Soccer Dad

Peter Angelos Whiffs

In a celebratory article a few weeks ago, "Sold! Angelos scored with ’93 home run", the Baltimore Sun recalls how Peter Angelos bought the Orioles.
I remember well that among sports writers and talk show hosts that Angelos was "cast as a civic white knight" because he would bring local ownership back to the Orioles and get away from the hated Eli Jacobs. Because of my low opinion of the Baltimore area sports opinion mavens, I never liked Angelos and was hoping that Bill DeWitt (now owner of the Cardinals) would prevail.
Given the past eleven years, it's hard to stomach the tone of the article. The Orioles under Angelos haven't exactly set the world on fire. The franchise under Angelos alienated some of its icons - Brooks Robinson and Frank Robinson - though, I believe that Brooks is back in the fold. It chased away Jon Miller and Davey Johnson. And it's gone from being the only game in town to second place in the hearts of Baltimore sports fans. Given the good will Angelos had when he bought the club, it's amazing how totally he's squandered it.
This past off season, he made some moves to regain the good feelings - including signing Tejada and bringing back Joe Angel to the broadcasting booth.
Of course Angelos threatened to undo some of the good with his apparent impatience with Mazilli just a few weeks ago.
But his ownership still rates an overall negative. It also illustrates that teams need good ownership, not necessarily local ownership.
Despite that, Thomas Boswell shows today that even Washington area Orioles fans haven't totally soured on the franchise. They still want their own team.

Instead, Farragut Park was a baseball idyll on Wednesday. Thousands of Washingtonians, in three hours of interviews, were of one nearly unanimous mind. They love the Orioles. They love baseball. They deeply want a team back in Washington. They think the idea of putting a team near Dulles Airport is both a bad joke and a certain disaster. And they know for certain that Angelos is a brazen monopolist who's already maimed the Orioles and now wants to grab something that isn't his: Washington.

If Boswell is correct, Angelos really won't lose significant revenue to a new franchise, because the Washington area fans still love the O's. Of course if he continues to stand in the way of a Washington area team he might really lose some of his fan base to resentment. That would be of those who aren't already turned off by a decade of mismanagement.

Posted by SoccerDad at August 19, 2004 01:30 PM | TrackBack