Dear Catie Griggs: When Orioles fans ask why I don’t have an Orioles media credential, I’m sending them to you for answers

Dear Catie:

I want to make one thing abundantly clear, as I attempt to appropriately reply to our brief previous correspondence, and the three absurdly performative, phone-only conversations with Mark Fine and Chris Ullman over the past year of waiting to see if I can somehow still qualify as a “real” Baltimore sports media member in the realm of the new out-of-town billionaires who own the Orioles and the professional organization you lead in operating the baseball franchise:

I’m pulling for you.

The city needs it.

We all want the same things for the Orioles and Baltimore’s downtown – a winning franchise we can be “proud” of as a community and feel good about supporting (no matter how much you charge for inclusion). A locally-based and operated team we can cheer for in decent conscience without doing the hard math and evaluating the inordinate amount of time, money and headspace we spend on further enriching you and Major League Baseball’s Lords and the transiently expendable millionaire players in an absurd system of compensation and employment – all while mystically, nostalgically and ‘Magically’ feeling like we’re somehow a part of it because we can cheer for the laundry. And now, thanks to MASN executive vice president and general manager GREG BADER, we can even pay for it and stream it live from anywhere!

Look, I’m pulling for you to fix the Orioles on-and-off the field, even if you continue the bizarrely petty Angelos family tradition of willfully, purposely and strategically mistreating me and restricting a legitimate professional working local media member from asking you serious (and important) questions in the David Rubenstein “Next Chapter” era of this baseball reality series.

As I told The Whistler in my two, brief conversations, as well as your emissary Mark Fine, who has known me professionally and personally as a Baltimore sports journalist for 25 years: “We all want the same things here.”

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But, a year later, there remains a lot of ongoing trauma for anyone who has remained a Baltimore Orioles fan. Hence all of those empty seats at Camden Yards – last October and now. I told Mister Rubenstein that when I shook his hand last November in Pikesville.

And after a weekend of ego billionaire bobbleheads, millionaire pitching figureheads and a memorably embarrassing Easter Sunday beatdown – and amidst a less-than-biblically stellar start (or starting rotation) to the Orioles 2025 campaign – our WNST Baltimore Positive seat in your baseball press box has remained empty on the few occasions when our stellar, veteran reporter Luke Jones had the day off or was celebrating the holiday with his family.

I have been disallowed to sit in our company seat or enter Oriole Park at Camden Yards (or Rogers Centre in Toronto three weeks) ago as a working professional continuing 19 years of Angelos aggression toward his least favorite former journalist and “very unimportant person” with “delusions of grandeur.” The part where you had Mark Shapiro’s people deny me a Blue Jays working media credential on Opening Day in another country in a “Dear John” letter with a lie about “lacking press box space” sincerely disappoints me on behalf of my lifelong relationship with him and his father, Ron, who are real Baltimore people, and whose books never included lying to friends and restricting legitimate media for sport.

Catie, I also am a man of the people in Baltimore, whose Pop worked in the Bethlehem Steel mill and took the No. 22 bus from Highlandtown to Orioles games from 1972-on and have chronicled every ounce of the history of the franchise, just on this side of Jim Henneman and John Eisenberg, since I got a job at the newspaper in 1984.

I’ve owned an FCC license capably serving this community for 27 years and put a generation of local sports media “personalities” into career paths in this business off a dream, family sweat equity with an AM radio station and more hard work designed to glorify and amplify Baltimore Orioles baseball and everything local sports promised me and local fans all of my childhood wanting to be a sports journalist.

This is the only job I’ve ever had. This is the way I provide for my family. It looks like fun but I assure you it’s not a hobby or a basement podcast we’ve been doing here since 1991.

Poke around this website and hit refresh. You can diminish me and my audience and my history; but you can’t erase it.

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Baltimore Positive is my life’s work and I’m proud of it. And I’m proud of my Venezuelan, son-of-an-immigrant and raised in Archie Bunker’s Dundalk tale of my American dream, borne of the love of baseball – or beisbol where my people are from.

(And you can take the Luis Aparicio murals off the club level inside the stadium but you’ll never erase “APARICIO” from the Orioles Hall of Fame or the one in Cooperstown.)

