Written By Charlie Hoppes of Orioles Spastics

When I was in college, my professor of poetry told us that certain elements of the form had been so overused that they were basically off limits if the writer hoped to be taken seriously. I’m not sure she was right, but I doubt she’d look kindly on all my Arrested Development references on Orioles Spastics anyway. So I guess it’s okay for me to call this post an “ode” to the shiny new Baltimore Sports Report Network, even if it’s far from poetry.

You, dear reader, are a diehard O’s fan. You probably have been for as long as you can remember. You’ve been around through some good times—last year’s magical run, the late ‘90s would-be juggernaut, the Why Not? squad, Cal squeezing that pop up, maybe even back to the glory years. And you don’t have to have been a fan very long to remember some dark days indeed. Either way, you are in love.

And your friends don’t get it. At least not really. They may understand it now a bit more, with the recent successes, but they can’t feel your love for it. It’s amazing to them that you know the OPS of Jonathan Schoop and that Adam Jones has been raking in days games. So you can’t even begin to explain that you’ve always been this way, even when those names were Luis Matos and Tony Batista instead.

And that’s why Josh Sroka’s idea for a network of podcast is so brilliant, and why Zach Wilt decided to bring all of us aboard and make it happen. All of us are just like you. To say that we live and breathe baseball is selling it short. And now you can find fans as big as you are in the same site almost every day of the work week, celebrating and agonizing and analyzing and reminiscing along with you.

Baltimore Sports Report Network - Superfriends of podcastingTo make it even better, no two shows are the same. Each one has a unique brand of humor and focuses. As a listener of the other shows, I felt that, like all good radio, I knew the characters long before I interacted with them. I laughed at some of Bert’s stories and knowingly smiled at Jake trying to calm Scott down. When I recently met them, it sort of felt like meeting old friends. And with everyone together now, you can not only expect to enjoy great shows consistently, but also some awesome crossover shows from time to time, Super Friends on your podcasting dial.

While none of us actually record from our mothers’ basements, we all have a passion of bringing you the best podcasts we can, to geek out and ham it up for the joy of it all. I think I speak for all of us when I say I’m excited for this network to become a part of your daily routine. It’s the future of Baltimore-area sports talk, and we are so glad to have you on board.