in any contract of substance that hits his desk.
Years after his departure from the Orioles, Wren told The New York Times: “He uses medical reasons to kill or change a deal if he doesn’t like it.”
Angelos got screwed on a deal with Xavier Hernandez for $1.75 million – blamed Wren – and never forgot.
Angelos then mangled a negotiation with Aaron Sele … and Jeromy Burnitz … and later Grant Balfour.
Anyone see a pattern here?
Angelos once told The Baltimore Sun, “No one wants to litigate but one has to sometimes.”
So, it’s now 2016 and he’s 12 years into a battle with Major League Baseball and every one of his partners over $298 million (according to The Washington Post), but as this series should unearth – it’s really the tip of the financial iceberg because this money continues to grow and act as an annuity.
The money flows in no matter what happens on the baseball field.
First place or last place. Chris Davis or no Chris Davis. Good pitching or bad pitching. Hell, they had a game this year where the fans weren’t allowed to watch the game.
The truth? The Baltimore Orioles and Peter Angelos don’t need the fans.
They have MASN!
So how did it get to this point?
Well, clearly it was the threat of the leverage of a lawsuit back in the tender period when the Nationals were being berthed in D.C. in 2004 and 2005.
At the time, many believed Angelos would take somewhere between $100 and $150 million in a one-time settlement and simply sell the team. That was the talk of his exit strategy.
But, instead, once Selig and MLB put their flag down at RFK Stadium without the ability to pacify him before the move, Angelos did everything possible to extract every possible ounce of blood money for the act of war on his franchise.
I’ve written about every facet and morsel of information regarding the terms of the settlement and how and why Angelos got such favorable terms.
The “deal” is here: Chapter 13 of The Peter Principles has extensive, full explanations of all of the financial terms and the end result. It’s a history lesson and mandatory reading if you want to understand where the seeds of all of this revenue (and acrimony) were planted.
And in the end, after all of the concern about a lawsuit before the Nationals were created to pump revenue into all of the owners’ pockets, it turns out that Angelos has now squeezed almost $3 BILLION out of the deal and Selig’s successor Rob Manfred has fared no better than old Buddy, who gave King Peter all of the money and the gun to protect the vault.
One Major League Baseball executive told me three summers ago: “We don’t get any further with him than you do.”
First, Angelos got a cash payout of $75 million in 2005 and 2006. Keep in mind he only brought $29 million of his own cash into the deal in August 1993.
He also got a floor price of $365 million, which was a very generous number at that time, especially given that Angelos was already well in excess of $150 million upside down with his own personal money that funded losing teams since 1999. At that point, it was a team that was largely unprofitable on paper for the first six years before the franchise started going south in the standings, attendance and overall revenue.
This was an era when Angelos was more interested in insulting Mike Mussina than signing him.
But the gifting of the MASN television empire by MLB was the largely the work of team president Joe Foss, who studied what the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox had done via the creation …