I am a walking encyclopedia of Baltimore Orioles history, knowledge and facts. I’ve written books on every facet of your business and discussed your franchise every day of my life professionally and publicly for 40 years: people here know who I am, and they know I know baseball. And they know that I’ve forgotten more about the Baltimore Orioles than most people will ever know.

Because I’ve been the best marketer in the history of local sports media – they called me a “self-promoter back in the 20^th century, which is why you’ve heard of me and still actively credential Luke Jones – it’s rare that I enter a room in this town where I don’t know someone, or someone doesn’t know me. And when that happens, they know that I still discuss and professionally “cover” the Orioles every minute of every day at WNST-AM 1570 and Baltimore Positive for hundreds of thousands of people monthly on social media and they ask me about you – all of you.

“How do you think the Orioles are going to do this year? Is the new owner going to be any different than Angelos? Has anything changed?” tends to be the icebreaker route when someone in the community approaches me and isn’t making me guess their first name.

Catie, in a town full of real neighborhoods and lifer Orioles fans, the old “Have you met the new people?” would be the first question about you and Rubenstein if Justin Tucker’s tawdry massage practices weren’t the lead story on every barstool in the city the past three months. (And people still ask me with a straight face why the likes of Chad Steele wouldn’t want me in Owings Mills asking questions over the years?)

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Gladwell would tell you that I am the maven, salesman and connector for two generations of Baltimore sports fans (whether you want me to be, or not…and that goes for the people like Zips and Royal Farms and Weis Markets, who you do business with and formerly supported my iconic local business.)

The audience above and these metrics exist because, like the trusted Paul Revere holding the light box of truth in the air throughout my weary community, I have never, ever lied to my audience. It’s against my code.

I have the kind of credibility in this town that you can’t purchase; the kids call it “earned” media. I call it a lifetime of dedication to my craft and respect for my audience, and certainly too much respect for my own reputation and family name to lie to Baltimore sports fans or carry muddy water for arrogant billionaires peddling balderdash or folderol.

Last week a guy at Bluestone Restaurant in an Orioles white panel cap, a Curley guy with an NDP daughter headed to Camden Yards on the Timonium light rail to see Dean Kremer pitch, engaged me at the bar after recognizing me by saying:

“Hey, you’re the guy that called out all of Angelos’ bullshit!”

I told him to make sure that is on my tombstone whenever I’m finally exited from the planet. He bought me a Key Beer outta Dundalk to show his appreciation for my lifetime of candor and local vigilance. (I turn down a lot of free beer in this town, even when it’s Chuck Thompson-style cold.)

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Some version of this kind of exchange happens almost every time I leave my house after 40 years of publicly front-facing integrity on a radio dial of FM, out-of-town owned corporate schlock and a disintegrating local sports media base that should worry you as an executive watching people like Dan Connolly, Peter Schmuck, Steve Melewski and Pete Kerzel no longer really around to set the record straight on real Orioles history and the path to whatever greatness ever existed or that you believe you’re chasing during your stay in Baltimore.

At WNST Baltimore Positive, we are known for facts and intelligent conversations about sports (and everything else) because we have never insulted our audience with the fiction spread by any professional sports communication specialist or lying manager or coach or owner.

We have a text service here that confirms real breaking news and has been Baltimore’s sports gospel in real time since 2006. There’s a reason Luke Jones eternally resides in that WNST seat in your press box that I sat in on Opening Day 1992 and it’s because we’ve built a professional reputation over four decades that we’re fiercely proud of and that the city participates in to lift our credibility to a place much higher and wider on Saatchi and Saatchi’s Love Marks than anything on the lower left that the Angelos family has left you with at Camden Yards, which is a shell of a fractured fan base and depressed franchise in a struggling city.

We’re 18 months out on John Angelos trying to make a fool of his “friend” Governor Wes Moore and less than two summers removed from when the Angelos “leadership” publicly spanked your lead broadcaster and voice of your franchise Kevin Brown for a month over a set of true facts and baseball statistics delivered on MASN. Always on brand, The Warehouse arrogance and tone remained a disgrace to the bitter end, when the Angelos boys and their mother hit a walk-off-grand-slam after recruiting your boss to write them a $1.8 billion check two winters ago, instead of attempting a Nashville power play with MLB.

