game last April with Agent Orange and his sweetie. We all bought Nats hats and trash-talked Peter Angelos.
It was fun while it lasted, and we’ve been to about six games over the two seasons.
But going to Nats games isn’t the same as having your own team. And it never will be.
We want a team we can be proud of here, despite my wife’s allegiances to the Red Sox.
After all, we honestly moved downtown more to go to baseball games than for any other reason. We went to about six in the spring of 2004 and haven’t been since.
We went until we — personally — felt uninvited, unwanted, disrespected and unappreciated.
When the product no longer qualifies as “fun” for me, I’m out. There was NOTHING fun about dealing with the Orioles: as a fan, first, but even more so with that “media” tag thrown on, which immediately qualifies you as a mortal enemy of many people in The Warehouse and that filters down to the clubhouse.
Short of getting physical with a reporter, there’s NOTHING out of line for a player in regard to dealing with the media. They can say what they want, how they want and there’s an “old boy” network of veteran ballplayers telling younger ballplayers to act like jerks. I watched it over a decade, and most sportswriters who spend time in there wouldn’t disagree.
Standing around a bunch of naked young men with bad attitudes toward the media (fully supported by the front office and ownership’s nodding approval, because no one there answers questions either) is just not a cool perk associated with my job.
It’s not why I got into this line of work, to get sneered at by a bunch of millionaires who are my son’s age.
That said, guys like Brian Roberts and Melvin Mora, who have been great guys and a credit to the franchise and the community, have gone virtually unseen because so many of us have been chased away for one reason or another.
So, combined with my innate birthright to Oriole fandom and a lifetime of watching and enjoying baseball as a centerpiece part of my life, it makes my blood boil more than a tad and I don’t want to be a party to it. Nes/jenn bird
And I’m not an angry person. So, I walked away, told them to shove their product. Except that I AM their product — I am the fan. They have nothing without us, the fans.
Much like a lot of the weird stuff in my career, I was a little ahead of the curve in some cases. I told anyone who would listen that Jim Speros was shady in 1994. I told people that before it was all said and done, that the Ravens would own this city back in 1997 because I saw the way both groups did business and how they treated people. But, even as bad as I personally thought The Warehouse was,
