports trivia," because most girls on dates with me really DID want to impress me with their sports acumen.

For me, it was also the easiest way to root out whether or not this girl was a date, a potential girlfriend, a potential wife or a potential early evening exit, like the redhead from the mall.

If the girl knew sports, I was at the VERY least going to enjoy her company considerably more, being that I HAD TO WATCH SPORTS ON TV EVERY NIGHT! IT WAS MY JOB FOR 14 YEARS!!!!

So, this hotshot little blonde challenged me and I came up with a few softballs. They were too easy, I quickly sensed.

So I just busted out a question that even I didn't even have the answer for.

So, I asked her to give me the starting rotation of the Houston Astros. It was September 1998. She rattled off Randy Johnson, Mike Hampton, Jose Lima, Sean Bergman (who I didn't even know), and then, stuttered and stammered. And finally, she said, "Is Shane Reynolds still in the rotation?"

Whew! Still, it was the most impressive machine-gun assault I'd ever been subjected to by a female on a first date, at least one who wasn't "connected" in the industry as a sports media person or a sports employee.

I HAD to date that girl after that, right?

Can you imagine, though, in 2006 walking up to a girl at Della Rose's and being able to talk roto baseball with her now? You might as well being looking for a girl who can read The Racing Form.
After nine years of fatigue, baseball is heading dangerously in the direction of the horse racing and boxing industries. Those three sports -- or what they really are, industries -- ruled our society from 1920 through 1980, that's 60 years, really. I would bet that no one would bet a nickel on boxing or horse racing making a major comeback from its fall from grace during our lifetime.

But baseball's arrogance is mind-blowing and out of control and they don't even see what's happening because they clearly don't spend enough time around the NFL.

My wife's experiences are the best example. She's from New Hampshire, she absolutely adores the Red Sox (she's a just fan, not a fanatic). She doesn't KNOW baseball, but she LIKES baseball and does her best to catch the team as much as she can. She even gets those crazy updates on her cell phone every evening, 20 times a night with Red Sox news flashes.

Taking a slight break -- given our abstinence from all things Oriole -- she does go to Camden Yards once a year with her sister to see the Red Sox. She wears a totally obnoxious gray BOSTON -- that's B-O-S-T-O-N on their road jerseys if Drew or anyone else is keeping score here -- with an APARICIO and an 11 on the back (I always tell her that I got her jersey No. 11, because unlike Bo Derek, she's a perfect 11…but then she realized Luis actually WORE No. 11 and it's now HER name too!).
But, just like the sign at Comiskey Park it says: 11 Aparicio. Just like the actual 1973 Red Sox jersey I got rid of last year (except this one fits). It has the 2004 World Series championship patch on the shoulder, and overall it's a pretty snazzy piece. And she loves it and loves baseball!

Sometimes, over the past 28 months, she's literally gotten emotional looking into the stadium and accepting that we're not going anytime soon.

We live three blocks from Camden Yards and we don't go to the games and won't be going until the team is sold. For the record, we moved where we moved SPECIFICALLY to GO to baseball games!

But the reasons we don't go would have to be in another book. There are more than I can list besides any one "incident." And most of it is honestly, at this point, related to stuff they've done to other people more than anything that's happened with me.

Everyone, it seems, has their favorite Angelos horror moment or something that has happened to them at a game, or their frustrations about time, expense, or maybe it's just the losing and all of the hair-brained things this ownership group has done over 13 years to chase away hundreds of thousands of people.

In my house, we've gone from being paralyzed to stunned to angry, to deprived to sad to FINALLY, on a mission to change things.

I live downtown. I see the empty nights in and around the stadium. I feel the economic impact in my own neighborhood. I hear the stories everywhere I go. People want these memories back, these lost experiences back with their kids and family. They're craving it and they aren't going to crave it for much longer, until like we did when the Colts left town, we just more onto other things in our lives.

Believe me, I can sit here and pine away about baseball and the Orioles, but I've had plenty of "other" fun over the past 28 months. We’ve traveled, found different hobbies, had evenings free more often and it's been a lot of fun.

But -- I do miss my Orioles and my summer nights at the ballpark.

Badly!

But if we wait five more years to do anything about it then 1983 starts to sound more like 1978.

Let's play it out for five more years ahead…and then five more!

And all of sudden the Orioles moving from a 25-year-old Camden Yards to Albuquerque or wherever doesn't sound so crazy.

Hey, they imploded most of the concrete bowls from the 1960's inside of 30 years in Philadelphia and Cincinnati!

Who knows what Baltimore will look like 10 years from now? And who knows what will happen with MLB 10 years from now, especially with the dangerous path it's heading on with kids not learning and playing and loving their game in this country.

I'll be honest with you. We're a sports family and always will be. We love sports and spend (and owe) literally every good thing in our lives to sports, and more specifically, baseball, because it was my first love. Baseball was the "gateway" drug for my sports addiction in the same way the Gateway Arch was my "gateway" city for a lifetime of mixing travel (my other passion) with sports and baseball and music.

And I want baseball -- and those great conversations and those stories I used to have about it -- back.

I want those friendships and those connections and those magic moments and evenings back!

And that's what this Thursday and The Rally are all about.