Ask anyone: the ownership tenure of Peter G. Angelos destroyed the essence and the soul of the franchise in almost every measurable way over 30 years. The lies. The losses. The lack of effort or will or ability to win baseball games. I wrote a lengthy book about it for your new “Special Advisor to the General Manager” Adam Jones, when he asked me the history of the civic abuse, and before he later got “cut out” by the same monsters.

You should read The Peter Principles and learn what I know to be true and every customer of yours who isn’t getting burped has lived in Baltimore.

Enter: you, Catie Griggs, the “fixer” of Baltimore Orioles baseball for the locals. You’re in charge now and ready to activate all of those strategic partnerships and key initiatives of measurable and attainable corporate goals by activating the hearts, eyes and credit cards of anyone who has an ornithologically-correct orange bird on a hat in their history or closet.

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You came from Seattle last summer to settle into your office at The Warehouse, and mingle anonymously around a city where you are a country club and Ivy League board member stranger, but every room I walk into in this city is occupied by lifelong friends and a vested community you hope will use their time, wallets and mojo to come to the ballpark and drink your $5 beers and eat your discounted munchies after paying full price to enter to support Baltimore Orioles baseball.

And you need the city to fall madly in love with Gunnar Henderson, Adley Rutschman, Jackson Holliday, Jordan Westburg and Colton Cowser! (BTW: That incredibly awful Star Wars commercial is not the way to do that…)

Let me reiterate my thesis statement: I’m pulling for you! (And, like Sting in the “Synchronicity” era, and the last time the Baltimore Orioles won a World Series, I’m also watching every step you take, every move you make on behalf of your fan base.)

Every single day. Every word you say. Every game you play.

I’ll be watching you…

And these people – your fans and customers – ask me, every day of my life, everywhere I go about our stadium of perpetual empty seats. And after living the best part of my life at the Inner Harbor in the heart of a city that I love, a large percentage of your fans are strangely quick to disparage coming downtown to Camden Yards if they’re Caucasian and from anywhere north or east or west of Ruxton (or, most of your fan base). These are endemic problems borne of reality, despair, racism, ignorance, Fox 45 news, crime and poor imaging in the 10 years since the unrest of 2015 spilled into your stadium on a spring afternoon and the previous owner decided to play baseball for no one while tanks surrounded the stadium and the city was on military lockdown. I watched this from my 23^rd floor home for a week this time 10 years ago. You probably just watched “The Wire.”

Seeing the city empty out and dry up is why I moved my “local sports” brand to Baltimore Positive, an opportunity to discuss all aspects of my city and community with the people charged, elected and chosen to help it heal and improve. And seeing the Orioles slink and shrink as a civic concern has been a civic sadness that has played out quite vividly on my watch.

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I’ll be 57 this October. As I told Mark Fine and The Whistler, I have no interest or energy to spend the rest of my life fighting with any of you. Making enemies of good local humans who seek to be your friend – as long as you don’t lie to me – seems wildly inappropriate and nonsensical but you and your new team of Baltimore Orioles’ employees can own it.

Despite your collective arrogance, you need every freaking fan you can get…

And I’m certainly not going to drive down to your stadium to watch your team play and be treated like shit ever again. I’ve done that all of this century waiting for someone sensible like you to come along and be a decent human being.

I was in Philadelphia 42 years ago when the Orioles last won a World Series. And I served as the Peter G. Angelos civic complaint department, Baltimore’s premier radio bitch-at-me bartender, for 15 years when the team was awful, abysmal and the owner was an abusive, hiding, petulant laughingstock who made the baseball experience in this city unwatchable for every real lifer Orioles fan. The disgust literally forced me off the radio in 2006 because discussing simply getting the word “Baltimore” re-associated with the franchise every day sickened my local soul, especially after being assaulted by The Oriole Bird and having decimal points nefariously moved on a financial transaction in May 2004.

I chronicled stories I never wanted to tell, about strikes and steroids and Steve Bechler; and know many others that I never will be able to tell in the aftermath of Mike Flanagan’s suicide.

The lows here have been lower than you know, Catie.

There’s been a lot of trauma.

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I am a living witness.

Every Baltimore Orioles fan I know wonders how and if you are ever going to win again. And whether this matters as much to this billionaire ownership coming to our hometown to take photo ops and throw out ballcaps (and strangely mint bobbleheads of himself as trophies) as it does to the real fans and people like Clancy, who have suffered two generations of truly awful baseball here.

