When your loved ones owns the Baltimore Orioles and your staff is having a terrific season with younger stars, when excited followers are coming again to Camden Yards after 5 dismal years, what you need to do is forged doubt on every thing.
You need to say it most likely received’t final.
You need to rain by yourself parade.
That’s the ticket, proper?
Business 101.
You’re John Angelos, the CEO and chairman of a staff your aged and ailing father acquired 30 years in the past — 30 years and 19 shedding seasons in the past — and you have to be having the time of your life.
You ought to be beaming with happiness. The normal supervisor you employed has assembled one of the best staff within the American League — on a budget, too — and the Orioles are the speak of the baseball world. Fan attendance is up by greater than 30%. The state of Maryland has provided to take a position one other $600 million in Camden Yards. Your staff is price one thing like $1.7 billion.
Plus, there’s a Springsteen live performance at Oriole Park on Sept. 9.
You are one fortunate fella.
You ought to be sitting within the stands with the followers, hosing down everybody within the Bird Bath Splash Zone, treating all of the followers in Section 312 to a scorching canine, shopping for Dippin’ Dots for all the children within the bleachers.
Instead, you give an interview to a newspaper in New York — not even in your hometown — to declare that the Orioles most likely received’t be capable of preserve all of the younger gamers the followers have fallen in love with.
To preserve Cedric, Adley and Gunnar within the years forward would imply “dramatically” elevating costs.
Lovely.
That’s like saying, “In Baltimore, we can’t have nice things.”
The Angelos administration of the Baltimore Orioles: Where pleasure goes to die.
I by no means took Business 101 — didn’t imply to recommend I did with the sooner reference — however I can’t think about there’s an instruction that claims: “When you’re enjoying great success and your customers are happy, make sure you hit them with some two-bit fiscal reality so they don’t get too excited.”
Angelos’ killjoy warnings about how Baltimore, as a small market staff, can’t afford to maintain the gamers who might very effectively type a baseball dynasty, are usually not solely ill-timed however tiresome.
First of all, it stays onerous to consider that, within the twentieth largest metropolitan market, with a attain effectively past Baltimore and the encompassing counties, the Orioles can’t “load the bases” with sufficient income to maneuver the staff payroll up 10 or 12 notches, the place it as soon as was.
Where’s the ambition to defy and exceed standard expectations — simply because the staff is doing on the sphere?
If the Orioles make the playoffs, even attain a World Series or two or three, doesn’t that rely for one thing? You can’t inform me that, with a profitable staff over a number of seasons, the Orioles wouldn’t be a secure, worthwhile and sustainable franchise.
But John Angelos needs to inform us the way it can’t be.
Of course, he’s the identical man who promised transparency by providing to point out reporters his staff’s financials — and by no means did.
He raised hopes that Orioles followers would learn pleasing information of a long-term lease settlement at Camden Yards by the All-Star break. That didn’t occur, both, leaving the fan base jittery at a time after we ought to be having fun with, with out these irritating distractions, the success of the staff.
And then there’s all the opposite stuff — his calls for for an increasing number of concessions (and downtown actual property) from the state on the best way to a brand new lease settlement. It’s nice that Angelos thinks huge about additional growing the Camden Yards complicated. But, as an alternative of coming throughout as a deeply dedicated company citizen who needs his metropolis to match his staff’s resurgence, the picture approaches that of a basic grasping staff proprietor on the lookout for extra, an increasing number of.
So that places me — and doubtless a variety of different Marylanders — with Bill Ferguson, the state Senate president, who mentioned, “I think it’s premature to talk about investments around [Oriole Park] when we don’t have a partner that is committing to be there for the next 20 to 30 years.”
One different factor: The Kevin Brown suspension. The Orioles play-by-play man went lacking from broadcasts for a few weeks, reportedly as a result of he recited info in regards to the staff’s awful report towards the Tampa Bay Rays lately. While it was suspected that the feedback acquired below Angelos’ skinny pores and skin — he’s president and chief working officer of the Mid-Atlantic Sports Network — he as an alternative made it sound like some underling had suspended Brown, prompting a overview of the disciplinary course of at MASN. “Nothing like that is going to happen again,” Angelos instructed the New York paper. “It shouldn’t have happened once.”
Maybe he’s doing a self-review.
It’s most likely a good suggestion.
I mentioned this a number of months in the past, throughout the ugly public struggle between Angelos and his brother Lou over management of their father’s belongings: I’ll by no means perceive guys who, born with silver spoons of their mouths, use them to dig themselves right into a gap.
I don’t perceive how one can personal the Baltimore Orioles and never really feel like one of many luckiest guys on the continent — and never need to be an enormous man, imaginative and optimistic, extensively appreciated by followers, rooting to your staff and your metropolis from the proprietor’s field till the tip of time.
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Source: www.bostonherald.com