Major League Baseball at USA Today last week. In addition to gobs of strikeouts and shifts and analytics creating a boring product, the lack of balance among teams has wrecked the pennant races in the American League before July 4th.
But the specific and inexplicable arrogance continuing to drip off of this last-place Orioles franchise and this Willy Wonka mystery about what they’re doing is another disgraceful chapter in what has been 25 years of this kind of “unorthodox” behavior. I’ve documented the first dozen years in The Peter Principles. You can read the whole history there in totality. It’s a third-person pursuit of all of the facts, decisions, quotes, stories and results of the behavior of the sad, little man who became a billionaire by owning the Baltimore Orioles and has systemically and completely wrecked everything about the franchise over his tenure.
Apparently, his health is failing. That’s just a whisper. In the Rosebud way, we can never expect to really know what’s happening. No one has stepped forward to tell anyone anything in regard to the decision-making tree as these key dates are coming later in the summer.
It’s a real shame that Peter G. Angelos never stepped up and out to tell us all how he felt in the aftermath of his coup by allowing Major League Baseball to have a franchise in Washington. I’d love to hear his pontifications about MASN and suing every partner he has in MLB after they gave him a billion dollars of free money simply for plopping the team down in D.C. Of course, he would probably say the 12-plus years of threats and lawsuits and greed and appeals speaks for itself.
And it does.
The dispute is now approaching a half a billion dollars of money and an unprecedented lawsuit entangling all of his MLB partners in fighting over roughly $40 million per year of cable television money every year over the last decade. It’s not a lawsuit with the Washington Nationals. It’s with the other 29 owners and Major League Baseball and the Commissioner’s office.
It’s a LOT of money. Like the kinda dough that could sign a Manny Machado or a Bryce Harper.
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By the end of this series I will get to the media and the Angelos hangers-on who have witnessed this past 25 years of sheer lunacy and decay in virtually every place but the coffers of the family, while deciding to never ask tough questions, never investigate anything around the team’s progress, future, profit, motives or strategy.
No one in the media is ever called a shill – even though the dignity of the whole operation is veiled by the fact that no one ever answers a question about anything and every night the fans are fed one Angelos employee kissing the ass of another Angelos employee via a network that millions of people of seven states are paying for and most have no idea they’re funding it.
And other than three years ago when they were playing a baseball game in the middle of a shuttered post-riot city when they locked the doors and told the fans not to come, we haven’t heard much from them. Every so often, John Angelos issues some civic statements via his liberal media buddies and social media that are incongruent with how the team operates. In general, we don’t hear much from anyone named Angelos – ever. The word is that his brother Louis is more involved, especially on the baseball side, and tending to what is left of the law firm. And anyone who has ever worked at The Warehouse tells me that Mrs. Angelos is a very significant voice and personality in decision making these days – and always has been for the rank and file Orioles employees.
Kids are getting in free.
The front office gave Alex Cobb $53 million in late March.
No one had a failed physical in the offseason.
It’s clear the times they are ‘a changing because this is clearly not