Baltimore sports fans on the streets ask me if you new, out-of-town humans are “legit” and “authentic” – and whether David Rubenstein is really here to fix the team, its damaged image, the stadium, the footprint and neighborhood around it and re-invigorate our city.

He actually called the Orioles a “philanthropic purchase” during one of his celebrity billionaire hits on CNBC last spring, which made me laugh out loud and instantly got my radar up that he might be as full of manure as the last guy.

All I’ve seen Rubenstein do is give self-congratulating speeches in controlled rooms of his choosing, throw out Orioles hats for the cameras and make TV commercials and bobbleheads of himself whilst talking about signing autographs for kids and encouraging and taking selfies with fans. Essentially, he spent $1.8 billion to make himself the instant “famous” celebrity he’s always wanted to be. Like the bobblehead itself, this franchise appears to be an expensive toy for a bored 74-year old who wants (or needs) to be loved. A fan on my timeline last weekend showed his Rubenstein bobblehead from the ballpark and said he’ll be using it as a good-luck-Voodoo-doll to see if poking it in the wallet will make the pitching better.

The same fans who stand in hours-long lines to collect the first 15,000 angry bird hockey jerseys and the silly bobblehead of the new owner ask me why I don’t have a press pass now that Peter Angelos is dead and gone.

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And here is what I tell them:

Ask Catie Griggs and Mark Fine and David Rubenstein and anyone else whose “organizational” decision it has been to deny me access, deny me a personal meeting, deny me a handshake and any face-to-face professional interaction (even privately) over the past year.

I have offered private coffee. I have offered Zoom meetings. I have offered to come to The Warehouse and face all of my Angelos-era detractors – one by one, to hug it out, like adults. I have sent texts. I have sent emails. I have offered Linked In vines. I drove to Pikesville to watch David Rubenstein speak (for free) at Beth Tfiloh in November and shook his hand and told him I’d like to have him on my show. I mentioned the “trauma” of the fans here in Baltimore and he literally turned away from me like he didn’t see me; like I was a ghost.

I guess billionaires only respond to ass-kissing, faux praise and requests for selfies?

I honestly wish I had more of that real, honest feedback to give the Orioles fan base in the new era of your leadership but my treatment in the first year of the David Rubenstein era is now public record. And the pitching, offseason investment, billionaire bobblehead and lack of any substantive change beyond the janky left field wall speaks for itself.

My heart and soul and words speak for themselves about why I did “Free The Birds” in 2006 after being ripped off and assaulted in front of my listeners in your outfield in 2004 and watching the team enter a second decade of consistent awfulness. I wrote a book I re-released here chronicling my love of Baltimore Orioles baseball and my “why” for following a path to owning a sports radio station in my hometown.

I did the walkout 19 years ago waiting around for someone like you and David Rubenstein and Michael Arougheti to come to Baltimore and own it and change it and fix the Orioles.

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And, as a 56-year old lifelong citizen, Orioles fan and Baltimore positive supporter of everything about my hometown, I have offered all of the professional “peace” that the last, independent and truly “local” working journalist with a lifetime of credibility is going to offer.

But once you make me drink from the water fountain out back – and you’ve been doing this for a calendar year now, under the ownership of David Rubenstein while preaching diversity, equity and inclusion after banishing me in Texas 18 months ago with much of the same Angelos cast of “communications specialists” – and excluding me from even a handshake or a Zoom conversation…

Catie, you can’t think that I think much of your character, decency, intentions or leadership actions thus far.

Baltimore Orioles fans have asked me if I’ve seen any noticeable “changes” since you took over other than cheaper food, a new sound system and this week’s absurdly overdue modernization (err, monetization) of streaming.

Catie, you are charged with changing the entire culture and brand in a losing, flailing, worst-class awful franchise that is charged with competing with the New York Yankees, Boston Red Sox and the entire “51^st state” of Canada for baseball supremacy in the AL East.

And you have refused – personally and as an organization – to even shake my hand or look at my face because I’ve been on the radio for 34 years having to honestly front-face my community and discuss the worst professional sports organization in North America that was rudderless and morally bankrupt as a daily vocation. (That’s not conjecture; the losses and lack of success on the field is a statistical fact. The Baltimore Orioles have been the worst of the worst, on and off the field.)

