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Thirty years on...


Mad Mark

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Why should we discredit these guys with inside knowledge?

Why indeed? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?;)

Did the Colts even draw 400K fans total per season in the 1980s? That was the increase from 1982-1983. But obviously the entire Colts faithful left en masse to Orioles games, no increase in attendance from the D.C. area could suffice. :rolleyes:

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All well and good. But no franchise is unfixable. A new owner hires his own people and they are TOTALLY responsible for the state of the franchise 7 or 8 years later. In previous iterations of this argument, you have tried to blame EBW for the current state of this franchise. And that is just not the case.

I have never said any such thing. Ever. I completely agree that PA is 100% responsible for the current mess. I have *never* said anything else.

The only thing I disagree with is the oft-repeated BS about how "PA ruined a once-proud franchise". He didn't. EBW did that. But EBW has nothing to do with the current mess. The current mess is entirely PA's fault, and I've never said anything other than that.

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OK, so please explain to me how attendance was constant from Hoffberger's last year through '82, and then all-the-sudden it zoomed way up in '83. Explain that. How did EBW suddenly flip a switch and do that? There was virtually zero change in attendance for his first 3 years, and then he created a huge upswing all-the-sudden in '83. How did he do that? And why did he wait 3 years before he flipped that switch?

You're telling me that he did it all-the-sudden after 3 years, and it was just a *coincidence* that it happened immediately after the Colts failed to win even a single game and were the worst team in the NFL. Right. So, if that's a coincidence, then just explain how EBW flipped the switch. I just want an explanation that's not loony, that's all.

EBW bought the team in August 1979.

1979 was a good season. Orioles Magic was born. Bill Hagy (and section 34) were "in". The attendance figure that year was 1.6 million which was by far more (> 400K) than any other attendance figure while Hoffberger owned the team.

1980 saw an increase. 1981 was a strike year. Maybe 1982 was down because of fan apathy over the strike? Maybe it took his marketing strategy a few years to bear fruit? That would be two reasonable explanations.

I don't know. All I know is that others that were much closer to the team were giving him credit for bring the DC crowds into Memorial.

The team averaged roughly 2 mill per season under EBW ownership. Under Hoffberger it was closer to 1 mill.

I have no reason to disagree with Cashen, Lucchino, Hamper, and Eisenbergs own opinions in the book about EBW.

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That's what the lottery paid for.

But it boils down to the same thing. Lots of states have lotteries. The money from the lottery is just a way to get around raising taxes, but it still boils down to the same thing. Lottery money gets used lots of places to pay for schools and such. If lottery money wasn't going to pay for stadiums, then it could get spent on other things that taxes are spent on.

Don't get me wrong: I'm not against the fact that the gov't paid for OPACY. To me, that's about the same as building roads or rapid transit: it's for the Greater Good, even if lots of people don't make use of them. I'm not dissing the idea of using lotteries for that. That's not the point. The point is that the whole reason they built the stadium is because EBW was threatening to move the team if they didn't give him a stadium for free, that's all. It's not like he was some big civic-minded hero. He figured out how to get a free stadium at the expense of somebody else, that's all. It's what modern ego-driven owners do. Nothing special about him in that regard. Just like when he told the GM he didn't want to do what's best for the franchise, he wanted to meddle. Same thing.

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The team averaged roughly 2 mill per season under EBW ownership. Under Hoffberger it was closer to 1 mill.

I agree that Baltimore did not support the O's that well during the great years under Hoffberger. Attendance shot up right at the end of Hoffberger's era. That had nothing to do with EBW because it was before EBW. It had to do with baseball attendance in general. And it also had to do with Baltimore sports fans shifting their passion from the Colts to the O's. You gotta remember that Irsay screwed things up for a *long* time before he stole the team and left. (For example, it was back in 72?/73? when he traded Johnny Unitas to the Chargers.) Irsay's effect did not begin when he moved the Colts to Indy.

Whatever the upward trend in attendance was about, it was before EBW got the team. Over the first 3 years of EBW ownership, it stayed about the same. Not exactly the same, but about the same. This same phenomena had always happened. For most teams, including the O's, attendance went up and down some from year to year, and sometimes for no apparent reason. The point was that attendance was about the same from the end of Hoffberger through the 1st three years of EBW. Then, it changed very dramatically all-the-sudden in '83. These are just facts. There's no arguing about them. I just don't see how these facts add-up with the "EBW fixed attendance" story. It just doesn't add up in a way that explains what actually happened.

I have no reason to disagree with Cashen, Lucchino, Hamper, and Eisenbergs own opinions in the book about EBW.

I have no doubt that EBW did things to help with the team's visibility in DC. Of course he did: he was a DC guy, he was very connected there, of course he would do that. That's fine, nothing against it. But that story does not explain the facts. Eisenberg can write whatever love-fest book he wants, but that does not explain the facts.

