DrungoHazewood

Oh be quiet! John Angelos is getting a raw deal, he deserves more money! He has to split his Dad's fortune three ways with his brother and mom and how can anyone be expected to live on that? Life is not fair!

Could the Orioles move? Sure, anything could happen. Is it at all likely? No. The only teams to move since I was a little kid 50 years ago are the Expos and now probably the A's. They have one thing in common: they played in 1960s era multipurpose concrete football bowls, and their cities would not write the owners $1 billion taxpayer checks for a new stadium. Once Montreal made it clear they weren't giving the Expos what they wanted MLB put Jeffrey Loria in charge and let him sabotage the team. The last time Major League Baseball abandoned a stadium the likes of Camden Yards was never. People pine for Ebbets Field and the Polo Grounds, but when the Giants and Dodgers left they were both close to 50 years old, with no parking, no amenities whatsoever, designed for the crowds and transportation of 1900 in a very different world. Before the move Brooklyn was entertaining options for a new park, some of the designs included the first modern domed stadium. The Polo Grounds hosted the first few years of the Mets, but then was torn down because it was obsolete. So if they were to leave OPACY and move a now very competitive Orioles team it would be unprecedented.

The Braves and the Rangers got two new mallparks since we got ours. Why do they get way more taxpayer money than us? It's just not fair! One of these days the Angeloses will finally catch a break.

I guess, sure.

If MLB decided to cast aside 141 years of Baltimore Orioles history and abandon this fanbase it would be quick and seamless transition to just watching soccer year-round. In a detached and abstract way I'd be happy for Gunnar and Rutchman's successes, but MLB would be dead to me.

As always with Angelos it's what did they spend it on? The peak payroll years around 2017 saw the bulk of that go to players in steep decline, and they still have never signed a young star to a substantial extension. Look at the 2000s teams, always at least mid-pack in payroll, always because they'd sign 3, 4, 5 Grade C free agents each offseason. Don't tell me Angelos won't open the pocket book, we just got Kevin Millar!

I have this kind of half-formed vision of the O's leaving, then being replaced by an Atlantic League team, playing York and the SoMD Blue Crabs and Lew Ford's Long Island Ducks. Some celebrity or billionaire gets inspired by Ryan Reynolds and David Beckham and decides to get on the big guy buys a little team bandwagon. Starts signing some major league talent. And the new indy league Orioles and the Atlantic League become this kind of phenomenon, with their own TV show and crowds of 10s of thousands show up.

I'm shocked someone hasn't said that the Britton/Ubaldo thing disqualifies him from all the things forever.

I'm sure you could. I'm in southern Maryland and we could pick up both DC and Baltimore channels with an antenna. But when I was a kid probably 1/4 of the games were on TV? Something like that. In the late 70s and early 80s. I didn't have cable until 1988 or 1989.

There's probably a doctoral thesis in urban planning or sociology in this topic, but I think a combination of the baby boomers hitting full stride in their careers and earnings, the beginnings of urban revitalization, and ever-more exposure in media were the keys to the attendance boom that started somewhere around 1980. Baseball has always been terrified of media expsoure disrupting their old business models. First radio was going to keep everyone away from the park and kill their revenues, then TV, then cable, then HD TV, now streaming. But it's clear in retrospect that each of those things has increased interest in the game which drives up revenues. At least at the Major League level. There's a good argument that media exposure to MLB teams helped kill grassroots minor league baseball.

I'm not at all against that. It's nice to recognize them. Just saying that 99% of fans have no idea who some of these people are.

I also wouldn't discount the degree of difficulty of getting to and from Memorial Stadium. It was about a 20 minute drive north of the harbor in good traffic. On surface streets, no interstates or freeways, no real public transport. It was in a residential area without gameday bars or restaurants, and by the 1970s maybe not the greatest area. Today 395 dumps you out essentially in the OPACY parking lots, and you can take light rail or Uber or whatever, too. Or stay downtown and walk. Unless you lived in the neighborhood you weren't walking to Memorial Stadium.

You mean the family that signed him to be the GM and let him keep the job for the better part of a decade?

It's the Orioles Hall of Fame, the rules are whatever they want the rules to be. But I wouldn't be opposed to putting Buck and Duquette in at the same time. Yes, Duquette mortgaged the future. But what else was he going to do? It appears that his marching orders from Angelos were to not sign any big free agents, keep the payroll in check, don't fix the farm system... and go win a pennant.

That's what wikipedia says.

Just remember that winning a Championship is heavily influenced by luck. On the first day of the playoffs the best team in baseball has more than an 80% chance of going home unhappy. The only way to substantially increase your odds of winning the Series is to be good for a long time and eventually they'll probably pull your name out of the hat.

What does that even mean, "tolerate"? What are they going to do? Yell? Write some tersely worded emails to Stenbrenner, Jr? Applaud lustily when the New York Post puts up some nasty headlines? I'll tell you what they'd do: they'd quit going to the games until they started winning again. Like pretty much every other team in sports except the Cubs.

Buck passed the threshold for getting into the O's Hall of Fame sometime in 2012. The criteria for being in the O's HOF is basically "was he a cool guy who was associated with the team for a while?" Billy Hunter is in the O's Hall for being a shortstop who hit .200 with no power for few years, then coached for a long time. Bob Brown is in for being an executive, and I literally don't even know who he is and I've followed the team closely for 44 years. Same with Lenny Johnston and Julie Wagner. Ray Miller is in for being a good pitching coach and a terrible manager. Rich Dauer is in for his solid-ish 2B on some good teams. Buck is 2nd on the modern team in managerial wins and played a huge role in dragging an Angelos-owned team that made almost no fundamenal changes from the 1998-2010 wilderness to three playoff appearances. He should get a medal.

The '66 Champs drew fewer fans than the 2022 or 2019 Orioles. The '69-71 Orioles went to the Series three straight years, the '72-74 Orioles drew under 1M fans three straight years. Some of this was the era, attendance was lower back then. But the '73 Orioles won 97 games and the division, but averaged 11,835 fans a game (9th in a 12-team league) after the Senators moved to Texas. They had a little more than half the attendance of the 85-77 Tigers. If anyone starts feeling badly for the owners of that time, remember that the minimum player salary appears to have been something like $17,000. And the O's entire payroll for 1973 looks like it was in the neighborhood of $1M or so.

Hey, it's possible that some people here hadn't read the Encyclopedia Britannica entry on the the 1966 Orioles.

Yankee fans still sometimes talk about the Alvaro Espinoza years like they were this epic wandering in the wilderness, bleak, dark era that deeply scarred everyone from Newark to Albany for life. That was a four-year period where they averaged 74 wins, followed by making the playoffs like 19 times in 24 years including winning four Series in five years.

You just have to come to peace with the fact that 10-20% of the population is unhappy pretty much no matter what. And they post as much as any other people. I'm absolutely certain there are Braves fans who are beside themselves with how poorly the organization is run.

Yea, when in doubt I always assume that the people in charge of the team with the best record in the league in 2023 are really stupid and will blindly follow dumb rules of thumb because they just don't understand baseball as well as some anonymous dudes on the internet.

They don't think much of you, either.

The Royals are a younger team than the Orioles.