So, are you too good for me?

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Or am I not good enough?

That’s not a trick question.

In my adulthood, I’ve made peace with Jim Irsay, who along with his father stole my Pop’s football team when I was a kid. He had the decency to tell me, “I can’t change history and won’t rewrite it. It happened the way it happened.” I will always respect that.

The first time I sat with Art Modell in 1996, he told me (and apparently told Mark Viviano the same thing privately at the time): “Never be afraid to criticize me! Because if all you ever do is praise me, they’ll never believe a word you say.”

I sat with Peter Angelos (yeah, I know that is hard to believe) and he told me this about embarrassing and jettisoning Hall of Fame broadcaster Jon Miller in 1997: “What I’m saying is, that if you’re a part of the Orioles organization and you’re broadcasting Orioles games, it’s not your prerogative to knock the Orioles team. Everyone in this room works for some organization. They are not expected to go around knocking the organization that they’re working for. That’s a fundamental proposition.”

(And one that Kevin Brown found out about the hard way a generation later, after Fredo had taken over control of the family business in 2023!)

Now a generation and one ownership group later, Catie, here you are refusing to shake my hand, even privately to sit down and discuss your franchise and ways that a legitimate media member, radio station owner, podcast host, vested local business leader, citizen and lifelong Orioles fan and observer might be beneficial in some informational, positive way.

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Mishandling grown-up media people then avoiding authentic communication is not protecting your brand; it’s avoiding accountability.

You won’t gaslight me any longer, privately, Catie.

Do it out here in the light where your lowest baseball IQ fans can see it and send me regular abuse on my social timeline on your behalf for being a lifelong whistleblower with facts, recording and measuring the promises and deliverables of the previous ownership, fairly and accurately – and now yours with David Rubenstein.

Expect the truth from me. I’m a seasoned professional journalist.

And you can underestimate who I know or what I know or how I find out the information but I assure you I am the most sourced sports journalist working in this city on a daily basis. And it’s not really close…

And the part where I wait over here silently as the only local journalist in the purgatory corner while you demand via Mark Fine that I somehow apologize for something that I don’t even know what I’m being accused of and fake contrition about some unspoken action in regard to the former ownership’s employees, who also systemically refused to behave professionally over two decades, or that I somehow never mention the well-paid executive humans in your MLB management structure who have been responsible for dealing honestly with the local media and credentials and access to information and communications is beyond ridiculous.

It’s childish. And the rumors, which no one seems to hide, get to my ears and border on outrageous.

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Bringing old Angelos wars into this new ownership and mistreating good local humans who seek to help you build faith and credibility in the future of the franchise for the community is infinitely silly on your part but it’s pretty clear that you must really believe that I’m a terrible human, which is pretty sad, professionally given my true audience and stature when I walk the streets of my hometown that you barely know and will probably barely ever know after you get that All Star Game you want for the refurbished Camden Yards.

Lots of people who’ve met me actually think that I’m an OK guy. But you have to meet me first to experience my unique charm and surprisingly quick-witted wisdom. I’m only an underestimated pariah to a handful of people still left inside your walls who are associated with Angelos’ remnants (some of whom I’ve never met) and the ego and obvious arrogance of Chad Steele’s brand protection shield in Owings Mills. Real Ravens fans know better; so do your fans who have been following the movie long enough to know the script.

I hold power accountable daily.

I have fealty only to the truth, to the local audience I learned to serve as a newspaper reporter and radio host who talked up all of the hundreds of millions of civic money our parents gave to professional sports at Camden Yards downtown a generation ago after losing the Colts and Bullets – and helped build a part of the sports culture (for better or worse) in this city. And watching the $1.2 billion you and Sashi Brown have been gifted via our citizens and Annapolis lawmakers to make your houses more profitable and move the shrunken press box to left-center field.

I’m not piling on your lousy start, horrific pitching, terrible offseason of player acquisitions or any number of fans’ issues related to the team’s performance on the field or the payroll. This isn’t about Mike Elias or Sig Mejdal or Brandon Hyde. I do that “baseball expert” routine daily; just as I praised their play on the field for large stretches of the past two summers as the young players performed and won 192 games without a scintilla of October success.