To explain the facts, you need some way to explain why attendance was at one fairly stable plateau that spanned from Hoffberger through the first 3 years of EBW, and then very suddenly and very abruptly jumped to a new higher plateau in '83 where it stayed for several years. It was not a gradual improvement thing, it was like somebody flipped a switch. Just because Frank Cashen said something, that doesn't mean that EBW came up the BW-Parkway with some Congressmen in the Spring of '83, and somehow metro-DC suddenly came tagging along like they were following the Pied Piper and, boom, attendance suddenly got fixed.

The EBW-helping-attendance story just does not explain that. It just doesn't add up with the facts. The Colts thing does. The Colts thing is also consistent with eyewitness reports from the time it actually happened. If there is some alternate story that explains how the eyewitness reports were wrong, and how it was really because EBW suddenly flipped a switch in '83, I am happy to believe such a story provided that it actually makes some kind of plausible sense. It's just that nobody has provided any such explanation yet.

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I have never said any such thing. Ever. I completely agree that PA is 100% responsible for the current mess. I have *never* said anything else.

The only thing I disagree with is the oft-repeated BS about how "PA ruined a once-proud franchise". He didn't. EBW did that. But EBW has nothing to do with the current mess. The current mess is entirely PA's fault, and I've never said anything other than that.

EBW may have made some bad decisions that had some bad long-term consequences for the team, but it was a lot more understandable than what PA has done. Under EBW's ownership, the O's won a World Series and another pennant, won 100 games another time, and had what, 6 winning seasons in a row? So in that scenario, it is at least somewhat understandable if the guy thought (mistakenly) that he knew what he was doing, and made some decisions that were bad in the longer run. PA, meanwhile has been making bad decisions and interfering with management year after year, even in the face of a decade of losing.

Name me some specific decisions made by EBW that ruined the Orioles. We could give you a list of specific things Angelos has done that is as long as your arm.

So I'm not here to defend EBW, but while he might arguably be in the bottom third of all owners, PA is in the bottom 5%.

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EBW may have made some bad decisions that had some bad long-term consequences for the team, but it was a lot more understandable than what PA has done. Under EBW's ownership, the O's won a World Series and another pennant, won 100 games another time, and had what, 6 winning seasons in a row? So in that scenario, it is at least somewhat understandable if the guy thought (mistakenly) that he knew what he was doing, and made some decisions that were bad in the longer run. PA, meanwhile has been making bad decisions and interfering with management year after year, even in the face of a decade of losing.

Name me some specific decisions made by EBW that ruined the Orioles. We could give you a list of specific things Angelos has done that is as long as your arm.

I think the right way to look at this is in terms of phases. The rules of doing it right have been changing since AM's Daddy was building the killer franchise. There's been a handful of phases, and we gotta talk about those phases for it to make sense. But that would be a long post and everybody gets all snippy when I make long posts, so I won't. I'll just stick to the conclusion of it:

EBW was in charge for 8 years. The teams won early on, but those teams were not his fault. He did not build the '83 team. He did nearly-nothing to the good for the franchise, baseball-wise, and he did important things to the bad. By the time he was done being owner, the entire organization sucked. To me, that's a grade of F. Doesn't matter how many headlines he did or didn't get about being a crappy owner, it's still a big fat F for the actual organization. Whether you wanna give him points for getting a new stadium out of the gov't, that's up to you.

PA's overall tenure has been more deplorable. But if we go by his overall tenure, we can't really say yet because it's not over. AM just might save his bacon. All we know is what it's been like so far, so we're looking at a partial story. The partial story is incredibly bad. He's had the time and the money and the opportunity to fix the very things that EBW broke. But he didn't. That's bad, and there's no excuse for it. That's also a grade of F, and it's a much larger F because of the much longer tenure.

If we go by comparable tenure, then we might compare EBW's 8 years with PA's first 8 years. That would be '94-2002. The first half of that, things got better until the team went wire-to-wire in '97. Then the house of cards came apart, and the next 4 years were downhill. So, it was a peak, then a valley. He got 2 post-seasons in there, and the 2nd time had the best team in the league. If the best teams won, that WS should have been the O's vs the Braves. So, he did something that was very successful for a bit. Not only did he have 2 post-seasons to EBW's 1, but PA's 2 post-seasons were actually his fault. Whatever credit you get for post-seasons, PA earned his while EBW did not earn his. When PA's success binge came apart, he just got stuck in a 4th-place funk. So, the 1st 4 years were good, and the second 4 years were bad. For those 8 years in total, is PA's grade any worse than EBW's grade of F? I'd say it's less-bad. Neither guy fixed anything, but PA got more success out of not-fixing it, and he actually did it himself, whereas EBW's only success was just something he just inherited from Hoffberger.

