was considered to be more than content to stay with the Orioles because he considered it his baseball home. Mussina loved the Orioles and remembered what it was like to win at Camden Yards.
But Hargrove had an advantage that no other managerial candidate would have with the 2000 Orioles. He had a unique relationship with troubled outfielder Albert Belle, who was still under contract for four more years and $52 million. The Orioles hired the one manager who at least knew all of the bizarre idiosyncrasies of the game’s most mercurial player and Angelos believed this was an “X factor” in his choice to hire Hargrove.
There was definitely an allure to having a manager who could communicate with Belle at some fundamental level. Certainly, there was no one inside the Orioles organization who felt even remotely comfortable in rattling the cage of Belle, who most everyone seemed to ostracize and isolate because, quite frankly, his body language and schizophrenic behavior was more trouble than it was worth. He seemed to believe that the media really wanted to talk to him. The truth? The fact that you could avoid him was a blessing for most writers, television and radio reporters.
No one wanted to deal with Albert Belle, let alone manage him. But Hargrove had been there before and gotten the AL Champions T-shirt twice in the previous five years with No. 88.
Hargrove was Belle’s first manager in 1987 with the Indians’ Class A team in Kinston, N.C., which was also Hargrove’s first managing job after a 12-year career in the big leagues with Texas, San Diego and Cleveland, where he was known for being a solid hitter for average and a decent fielder. Hargrove, who would take inordinate amounts of time at the plate between pitches – adjusting his sleeves, helmet, gloves, crotch – had his own idiosyncrasies. In 1991, Hargrove was promoted from first-base coach to manager of the Tribe, and Belle was a mercurial second-year player with enough hitting skills to go to the Hall of Fame but with the social skills of a man who wanted to be in the Hall of Shame. But together they led the Indians from a team that lost 105 games in 1991 to a team that won 100 in 1995.
Mike Hargrove and Albert Belle had a lot of success together.
Yet Hargrove told Dave Sheinin of The Washington Post in December 1999 that he was “not unhappy” when Belle left the Indians to go to the White Sox in 1997. As a matter of fact, many thought it was one reason that the Tribe made it to Game 7 of the World Series that year without Belle before losing to the Marlins. Losing Belle did nothing to hurt the Indians in 1997. And once again heading into 2000, Hargrove would need the best out of Belle but could he get No. 88 to perform?
“I never disliked Albert,” Hargrove told the newspaper. “I disliked some of the things he did. And I’m sure there were things I did that he did not like. But before he left [Cleveland], I think we came to trust each other. My job with Albert is to give him every chance to be totally unencumbered mentally going into a game or into a season. The best thing you can do with Albert is try to call him into the office one-on-one maybe three, four, five times a year. I have learned not to talk publicly about anything he does. He believes strongly that things should stay in the clubhouse. I didn’t understand that at one time. But I’ve never known Albert to not be amenable to at least talking about something in a private setting.”
Across the rest of Major League Baseball, it was no secret what was happening with the Orioles.
The ownership wasn’t good, stable or empowering for any human being not named Angelos – and that set the tone for all of the problems. You don’t trade Pat Gillick for Syd Thrift and not feel it. If you were Cal Ripken, Mike Mussina and Brady Anderson – the core of the franchise – there’s no way you couldn’t feel and sense the dysfunction every single day from the minute you’d show up for another spring training in a four-walled dump in Fort Lauderdale, which only existed because the son of the owner of the team liked the social activities in the region in February and March and his overlord father, who liked that it had an airport that landed private jets next door to a stadium that was almost as old as him. The distance between games in South Florida for the players on buses every other day was ridiculous. But the leer jets landed about 200 yards from home plate in Fort Lauderdale.
The sensible fans in the Orioles kingdom were catching on as well. So was the media, which was constantly vilified by Angelos as “fake news” via his fax machine.
When the century turned and the 2000 season began, it was a scathing column by Tim Kurkjian, a former Orioles beat writer at The Sun who graduated to television every night at ESPN and Baseball Tonight but still wrote for ESPN Magazine, who inked a cover story entitled: “Sopran O’s.”
Kurkjian wrote:
The true snapshot of the 1999 Orioles comes only with the negative. Same nightly picture: Albert Belle sits alone at the postgame spread, bothering no one but acknowledging no one, his body language screaming, “Stay away, and no one will get hurt.” His furious eyes focus on his usual meal: four yogurts, placed roughly four inches apart. What is he thinking? Perhaps about what’s most important to him – his four at-bats that night.
It’s a sad team portrait. The Orioles were once baseball’s finest family, a perennial 90-win machine, the essence of stability. They were assembled from within. They were run frugally, yet wisely. People smiled when they passed you in the halls of Memorial Stadium. People were proud to work there.
Mostly, the Orioles were fun. They were Frank Robinson in a ridiculous wig, presiding over the team’s kangaroo court. They were Earl Weaver, all 5’7” of him, cap on backward, stretching on tiptoes to get in the face of an umpire, then using his tiny feet to cover home plate with dirt during one of his signature beefs over a missed call.
They were Rick Dempsey slipping and sliding around the tarp-covered infield in his slapstick rain-delay routine, finishing his inside-the-parker with a great belly flop at home.
Now the Orioles are baseball’s answer to The Sopranos: a dysfunctional family of 78-win underachievers.
In the field of sports writing, this kind of column is called a “take down,” as in take-to-the-mat in a wrestling match. Angelos certainly deserved the criticism – he loved the credit but always disappeared and was unavailable to be quoted when it came time for the blame – and the losses, lies and embarrassments were mounting along with the purged personnel, who had no problem telling the true tales of The Warehouse upon their departures. But the obvious mafia references in the story, which loosely mocked the wildly popular HBO television series, The Sopranos, a dysfunctional family of mean-spirited meddlers, really stung Angelos.
The Orioles play in the best ballpark in America. (Okay, one of the best.) They have a tremendous fan base. They have a rich tradition. And they have seemingly unlimited funds. And yet, over the last five years, Oriole employees, from general managers to press box attendants, have been departing faster than Al Bumbry running out a triple. How can this be?
These days, the Orioles don’t communicate well even with one another. Several times in recent years, minor league teams in the organization lost or gained players without notice from the parent club. Now when something goes wrong, the Orioles brass run and hide. Ray Miller, always accessible as a pitching coach, became sullen and withdrawn as manager. Angelos is constantly angry at the local media. The Orioles seem to operate in response to what columnist Ken Rosenthal writes – or doesn’t write – in The (Baltimore) Sun.
Angelos’ intimidation of the local media had become blatantly absurd and his sending of faxes and memorandums to the press were almost laughable in intent, let alone the tone and personal attacks.
What self-respecting adult behaved in this way publicly and expected public sympathy on this side of the debate?
With the money and power gone to his head, and his inability to communicate to anyone outside of a courtroom without some kind of inherent threat, Angelos withdrew even further from the criticism and
