DrungoHazewood

And since Zimmerman played 52 games this year it wouldn't have been a huge challenge to find playing time for Mancini. Unless maybe the Nats were also infatuated with Matt Adams and decided to also play him over a much superior Mancini.

This is a hypothetical exercise about which Orioles would have a role on the Nats or Astros. In my hypothetical answer I put the best players on the field. If you choose not to, and instead construct an alternate universe where the Nats play an oft-injured 35-year-old fan favorite with a .730 OPS over a guy nearly a decade younger with an .899, that's fine, too.

My guess has long been that if you walked around OPACY with a mic and asked random people what today's lineup is 30-50% would fail after two or three players and you'd hear some Brady Andersons and Brian Roberts and Nick Markakises. And if they were playing the Rockies or the A's, 75-90% of the people in the stands wouldn't be able to tell you a single relevant fact about anyone on the other team. Die hards like us are a tiny sliver of the fanbase.

While baseball does have some demographic issues, your constant exaggeration and hyperbole hurts your case. Also, your assertions with no data to back it up. I could just as easily state that Strasburg or Rendon are more popular than Ovechkin, and I've presented as many facts to back that up as you have.

History is overrated, and museums are for suckers. When I go to Cooperstown and see 10-year-olds there I give them each $20 for a bus ticket back to somewhere relevant.

Yes, it makes sense. It mirrors my position on expansion teams. They should be bad. They should be the '62 Mets. They shouldn't be like the Vegas hockey team or the D'Backs and be in the championship with zero history. It shouldn't be a thing that fanbases that have put up with the Orioles or Pirates or Mariners for decades and decades get immediately passed by a huge infusion of a rich guy's money into a team that didn't exist a week ago Thursday and whose fans are there for the same reason they went to the new Flavored Oxygen/Juice bar down the block. Although an argument can be made that the Nats have been a thing for 14 years, and Washington first had pro baseball circa 1872.

Four. Four had been rooting for the Browns. The 1953 Browns drew fewer fans than eight of the twelve teams in the 2019 AA Eastern League, had comparable TV and radio coverage to a modern Eastern League team, and of course no internet coverage whatsoever. It's easier to root for a lower-division German soccer team from Baltimore today than it would have been to root for the Browns in the 1940s.

Pink Hatter is a term used to describe people who wear team gear as a trendy fashion accessory, despite the fact they couldn't care less about the team in question. For example, a Red Sox "fan" who wears his green third alternate Sox jersey everywhere but doesn't have the slightest idea who Yaz, Bill Buckner, or Jimmie Foxx are/were.

It might be in the old annual guides that were printed and sold. Things like Who's Who in Baseball, or the Spink, Reach or Spalding Guides, or Sporting News Guidebook or similar. I don't think much of that has made it onto the internet. At home I have a guide like that that from the 1950s that I got from a great-uncle who had boxes of that kind of stuff. I'll have to look. It appears that the Spalding guide stopped after 1939...

In 1944 the IL Orioles made it to the Junior World Series against AA champion Louisville. I've read that the '44 Junior World Series out-drew the real World Series between the Cards and the Browns. That was at least in part because earlier that year Oriole Park burned to the ground and the O's had to finish out the year at Municipal Stadium, which was a large football field on the future site of Memorial Stadium. My dad was born in '46 in rural Virginia and was nominally a Yankee fan. But I don't think they had TV until about the time the Browns moved to Baltimore, and I have no idea if he listened to the radio. So his fandom was that he had some Mickey Mantle baseball cards that were thrown away prior to the big baseball card boom in the 80s. I really think that if you were a baseball fan in Baltimore between 1903 and 1953 there's a good chance you were an Oriole fan more than anything else. Especially in the time before about 1935 when the Orioles were independent, and often dominant. By the late 40s that may have shifted somewhat, with the O's being an affiliated team and a lot more radio and eventually TV coverage of the majors. It's probably true that the late teens and early 1920s Orioles could have been an average team in the majors.

It's not a fixed pie. People act like there are 750,000 baseball fans in the DC/Baltimore area and if the O's don't get them they all go to the Nats. But the truth is that the size of each of the fanbases and their overlap is constantly changing.

