is still in business. And lord knows, Peter Angelos and his militia have been trying to put me and plenty of other abutting and highly-supportive local businesses OUT OF BUSINESS over the last decade and now an out-of-control, 14-year civic disaster is all we’ve got left to look forward to this spring and summer.
(For those of you looking for my thoughts on the 2011 Orioles – and they’re mostly positive and I expect my first spring of orange relevance since we began WNST in 1998 — I’ll be opining early and often about the “changes” at the Warehouse and in the Camden Yards culture later in the month. But for now, I’m going to stick to this NFL thing.)
This is only the beginning of a summer s**tstorm that the NFL and its players and lawyers and sponsors and virtually anyone who is paying attention to these matters has seen coming for three years. And the strange part is that I’m as educated on these issues as any journalist in the country. I’ve attended the last five years of NFL Owners Meetings so I’d be wired into players, owners, coaches, officials, lawyers, sponsors and “people in the know” in a unique way because I own a business that directly abuts the National Football League and all of its sin and glory.
So, in Dundalk parlance, while I’m a bleeding-heart liberal in the real world my philosophies on this are probably a lot more like Steve Bisciotti in this brawl than like Ray Lewis or Joe Flacco.
But who cares what I think? I’m just one guy, one dude with a pair of PSL’s in Sect. 513.
But the feelings of the fans and the airing of the grievances will be coming early and often this time around from every fan in the league in social media. The one thing most of the old men in ownership don’t know about and haven’t yet deeply understood is how this is going to play out in a world of social media where everyone talks to everybody.
And the players can’t shut up. And, having spent an inordinate amount of time around NFL players, on the whole they’re the least educated
