Orioles fan base and community and his own organization about how their local “investment” in the Orioles via MASN money would improve the product and bring (and retain) better players to win championships.
See the intro quote from 2006 above via PressBox and this gem here, uttered to then-Examiner media critic Jim Williams during the same media blitz designed to divorce Washington, D.C. and re-position the Orioles as “Baltimore’s team”:
“For us, confronted with the immediate competition in what was our fan area, (MASN) is in many ways a lifesaver,” Angelos said. “And that was the purpose to see to it that, as I said, the O’s franchise would have access to additional funds to remain competitive. Now that we have an RSN and we can move forward with it…that is going get us on a more even plane with Boston and New York, and that was the purpose. That is going to provide relief and my game is to improve the status of the Orioles and get the team back on a winning basis.”
But the real buy-off of the media happened in the years after Angelos uttered these lies and false promises.
At the time of these quotes, he had poured tens of millions of his own money into a franchise that was bleeding cash after he summarily wrecked all of the goodwill the Orioles had built over two generations of fans. But that was also back before he had received a few billion of your dollars automatically funneling into his coffers from your cable television bill.
And, yes, that’s BILLION with a “bee.”
Like Carl Sagan…
So, as I lay out all of the facts in the coming days – all well sourced and meticulously linked – you can decide what it means to be honorable and accountable.
And you can decide if you should send me some nasty email via nasty@wnst.net or in your social media forum of choice?
And you can decide who’s lying and who’s running and who’s accountable and who’s credible.
And you can see the math.
And you can decide whether you’re actually a bigger Orioles fan than the owner – circa 2015.
Peter G. Angelos is 86 years old and has made a lot of money from squatting on the local baseball team over the past 23 years.
You’re here – reading this – so clearly you’d like for them to win and have the best players and enjoy more seasons like 2012 and 2014.
So would I.
I’ve been waiting on some of those “journalists” at MASN or The Baltimore Sun or The Washington Post or WBAL or the lazy assclowns at CBS Radio to get out their calculators as the years have passed and do some fact checking.
This is relatively simply math; it ain’t calculus or quantum physics. But of course at WNST.net & AM 1570, we play chess, not checkers.
A story like this is why you should listen to our radio station for expert information, industry insiders and people who are empowered to tell you the truth about the Baltimore Orioles and what they’ve done and stood for over the last 22 years.
With the latest headlines regarding the ongoing litigation and New York Supreme Court ruling in early November that favored MASN and Mr. Angelos in keeping more of the money from his cable television network away from the Nationals – The Washington Post reported that it’s $298 million since 2012 – there is a missing element in all of this sloppy, lousy, lazy and mostly partisan “reporting” that’s been going on the wake of it that is missing the whole point.
This is the evidence that tells you all you need to know about the commitment of Peter G. Angelos to winning a World Series in Baltimore. Angelos isn’t just suffocating the Washington Nationals by avoiding all aspects of a fair media deal.
He’s also screwing his own baseball team – the Baltimore Orioles – out of tens of millions of dollars of revenue that’s going personally into his pockets via his principle ownership (now at 83%) in the Mid Atlantic Sports Network (aka MASN).
We call it the Mister Angelos & Sons Network because that’s essentially what it is. Over the past decade a very, very small percentage of the revenue has ever reached the Baltimore Orioles bank account – let alone to ever finance any player acquisitions of significance.
The real conflict of interest in all of this is that Major League Baseball has set up a poor system of equity and a lousy deal that actually punishes Angelos for utilizing the money MASN prints for him on baseball players.
It’s almost a double jeopardy situation.
He’d punish himself twice by giving the Orioles a bigger cut of the MASN money, like his promise from a decade ago before your money was already in his possession.
For every dollar that the Orioles receive from MASN, the Nationals get the same amount. Every dollar that goes to the baseball clubs also depletes the MASN profit, which Angelos currently owns an 83% stake of the company per his deal with MLB in 2005 to allow the Expos to become the Nationals.
Even worse, every dollar that goes to the teams from the local television pool via MASN also gets divided by 34%, which is then earmarked for a general fund that is split by all 30 teams.
I told you it was complex.
Don’t worry – we’ll get out the pen and paper for you and help you understand it all.
Here’s the bottom line: Angelos doesn’t have any reason to spend money and field a competitive team for Orioles fans when you see the kind of profit this MLB machine is throwing off annually while the team’s payroll is mostly stagnant vs. the field.
There’s no $30 million per year investment in Chris Davis that would ever come back as a good investment on a bottom line.
It was once said: “Why pay for steak when the fans will eat hamburger?”
Peter G. Angelos could see his overall profits from the Baltimore Orioles and MASN reach over $100 million for the first time in 2016.
In Part Two, we’ll break down all of the numbers and show you the quiet effiency of the MASN money tree.
