at The Warehouse while the team’s precipitous fall from grace is something no fan who ever loved Brooks Robinson or Cal Ripken can bear to witness on a nightly basis.
The fans just stay away and write on Facebook that they’re waiting for him to die. (I can’t think of a more heinous thought but that’s where this city is, sadly…)
It’s all so sad, really, when you think about it. Maybe the saddest story we’ve ever seen unfold in Baltimore this side of Bob Irsay and watching Indianapolis wear horseshoes.
The last 15 years of losing have been one giant orange blur but it all comes back to Angelos and the ownership group not spending the money that was gifted to them to improve the team and compete in the AL East. The Orioles have even managed to become a welfare team to the other Major League Baseball owners because the revenue actually tied to the team isn’t significant. An empty ballpark and empty skyboxes and complete lack of advertising revenue bears out that the Orioles — as a sole entity — are hardly a thriving operation financially. And MASN is a separate business so its profits mean nothing to the MLB owners.
Some, like Buck Showalter have been bamboozled into getting involved with real belief that the team can one day win. MacPhail was a particularly ambitious fibber who has MLB Commissioner aspirations and a penchant for telling the fans about hope and the evil empire of spending in New York and Boston, a perfect puppet for Angelos during four straight last-place seasons. Some believed that MacPhail had a contract that was tied to profit, not winning.
Then there are the Dave Trembleys, Juan Samuels and Sam Perlozzos – “baseball men” who felt privileged to just have a job as a MLB manager and would not be considered for managerial jobs most anywhere else.
For Bobby Valentine and Joe Girardi, who both turned down a chance to manage the Baltimore Orioles over the past four years, they get to come into Baltimore’s Inner Harbor this year with real teams and bring traveling fan bases that will pack Oriole Park at Camden Yards and turn them into home games for the Yankees and Red Sox while everyone in orange stands around numb for another summer and waits for Joe Flacco and Ray Lewis.
As for the MLB players, Baltimore is only the place you go when you can’t find gainful MLB employment anywhere else. And even then, there’s the Orioles “surcharge” where you get more money and years just because you’re willing to give up an opportunity to win.
In my opinion, you’re a loser if you sign with the Orioles.
And it’s endemic of the kinds of candidates the team can attract at this point with no hope, no fan base and no direction. You might win when your paycheck gets cashed but you also know you can book your October cruise or vacation without concern of having to play postseason baseball.
But for Baltimore Orioles fans somehow Angelos has lowered the bar to a level where a .500 team would be considered “winning.” It’s shameful how many times this spring MASN has already aired Nolan Reimold crossing the plate to end a 69-win season to the delight of the few people left who think this is acceptable.
Some MLB players are OK with taking the money and losing. Many of them over the past decade have been among the highest-paid (and most overworked) relief pitchers in baseball. Mike DeJean. Buddy Groom. Kevin Gregg. Fill In Your Favorite Here.
Those guys took the money and marched on with their lives after 90-loss, 5.00-plus ERA campaigns as nightly arsonists in meaningless games in Baltimore.
Some guys, it destroyed. See: Flanagan, Mike.
Others, like Dan Duquette, Brady Anderson and Showalter, apparently are attracted to this hopeless opportunity because they can’t find work anywhere else in Major League Baseball.
It’s much like the Island of Misfit Baseball People…
The MASN money and the general public’s lack of awareness. The MacFailure. The night Mike Flanagan shot himself in the head. The naming of Dan Duquette as the “leader” of this perpetual and ever-sinking Titanic. And MLB’s role in this disgrace and civic sham perpetrated on the fans of the Baltimore Orioles will be discussed over the next week.
Honestly, at WNST.net, we can’t seem to get anyone in Baltimore to care enough to be heard.
So is 2012 the summer you start caring about the Baltimore Orioles again?
Probably not…
Or are you going to wait for Peter Angelos to die and see how his sons handle his estate (as so many of you have written on my Facebook page or said to me at various places around town)?
Or do you just not care that he’s printing your money in the MASN basement?
Or are you so caught up in purple fever that you’re more concerned with running Lee Evans and/or Billy Cundiff outta town?
You know, it’s amazing the double-standard this town has with the baseball and football team.
For most of us, it’s like the Orioles moved to the Indianapolis in Mayflowers every May. Opening Day comes and people get drunk and throw a frat party. Then, quickly, the team sucks. Everyone turns their head to not view the empty orange elephant in the middle of downtown. And they pine away waiting for training camp, which now doesn’t even include trips to Westminster.
I’m sick of it. I’m fed up. But I’m not really “angry” anymore because anger isn’t an empowering emotion. It’s a “freeze frame” emotion. I want ACTION – not simply emotion.
If people around the country could sleep on the streets for weeks at a time in the “Occupy” movement then why can’t we go downtown one night and show that we support the Orioles but that we’re not going to give them any more of our money than is already being siphoned from our cable television bills every month and being deposited in the coffers of the Peter G. Angelos empire.
Baltimore with the Orioles in last place is unacceptable.
I know it.
You know it.
Everyone knows it.
Now what are you going to do about it?
If you want a recap of Angelos’ 2006 lies to Pressbox, HERE THEY ARE…
WNST.net & AM 1570 will be playing our March 1997 interview with Angelos to review all of the lies of that evening next week.
This is a sampling…
The last six years of recap – managers, MacPhail, media intimidation, the quieting of the banishment of John Angelos from all things
