his profiteering off the back of the Orioles’ good name.
But I can’t begin to tell you how many misinformed, lacking-common-sense opinions I’ve heard in talking with local baseball fans.
And perhaps because Bob Irsay packed up the Colts in March 1984, there’s some extra paranoia that “Mr. Angelos will move the team if you don’t pipe down.”
My answer to that would be two-fold:
1. Where the f*** is he moving this cash cow meets filthy pig? San Juan? Caracas? Havana? Mexico City?
Or Perhaps Seoul? (But we all know that’s not possible…)
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You want to know something about the “value” of Major League Baseball to communities? It’s about ZERO in some places because there hasn’t been an American city truly court a baseball team in about two decades. And in three out of the four places where MLB expanded a generation ago – Miami, Tampa & Phoenix – interest has been tepid at best for much of their collective existence.
Hell, the whole REASON we’re screwed in Baltimore is because Bud Selig and his boys club couldn’t figure out a way to make ANYONE else outside of Washington, D.C. get in on the bidding a decade ago.
Tampa and Miami have been colossal disasters that have somehow even managed to print money in various ways and produce productive and competitive teams that STILL don’t garner any semblance of a “big league” fan base even after a combined 40 years in Florida.
Now, that shady ownership conglomerate down in Miami has managed to bamboozle a new ballpark on the site of the Orange Bowl to open the entire Major League Baseball season in the middle of a war zone of a neighborhood and essentially setting a parachute on the entire fan base from Fort Lauderdale north to West Palm Beach and Jupiter. But that’s Miami’s problem, not ours. Really, it’s also MLB’s problem but Bud Selig is too busy reading his press clippings to give a damn about what’s happened in Baltimore. And, judging from the lubrication necessary to give Angelos this deal that makes winning a low-level priority in the first place, I have very little faith that anyone in MLB’s offices in New York (or Milwaukee) have called Angelos and asked him this succinct question:
“Are you really trying to win and put a competitive Major League Baseball product on the field?”
As Steve Bisciotti pointed out to me last week, the MLB product sucks — he called it “Bantamweights vs. Heavyweights” — especially in places like here in Baltimore where the salary disparities and the lack of desire to win for the community run in direct opposition when $100 million profit lines are guaranteed like annuity via MASN money.
I think you’ll find Steve Bisciotti’s desire to buy the Orioles here (in his own words):
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2. Why in world would Angelos even THINK about moving the Orioles to a non-existent “City X” when he’s been printing hundreds of millions of dollars of profit off the Orioles over the last six years since the MASN money began printing an annual annuity for him beyond his wildest financial expectations when he bought the team in 1993 for $173 million dollars at auction?
Angelos is winning in the only places a businessman/attorney would want to win – in his bank account.
He’s been printing money while your back has been turned and the team has gone into the crapper and the city has become a wasteland on spring and summer nights and no one here has done anything about it or said a word – unless it’s whispered in my ear at some cocktail