MLB might pull in millions for playoff games on Fox or ESPN, but not, say, a regular season game on MASN. Certainly a normal O's game on MASN counts viewers in the thousands or maybe tens of thousands. But I'm guessing a Washington Spirit game on MASN might not have 1000 people watching. But that's just a guess. And most NWSL games are either not televised or are on RSNs like MASN.

Probably like Colts fans in 1993: they were rooting for the whole league to burn in hell.

What are the TV ratings for the NWSL? Higher or lower than for the Sham-Wow infomercial? Men's soccer gets some big games with ratings that approach or even eclipse a lot of MLB/NHL/NBA games. MLS not so much, DC United moved most of their games to an obscure, buggy streaming service. Women's World Cup gets good ratings. But women's pro soccer in the US? It's mostly something you see on MASN or Fox Sports Des Moines when it's the off-hours/offseason and there's no Mountain West college football game to televise. Even the die-hard women soccer players I know don't regularly watch the NWSL.

Sorry, I didn't know the criteria included playing a vastly inferior player for sentimental reasons.

The Nats have little impact on the Orioles ability to compete. In 2014 both the Orioles and the Nats were around 2.5M in attendance. In 1998-2004 the Orioles were awful, and it wasn't the Expos' fault. If anything impacts their ability to compete it's that Baltimore is the 26th-largest market in the country. I think that the Nats' presence is a net gain. The competition forces the Orioles to make positive steps to build a strong franchise and contend. Yes, a few more dollars would be coming from K Street if the Nats were still in Montreal, but it's not that much.

I was talking about the NWSL. atomic said they're going to be bigger than MLB in a matter of weeks.

The DC metro area, not including Baltimore, is the 7th largest in the country. Roughly the same size as Dallas, the Bay Area, Houston, and Boston.

Do you think Baltimore could realistically, consistently support the NHL, NBA or MLS? I really don't know, but there's not much history of any of those sports in Baltimore. At least at a high level. The Bullets left when I was a kid and the NBA wasn't nearly as big as it is today. The Skipjacks left town and weren't replaced. And I'm not aware of much soccer history.

Five sport, but yes. Could you imagine Oakland keeping San Francisco from having a major sports team? Or Providence blocking a team from coming to Boston? Or if the PCL's Hollywood Stars successfully blocked the Dodgers from happening? Baseball's major flaw in the 1950s and 60s was allowing teams to move almost at will, instead of helping to fix problems and better managing expansion. Or just negotiating a way for the PCL to go major. Then we wouldn't have had all the displaced and disgruntled fanbases all over the place, and brand new, history-less teams in a dozen cities. There's no reason Washington was without a team for 30 years besides poor management.

I think the presence of the Nats is a net positive for the O's, because the presence of a well-run team 40 miles down 95 makes it harder to coast on revenue sharing payments. The 2012-2016 Orioles weren't great, but I think part of the reason they competed was that the Angeloses knew they'd get stomped by a good Nats organization if they kept running things like 2007. So they freed up some resources and control.

It was '83. You couldn't go online and order 5,000 custom T-shirts to be delivered in a couple days.

Don't forget September 27, 1897. The O's played their last game of the season against Boston down 0.5 a game in the standings. 25,000 showed up to Union Park (capacity about 10k) to cheer on the Birds. But they lost 19-10, and dreams of an NL four-peat were dashed. Two years later they'd be contracted out of the league.

The Redskins decades of suckitude have allowed me to mainly stop watching the NFL and devote that time to more worthy pursuits. So I guess I should thank Dan Snyder.

There's no reason Washington shouldn't have their own team. Every city should have their own team. Montreal should have one, and Louisville, and Buffalo and Austin. They're just not my team. The Nationals are like the Brewers or the Mariners or something. They're not the Orioles and I have zero emotional attachment to them. I have no resentment of the Nationals fans, just as I didn't resent last year's... wait, that was the Red Sox. I resent them. But besides the Yanks and Sox I don't resent anyone. It's nice that other fans can be happy for a while.