Zinno heads to Atlanta
As Tony Lombardi mentioned earlier this week, 105.7 The Fan’s Mark Zinno has accepted a position with the CBS Radio owned 92.9 The Game WZGC to host evenings in Atlanta. Zinno has been on the air in Baltimore since 2006 working at The Fan and WJZ-AM 1300 as a part of call-in talk shows, pre/postgame shows and player shows. He also did radio play-by-play for the Loyola men’s basketball team in 2004.
The strongly opinionated sports talker will be greatly missed by this media critic as he’s one of the few knowledgeable baseball minds on the air in Baltimore. 105.7 The Fan’s lineup includes a former police commissioner in the morning, former Redskins GM midday, former Ravens play-by-play man in afternoon drive and the director of Ed Reed’s foundation at night.
To be fair, Bob Haynie seems to know a bit about baseball too, but I always enjoyed Zinno’s insights on the game from a more national level.
Zinno’s boisterous persona rubbed some the wrong way locally, especially because he’s a native New Yorker and doesn’t try to hide his love for the Yankees. Despite all of that, I still found his knowledge to be deeper than anyone on the air locally and found that despite his approach, I generally agreed with most of what he had to say.
I’m happy that Z will be making more money in Atlanta, a “big bump in pay” according to Dave Hughes of PressBox Baltimore, but I wish he could have made it here in Charm City.
Nestor blames Angelos AGAIN!
Last week I wrote about the NCAA Lacrosse Tournament returning to Baltimore in hopes of increased attendance over Memorial Day weekend. Back in 2007, 123,225 fans attended the tournament in Charm City and that total has been decreasing ever since.
The Orioles 12:35 PM game against the Indians didn’t help, but there wasn’t much the O’s could do to accommodate the LAX tournament as FOX’s national blackout restrictions limited their broadcast window. The two teams and Major League Baseball could have agreed to move the game to 7 PM, but then it wouldn’t have been broadcasted on television. So, they opted to keep it during the day.
Well, once again facts aren’t good enough for WNST’s Nestor Aparicio, who took to Facebook to use this as yet another reason to throw stones at Orioles owner Peter Angelos.
“For all of you lacrosse fans, perhaps today will prove to you that I’ve always been honest about what kind of a man Peter Angelos really is…,” he wrote.
A few blind supporters shared their idiotic comments of support and Nestor followed with this:
“This is a pissing match between Peter Angelos and the Baltimore Ravens and Steve Bisciotti. It’s why the Ravens opened in Denver. It’s why the lacrosse people have a massive conflict today. It’s why the Navy-Ohio State game is getting screwed. Angelos hates the Ravens. He’ll do anything to screw them and when they sell events YEARS ahead of time, he and his scumbags purposely schedule against the events because the Maryland Stadium Authority gave him that right in 1996 when Art Modell came to town.”
None of this is accurate, but it sure makes for a great story is you have an ax to grind with the team that removed your press pass because you held a few walkout protests against ownership.
A final thought…
I watched Ray Rice’s press conference live last week and have seen the clips played a million times both locally and nationally. I won’t get into my personal opinions of Rice or what he had to say about the “incident” in Atlantic City, but I couldn’t help but wonder what Under Armour thinks.
Why Under Armour?
While ESPN continues to show clips of Rice discussing the night in which he committed an act of domestic abuse and the video of him saying that “sometimes in life you will get knocked down” will forever live on Deadspin, the UA shield is blasted all over the footage. The press conference was held at the Under Armour Performance Center in Owings Mills and behind Rice and his wife Janay is not only the Ravens logo, but also that of Under Armour.
What do they think about having their brand associated with this press conference?
I’m guessing this likely wasn’t the type of exposure they were hoping for when they signed on as a sponsor of Baltimore’s football team.
I’d be curious to hear some thoughts from someone at UA or a sport business reporter like Darren Rovell on this subject.
