explain their unique business and justify why an antitrust exemption should remain status quo for a bunch of billionaires who hustle municipalities for more personal wealth.
Fainaru continued in Part Three by addressing Angelos’ until-then unknown financial struggles with the Orioles via the words of Selig.
“The more he dealt with players, and the longer he was in the game, the more he understood [that] these aren’t dock workers,” said one executive who worked under Angelos during this period and requested anonymity because he still does business with the Orioles.
Angelos began to refer to the players’ association as a “guild,” a term he used to draw comparisons of the players to pampered entertainers, according to a major league official who interacted with him.
At the same time, Selig said he had been having steady conversations with Angelos.
“After the strike got settled (in 1995), I made it a point to . . . talk to him, to explain things to him,” Selig said. “And he, in running the club, began to run into considerable economic difficulties, to put it very bluntly. And the more we would talk, and the more we spent time together, well, it was just a very gradual thing. There was no precipitating event. He just came to understand.”
“Do I have a great deal of respect and affection for Peter Angelos? You bet I do,” Selig said. But he said “all decisions on the future of the game have to be made in the best interests of baseball.”
8
The Washington Post also reported what every Baltimore area fan had been complaining about in regard to abandoning the home city where the team plays in an effort to claim its larger (and perhaps more lucrative) neighbor.
In Baltimore, meantime, the owner was quietly accelerating efforts to turn the Orioles into a regional franchise. During this past offseason, the word “Baltimore” was scrubbed from the home dugout roof at Oriole Park at Camden Yards. Auxiliary scoreboards displaying an in-game linescore — which once represented the Orioles as “BAL” — now designated the home team as “O’S.”
The team’s broadcasters had been told in recent years: “We don’t refer to [the team on the air] as Baltimore. We refer to it as the O’s or the Birds,” said Michael Reghi, the team’s television play-by-play man until last season.
Even the club’s news releases no longer carried a Baltimore dateline and uniformly began, “The Orioles announced today.”
The fans who entered Camden Yards — the thousands who came from the District and Virginia and suburban Maryland to see the Birds — all were hard-pressed to find any mention of the Orioles’ home city.
To those around the team, the message was unmistakable: Angelos was claiming Washington.
And, in trying to claim Washington, he was abandoning any close association with Baltimore.
8Angelos was under siege, his team was swimming in debt, still struggling on the field and his “partners” were clearly conspiring to move the Expos to Washington, D.C.
Three days after The Washington Post series ended, Angelos got gang-tackled on July 1st by Baltimore Mayor Martin O’Malley, who with designs on the statehouse in the next election as the Governor of Maryland, openly defended Washington’s right to have its own baseball team.
“I think there are a lot of diehard Orioles fans in the Washington area,” O’Malley said. “I would hope that they would still want to come to Baltimore and our great stadium, and I’m not opposed to them having a team.”
Angelos immediately called The Sun and fired away at a not-from-Baltimore mayor, whom at various points he supported with Democratic Party financial contributions.
“I think that’s typical of someone who never really does know what he’s talking about and who is nothing more than a small-time politician aspiring to high political offices, which if he was successful to achieve he simply couldn’t execute properly,” Angelos bellowed. “Presumably [O’Malley] wants to say something that he believes is harmful to the ownership group, namely me. But what he doesn’t realize is that his statements are harmful to the Orioles’ franchise, which is a very, very important asset to this community and which generates more than $200 million of economic activity in this city annually.”
Angelos was angry with the mayor of Baltimore, while at the same time refusing to use the word “Baltimore” in conjunction with any association to the team. But with Angelos, conflicting ideals was simply the residue of protecting his bottom line.
Many Baltimore sports fans were now recognizing the other side of what was a massive civic debate for the 14 years when the Colts left Memorial Stadium for Indianapolis. All of the past animosity on the football side for the Washington Redskins and former owner Jack Kent Cooke’s machinations to keep the NFL out of Baltimore came back in full color as Angelos tried to squash D.C. baseball in any way possible.
8In 1995, when the Cleveland Browns and Art Modell quietly were angling to make the Charm City a football town again, the notion of D.C. football didn’t stop the purple train from parking at Camden Yards. O’Malley simply pointed to the Ravens coming to Baltimore while D.C. had an NFL team and said, “Fair is fair.”
On the 4th of July, 2004, the longtime sports editor of The Washington Post, George Solomon, pressed Selig to make a decision in an editorial to follow Fainaru’s reporting from the previous week.
Solomon wrote:
If you move it to Washington or Northern Virginia, your new best friend, Orioles owner Peter Angelos, will cry foul, sue you and me, get a stay to stop the move temporarily from some Baltimore judge and have all his Baltimore toadies announce the end of civilization even though MLB’s rules claim Washington an “open” city.
Or you can move them to one of these lesser burgs, caving into this clever, selfish, stubborn lawyer who wants to retain his broadcast monopoly in the region and hopes to keep the capital area from having the major league team that it had 50 years before Baltimore got its team (with permission from Washington’s owner).
Or you can keep them without portfolio in Montreal, as you’ve done for the past two years, and eliminate them in two years when the current labor agreement expires.
On July 12th at the All Star Game in Houston, Selig firmly said: “I will not do anything that makes Peter Angelos unhappy.”
On Aug. 15, in advance of the Orioles coming to D.C. for an unprecedented summer “Fan Fest,” Angelos agreed to talk to The Washington Post and said, “This isn’t about me. The facts are speaking here, not the emotions or personal interest. There’s no animus directed at Northern Virginia or Washington. It simply won’t work.”
Asked if he was popular enough or influential enough with other MLB owners …
