Spring training for the Baltimore Orioles opened in Sarasota on Feb. 12, with pitchers and catchers reporting to Ed Smith Stadium. But something else was starting that day, beyond pitchers working their way back up to 90 pitches and position players insisting they’re in the best shape of their lives.
The Baltimore Sun was also launching Early Birds, a twice-weekly podcast covering both the Orioles and Ravens. So by the time Matt Weyrich, Sam Cohn, and Josh Tolentino recorded the first episode that afternoon, the Orioles had signed Chris Bassitt to a one-year, $18.5 million deal, and Ravens head coach Jesse Minter had finalized his inaugural coaching staff.
What they needed was to strike while the iron was hot. And what they got was exactly the kind of break you need when you’re launching into a sports market already saturated with shows and voices competing for the same ears during morning commutes and lunch breaks.
Weyrich, who covers the Orioles beat for the Sun, hosts the show every Monday and Thursday morning. Cohn, the Ravens reporter, rotates in on one episode per week. Tolentino, a columnist who came to Baltimore from The Athletic, takes the other.
Good morning, Baltimore! New @baltimoresun pod alert 🚨
Thrilled to launch @SunEarlyBirds with @ByMattWeyrich and @samdcohn. Follow below and listen to us wherever you get your podcasts 🎙️ https://t.co/q6azL5aVZY pic.twitter.com/jChxGMNvG9
— Josh Tolentino (@JCTSports) February 12, 2026
According to Cohn, Matt Weyrich deserves all the credit for actually making this happen. Weyrich — who joined the Sun in 2024 — had mentioned during his initial interview for the job that he wanted to get into podcasting or some other multimedia work, which aligned perfectly with where the paper was already headed. Over the past couple of years, the Sun has been pushing to expand beyond just written content, building out its social media presence, experimenting with video, and finding new ways to reach audiences who aren’t opening the paper every morning to read game recaps over coffee.
Sometime during fall — Cohn couldn’t pin down the exact month, but it was deep into Ravens season, the kind of October or November stretch where football dominates every conversation in Baltimore — Weyrich approached him with the pitch. Would he be interested in co-hosting a podcast covering both teams? They met for coffee and started working through what the show could actually look like. How would they make it different from the other Baltimore sports podcasts already out there? How would they split the workload between football and baseball? What would make someone choose this show over the dozens of other voices already competing for the same ears during their commute or their lunch break?
Then they brought in Tolentino, who Cohn knew from their overlapping time at the Philadelphia Inquirer when Tolentino was covering the Eagles.
“The three of us had put together this pitch and planned a lot about just like what this show could be and could look like and how it can be different from what’s already happening in this market,” Cohn told Awful Announcing.
Getting approval from Sun leadership wasn’t automatic. There were multiple meetings where they had to make the case that this was worth investing in, that podcasting wasn’t just a trendy thing newspapers feel obligated to try before abandoning six months later. And the Sun responded by providing the necessary resources, including building a dedicated podcast studio in the newsroom, which should be ready by March. There are longer-term plans to create a small podcast network encompassing different sections of the paper, with sports serving as the proof of concept.
The original timeline called for launching before the end of the Ravens’ season, ideally during a playoff run, and building momentum heading into spring training, when the Orioles would take over as the primary focus. That plan fell apart when the Ravens missed the postseason for the first time since 2021, and the organization fired Harbaugh, creating a massive coaching overhaul that dominated the offseason conversation. By the time Jesse Minter came in as the new head coach and began assembling his staff, the window to launch during football season had closed.
So they pivoted to spring training, and in retrospect, the delay probably worked in their favor. Launching now means the show gets to document both teams from the very beginning of their attempts to fix what went wrong, rather than jumping into the middle of an ongoing story. The first episode was recorded the same week Minter finalized his coaching staff and within a few hours of the Bassitt signing.
The Orioles made their much-anticipated rotation addition, signing Chris Bassitt for $18.5 million.
Was it enough? pic.twitter.com/0RAtaldYuT
— Early Birds Podcast (@SunEarlyBirds) February 12, 2026
The Ravens finalized their coaching staff today, taking a few swings on inexperienced assistants. Should fans be confident this group has Baltimore headed in the right direction?@samdcohn and @JCTSports weigh in. pic.twitter.com/eaElhkGvFE
— Early Birds Podcast (@SunEarlyBirds) February 13, 2026
Having a story to tell on day one mattered, but only if they could turn that initial attention into something sustained.