I had a former executive from within your organization during its glory era send me a one-sentence text on Saturday morning when he saw David Rubenstein bobbleheads on his timeline for a sub .500 team just two weeks into his first real season of MLB ownership:

“Seems clownish to me from afar.”

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And nobody was there to talk the billionaire neophyte out of it, and CFG Bank put $100,000 behind it, so it must be a great idea, right?

What you lack in authenticity, you seem ready and willing to purchase like a sponsored post or an Easter egg hunt on the White House lawn. Like Arougheti’s “buying beer on the Pickles bar” made-for-TV sponsored content reality show act last Opening Day. You’re trying to buy authenticity, credibility and fake love in Baltimore. But, right now, judging by the empty seats and the bigger brand you’re not building, it’s not selling any better than the starting pitching or Mike Elias’ trading acumen and roster management this offseason.

Your “PR” and street credibility is the first (and easiest) thing that you and your new group should be fixing – it starts with just being nice to everyone for no good reason other than they love baseball and want you to win – and it’ll be the last thing that comes if you ever truly grow your fan base and not just lure young drunks to the outfield bar once or twice a summer or the kids who run the bases on a Sunday but want to pick up a lacrosse stick, soccer ball or basketball the rest of the year. The most broken aspect of the franchise is the messaging and the humans with blind and muted fealty to the previous royal family and its poor habits, mean-spiritedness and losing mantra.

My two-decade press credential drama is a sad story of petty retribution from small-minded, poorly managed and trained humans within your walls. And an owner who had no respect for Baltimore baseball fans.

The worst thing in life you can do is look down upon people who look up to you. Mistreating people has been an Orioles tradition all of this century.

As a media member and a fan, I have been personally treated like garbage since long before I did “Free The Birds.” It was the rationale for hosting and executing the walkout on September 21, 2006.

With the Angelos people, it was my experience that the infinite lack of integrity was a desired fatal feature, not a bug or a flaw that needed to be corrected. Since some of them are still around telling you that I’m a “bad guy,” I’m guessing you’ll be making some of the same mistakes again with humans who seek to help you sell baseball, tickets and “hope” to your fan base.

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The “fresh start” and that handshake goes two ways, Catie.

I drove across town to shake hands with David Rubenstein and look him in the eyes and sought-out and found Michael Arougheti, who was one of the rudest men I’ve ever met (and I’ve met a lot of people) on your club level last year. And I’m still waiting for that email return from Priscilla…

Catie, I will not allow you to mistreat me or ignore my work or questions in darkness. I never afforded Peter G. Angelos that privilege, either.

The only problem the rich and wealthy ownership people have ever had with me or my integrity is when they’ve learned it’s not for sale.

And that has made me the last honest sports media pariah from an era who has watched Abe Pollin move the Baltimore Bullets to become the Washington Wizards, ‘Tiger’ Bob Irsay disappear the Colts and all of Johnny Unitas history on the Mayflowers to Indianapolis in the middle of the night before we stole the Browns from Cleveland to become the Ravens and pony up for Poor Suckers Licenses.

And I’ve had a very sad and unfortunate front row, Cal Ripken-on-MASN-style box seat in full public view watching Peter Angelos destroy the Baltimore Orioles over three decades.

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But continued arrogance and a flying orange middle finger toward any customer who is still there after two decades of mistreatment should be taken very seriously by you, Catie Griggs. You should be doing better than that with your new leadership opportunity here in Baltimore.

Willful ignorance was a way of life and standard operating procedure in the old realm.

I offered you a from-my-heart handshake in local spirit; no one in your organization offered to shake my hand back. Not even a guy who has known me for 25 years and absolutely knows I’m a legitimate media member, whose first act with me was to attempt to intimidate me and hold my press access hostage until I’m better behaved and more apologetic.

I have been told to go sit the corner until I can earn your respect by quietly not holding you accountable.

I have known your new Chief Marketing Officer Mark Fine since the end of last century when he worked for the Frederick Keys. Two decades ago, he brought Curly Neal of the Harlem Globetrotters into my WNST radio studio for an hour one afternoon as the public relations man trying to sell tickets for free on my airwaves. A decade ago, Fine sought me and my wife out at Citi Field in Queens when he found out about our 30 MLB Ballparks in 30 Days Tour in the summer of 2015 for Jenn’s first leukemia battle and There Goes My Hero. That night, he re-introduced himself and had a meal with us and Adam Schefter’s family before the Mets game, where he worked in the front office.

