Soccer Dad

2 + 1 from Boswell

At the end of an earlier post I wrote:

BTW, if there's a Baltimore Washington World Series (or even if both teams make the playoffs) I'm sure that Peter Angelos will regret fighting the appearance of a team in Washington.

If I wasn't clear, I meant that I thought with heightened interest in baseball in the Baltimore/Washington region this year, there would be a greater interest in the Orioles.
At the end of a recent column, "For O's, a swing set," Thomas Boswell bring the numbers to support that contention:

Those big crowds pulled the two franchises so close in attendance -- the Nats average 33,328 to the Orioles' 33,198 -- that the remarkable feature was not their similarity but the raw total of both cities combined: 66,526 fans. The Orioles are now 3,000 a game above their '03 pace and only 1,000 a game below '04. In fact, we've reached the point where the only two cities in all of baseball that draw more fans than the combination of Baltimore and Washington are Los Angeles and New York.

I realize that's likely a temporary state of affairs. If one or both teams fade, interest in them will fade too. But I suspect that there's a bit of a multiplier effect here. In other words if the O's were doing better but no other team was in the area I think (I have no proof) that the increased attendance would not be as great. By fighting the return of baseball to DC, Angelos was cutting off his nose to spite his face.
Boswell's other recent Oriole related colum was about team (super)star, Miguel Tejada, "Best in the All-Star Game, Perhaps Best in the Game." Here, Boswell gets a little carried away. Yes, Tejada is about the best player in the AL right now. I don't know if he's better than A-Rod, but probably better than everyone else. But in his career, he won't be better than A-Rod. A-Rod was a productive major leaguer at the age of 19. Barring injuries A-Rod will undoubtedly be the premier player of this era.
I'm not comfortable with Boswell's comarisons between Tejada and Ripken. Not because I believe that Ripken is some sort of deity. It's just that there's more to a player's offensive ability than his home runs and RBI. If he's going to make the comparison, he needs to do a little more work.
But I agree that Tejada if the face of the team. And it's a pretty nice face right now. (Until this year, I was still thinking that this might be Melvin Mora's team. Still it's nice that two of the Orioles' stars come accross as such nice guys.
Finally, I'd just like to point out that Boswell had a really nice profile of the Nationals closer, Chad Cordero. I guess what really sticks out is that he was very happy with his signing bonus and didn't even have an agent when he originally signed with the team. It's a nice story. Still, I hope he has an agent by now. As he improves he will need a professional looking out for his interests.
One of the reasons I didn't want the Nationals, is that I realized that Boswell would primarily write about them instead of the Orioles. It was nice to read a couple of Oriole related articles, even if his first love now is the Nationals.

Posted by SoccerDad at July 14, 2005 06:26 AM | TrackBack