The entire approach is built around the idea that the podcast and the Sun‘s written content drive traffic to each other rather than existing as separate products competing for the same audience’s attention. Early Birds is free, meaning listeners can hear Cohn and Tolentino discuss a deeply reported story they wrote about Jesse Minter’s coaching staff, sometimes including details and analysis that didn’t make it into the final article, and ideally get curious enough to go read the full piece on the Sun‘s website. The hope is that some percentage of those listeners convert to paying subscribers.
“What we’re doing is creating content to drive traffic to other content,” Cohn explained. “The podcast is not behind a paywall. So someone listening to our podcast for free might be more inclined when I tell a story, for example, on our first episode about a deeply reported story that Josh and I co-bylined where we’re talking to over a dozen sources around Jesse Minter and explaining, hey, this is some of the more interesting stuff we got from the story, including some analysis based off the story and maybe even some details that were left on the cutting room floor.”
The strategy works in reverse, too. Someone who already reads the Sun‘s sports coverage regularly might discover the podcast through social media or a link embedded in an article and start listening, creating another regular touchpoint with the paper’s journalism.
Cohn was emphatic that the podcast isn’t replacing written content or signaling some strategic retreat from text-based journalism. Beat reporting and columns remain the foundation of what he, Weyrich, and Tolentino do every single day. But Early Birds represents an acknowledgment that audiences consume sports journalism differently than they did even five years ago, and if the Sun wants to reach all of them, it needs to be producing content in multiple formats that serve different needs.
“People are reading a little bit less and less, and we still really value our written content; that’s still a huge part of it, it’s still nearly the entirety of our job,” Cohn said. “But this is a way to complement our coverage in a way that we can meet readers, subscribers, and potential subscribers where they are and connect with the market and connect with an audience in a really meaningful way.”
The show’s structure takes advantage of Baltimore’s unique position as a mid-sized city with only two major professional sports teams. Trying to do a comprehensive podcast covering the Eagles, Phillies, Sixers, Flyers, and Union in Philadelphia — where Cohn and I both went to school (Go Owls!) — would be completely unmanageable. You’d spread yourself too thin trying to give meaningful coverage to five different teams and never go deep enough on any of them to justify the time investment from listeners.
But in Baltimore, covering the Orioles and Ravens in a single show makes sense. The sports calendar creates natural peaks and valleys that the podcast can ride without forcing content. The Orioles dominate spring and summer while the Ravens are relatively quiet beyond draft coverage and training camp prep. Then football takes over in the fall while baseball either winds down or ramps up for a playoff push, depending on how the season plays out.
Ravens’ new OC Declan Doyle wants to see Baltimore’s veterans (read: Lamar Jackson) at OTAs this spring. pic.twitter.com/I0KV7Gh6Tv
— Early Birds Podcast (@SunEarlyBirds) February 19, 2026
“The fun thing we can do with having one podcast covering both is we can kind of ride this wave of the sports calendar, where things are gonna pick up for the Ravens and slow down for the Orioles, and vice versa,” Cohn said. “And when both teams, when the Orioles are potentially in the playoff hunt or making a playoff run and the Ravens are in the early weeks of what could be a very successful season, like that’ll be a lot of fun and the interest could be really high.”
The challenge Early Birds faces — and it’s the challenge every new podcast faces in an absurdly saturated market — is convincing people that this particular show is worth their time when there are already multiple Baltimore sports podcasts that have been doing this longer and have established audiences.
“We want to lean on our reporting,” Cohn said. “We don’t want to be Barstool. We don’t want that to be our brand. We want to lean on, we’re reporters who are there every day. We’re covering the team. We’re building relationships with our sources. We want to lean on our reporting as journalists, but we also want it to be fun and engaging and connect with people, connect with our readers, connect with our subscribers, and connect with fans of the Orioles and Ravens and beyond.”
Cohn was refreshingly honest about the fact that the first couple of episodes haven’t been perfect and that all three of them are still figuring out how to work together as a podcasting team. They recorded two practice episodes before launching publicly just to get comfortable with the format and work out some of the technical and editorial kinks. All three have varying levels of podcasting experience from previous jobs and side projects, but none of them have done it together before, and there’s an adjustment period to finding the right rhythm.
“There’s always gonna be room for growth, and I think that the most important part is that we’re aware of that and we get creative and we be different,” Cohn said. “We’re not the first podcast in Baltimore to cover the Orioles and the Ravens, but in the same way that we approach our written content and all of our reporting, the goal is to be different, and the goal is to be unique, and the goal is to do something different than others aren’t.”
Early Birds isn’t trying to revolutionize anything or reinvent what sports podcasting can be. But at least they’re starting with a story worth telling.