Mark Fine has been a LinkedIn first connection for as long as I can remember and is fully aware that I’m a professional working sports journalist in Baltimore.

His first act was to deny me a credential while refusing to meet with me or have me meet with anyone in your organization. I took two phone calls with Fine; one to “look into things” in February and one in March to tell me that I’m being denied credentials because certain unnamed members of your business team feel “mistreated” after I’ve had my business credibility and access denied by your franchise since 2006.

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I offered to come and meet with anyone who has a problem with me and talk it through, like adults, professionally and privately.

All of it has been denied.

You Rubenstein appointees have inherited a cowardly clown car and somehow think you’re on a bullet train.

There are no qualifications that I lack to have a media credential. I’m not on scholarship around here.

I’ve been patient; it’s been a year.

I wake up every day and look to help people. And if you ever circulate in the real intersection of Baltimore – and I could drive you around town one day and show you the real city and its people – you’d find out that my reputation and credibility is plenty good enough on the streets of my hometown. Better yet, waltz around your stadium with me next Opening Day and see how real Orioles fans treat me once they see my face past my impeccable heavy metal hair.

My reputation in Baltimore is impeccable with humans who respect critical thinking, live with integrity and demand high character and accountability. Authentic, real local humans who demand truth and accuracy.

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My track record is quite spotty with frauds, liars and spinsters who ask me to play kayfabe with obvious facts about integrity, truth and verified information. I have been a miserable failure for those who wish to use me, my platform or my voice as propaganda for bullshit.

As the honorable and legendary Nancy Grasmick once kindly said to me: “You bring credibility into every room you enter…”

Not to be crass, but I could wallpaper your office five times over with my media “accreditation” from every professional sports league on this continent and a few on others.

My credentials speak for themselves to my audience, which is why they read, listen, follow and opine.

I am here to hold you accountable; not to degrade you.

You make a lot of money. You’re given a lot from our community, and unfortunately the “benefit of the doubt” is nothing any of you have earned.

The empty seats speak volumes about your role.

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I’ve been dealt a level of professional arrogance from your new group that I will not accept quietly.

You should be seeking better counsel than the desperate minions and “unnamed” cowards of the former regime who have besmirched my good reputation enough to make you and your new group treat me in this awful fashion.

I think it’s gross. And grossly unnecessary.

And I’d tell you to your face if you ever had the courage to shake my hand.

But I’ll be here. Chronicling it all for your Baltimore Orioles fan base with pride, credibility, accuracy and fair criticism and legitimate praise that only comes from a lifetime of professional expertise and observation. Your organization can de-legitimize, un-authorize and pretend that me (and my rather large audience of your fan base and potential customers) aren’t here. That we’re not worth your time and that I’m a “bad guy” from Dundalk who openly cheers for your baseball team but sees through your bullshit.

Just like I’ve been doing professionally here in Baltimore all of your life.

You have “disappeared” the only Hispanic or Latino sports reporter, journalist and civic advocate in the history of the city. And an Aparicio, right from your own Orioles Hall of Fame family.

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Stand tall, Catie!

You certainly did the right (wing) thing!

You’ll be hearing from me here about a wide variety of business-related issues pertaining to the Orioles and the hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer money you’ll be spending to enrich the Camden Yards experience and add zeros to the balance sheet with great ideas, big new offerings, Birdland Rewards, new gambling plans, World Series baseball and the greatest baseball stadium on earth. Oh, and an MLB All Star Game soon!

And I’ll be here talking with your customers and fans.

And I’ll let ‘em know how you’ve treated me as well as what I think of last night’s starting pitching and managerial strategy and the many home runs hit.

I’m pulling for you.

Even if you’re still trying to put me out of business while talking about your baseball team in my hometown.

8

It hasn’t worked yet…but Peter Angelos died trying.

Catie, I was here the day you arrived and I’ll be here the day you depart for your next job in professional sports. I really wished you had chosen the kindness and inclusion you talked about when you arrived last summer but that hasn’t been my experience with your organization thus far.

A shame. And shameful, really. Sad.