Baltimore sports for the fans in the community after that fatal Armando Benitez pitch to Tony Fernandez in October 1997. The Jon Miller situation burned in the bellies of many in the fan base and it would be used for years to vilify Angelos because it had nothing to do with winning at all. It had to do with the fan experience. And there’s no doubt that the majority in the Orioles fan base loved spending an evening with Miller, who conducted the radio orchestra and theatre of the Baltimore baseball mind for a generation of fans. Miller was something that was taken away from every game, every night. He was a performer in his own right – the master of ceremonies of Orioles baseball for a generation of young and loyal fans of the franchise. He painted the picture and taught the history of the team. He also took the baton from a legend in Chuck Thompson and weaved his name and style into the narrative seamlessly while honoring the traditions of the club.
But it was the Benitez failed slider to Fernandez in Game 6 of the ALCS that burst the pimple of ideological bile that was forming around the Orioles in the Fall of 1997. The devastation of the Benitez gopher ball was so severe that at one point a decade later it caused Angelos to have amnesia about the incident. “We were one pitch away from the World Series,” he later told The Sun.
Actually, the loss came in Game 6 so the Orioles weren’t even as close as he remembers it.
But that evening in 1997 would be the closest that Angelos would ever come to touching the World Series or the Commissioner’s Trophy.
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RAY MILLER, AFFECTIONATELY KNOWN AS “The Rabbit” by his pitchers over the years, was always one of Peter Angelos’ favorites. He had ties to Earl Weaver and The Oriole Way. And even a novice baseball fan like Angelos knew who Miller was in 1998.
Miller was thought to be a pitching sage and a bit of a local celebrity in his own right. He’d been coaching in the big leagues since 1977 when he broke in with the Orioles as the pitching coach for the legendary staffs ruled by Jim Palmer, Mike Flanagan, Scott McGregor, Dennis Martinez, Steve Stone and Mike Boddicker. His success in Baltimore helped him become the manager of the Minnesota Twins in 1985 but he didn’t make it through two seasons as the skipper in the Twin Cities. He bounced back with the Pittsburgh Pirates as the right hand man for manager Jim Leyland for nine seasons and had a nice playoff run in the Steel City before returning to the Orioles. He was handpicked by Angelos, highly recommended by Flanagan and Palmer, and eventually was forced onto Davey Johnson’s staff in 1997. Angelos demanded that Pat Dobson – a friend of Johnson’s and his choice as pitching coach in his first season – be fired and unilaterally inserted Miller. And that was a year after Flanagan left for the television booth, another handcrafted move directly from Angelos, and now was being returned to the field as the pitching coach again, directly from Angelos’ perch and without any consult from Gillick or Johnson.
The owner of the baseball team was now annually hand-selecting the pitching coach for the Orioles.
And while many modern sports franchises work with a chain of command and a business model that is systemic and “borrowed” via best practices around the league from men who had spent a lifetime in the game, the Orioles were simply being run at the whim of Peter G. Angelos.
At this point, Angelos had a very old-world leaning toward two kinds of trusted employees – family members and older men. It was once said that Angelos didn’t trust anyone who didn’t have gray hair. And Angelos certainly didn’t trust most people.
But that “age appropriate” trust was working in his relationship with Syd Thrift, who had his ear from the day that he was recommended to Joe Foss by local attorney Ron Shapiro. And that’s also why Angelos liked Ray Miller, with his salt and