The main thing wrong with PA is that his 4th-place funk has lasted insanely long. I could understand it if he had a short-period of 4th-place funk after his Steinbrenner dream fell apart. I could see how it could take a little bit to get his head around a different approach. But he didn't. That's the huge problem. You can sorta understand the 1st 8-years. You might not agree with it, but you can at least understand it. It's the years since his first 8-years that have been completely inexcusable. There's no way to understand it, except to call him a dense knucklehead. He's been Steinbrenner minus the successful parts.

There's no way to compare his inexcusable record after those 1st 8-years to EBW because EBW didn't have those years to compare to. All he had was 8. We have no idea how bad he might have been. Maybe EBW would have woken up and done something right for once, we just don't know. We don't completely know that about PA either, just yet. So far, it's been beyond dismal. Just like EBW, the only bright spots you can find are on the non-baseball side of things. Whether AM can save his bacon on the baseball-side of things remains to be seen.

So I'm not here to defend EBW, but while he might arguably be in the bottom third of all owners, PA is in the bottom 5%.

I think EBW is lower than that, but your basic point is right if we're comparing EBW's 8 years to all of PA's years-to-date. I think you get a different answer if you compare 8-years to 8-years. We may or may not get a different answer by the time PA is done.

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To explain the facts, you need some way to explain why attendance was at one fairly stable plateau that spanned from Hoffberger through the first 3 years of EBW, and then very suddenly and very abruptly jumped to a new higher plateau in '83 where it stayed for several years. It was not a gradual improvement thing, it was like somebody flipped a switch. Just because Frank Cashen said something, that doesn't mean that EBW came up the BW-Parkway with some Congressmen in the Spring of '83, and somehow metro-DC suddenly came tagging along like they were following the Pied Piper and, boom, attendance suddenly got fixed.

The EBW-helping-attendance story just does not explain that. It just doesn't add up with the facts. The Colts thing does. The Colts thing is also consistent with eyewitness reports from the time it actually happened. If there is some alternate story that explains how the eyewitness reports were wrong, and how it was really because EBW suddenly flipped a switch in '83, I am happy to believe such a story provided that it actually makes some kind of plausible sense. It's just that nobody has provided any such explanation yet.

Sheer numbers alone tell you that the jump in attendance was much more than fans just switching from football to baseball. If there was this light switch that was flipped on, it was publicity for the Orioles in the D.C. area which hadn't been there before. That explanation has been given to you, over and over but you choose to ignore it.
EBW bought the team in August 1979.

1979 was a good season. Orioles Magic was born. Bill Hagy (and section 34) were "in". The attendance figure that year was 1.6 million which was by far more (> 400K) than any other attendance figure while Hoffberger owned the team.

1980 saw an increase. 1981 was a strike year. Maybe 1982 was down because of fan apathy over the strike? Maybe it took his marketing strategy a few years to bear fruit? That would be two reasonable explanations.

I agree that this had some impact on 1982. The 1981`season lost close to 40% of its games and was split into two seasons.
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Sheer numbers alone tell you that the jump in attendance was much more than fans just switching from football to baseball. If there was this light switch that was flipped on, it was publicity for the Orioles in the D.C. area which hadn't been there before. That explanation has been given to you, over and over but you choose to ignore it.I agree that this had some impact on 1982. The 1981`season lost close to 40% of its games and was split into two seasons.

There were a lot of contributing factors to the attendance jump. Yes, the decline of the Colts was part of it. And marketing to Washington (not just by EBW) was part of it. In 1979 they added a Washington station to the radio network for the first time (at the start of the season, so Hoffberger was still owner). Channel 20 in DC began picking up games around that time too. The first attempt at a regional sports network, something called Super TV, was started in 1981 I think. It was an over the air broadcast (because only a small % of people had cable back then) but you had to buy a descrambler to watch the games. Under EBW, the Orioles opened a fan store in DC.

So those factors (Colts decline and departure, EBW, marketing to Washington) DID contribute to the jump in attendance....but they don't tell the whole story. The aggressive marketing of the team by WFBR radio in 1979, where all the deejays during the day would play Oriole highlights set to music, was far more than the previous flagship station (WBAL) had done. In addition, attendance was shooting up all around baseball. Free agency was just beginning and salary costs were rising, and the owners had to market better, and they did. The saturation coverage of the O's by WFBR, and the marketing in Washington, were two things that were done here. Other thinsgs were being done in other cities. You can't just look at the surge inthe Orioles' attendance without relating it to the growth of the game overall during the same time period.

I'm not even sure what you guys (Tony and Shack) are arguing about? Is one of you trying to say EBW marketing to Washington had no effect, while the other is trying to say the it is the sole cause for attendance going up? As usual, the world isn't black and white, the truth is usually found in shades of gray. It had some effect, but certainly there were many other factors.

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Name me some specific decisions made by EBW that ruined the Orioles. We could give you a list of specific things Angelos has done that is as long as your arm.

He basically did something very similar to what the Orioles did in the early 2000s. The team had a great nucleus from 1979-1983, but that nucleus got old. In 1983 or shortly thereafter, Bumbry, SIngleton, Lowenstein, Roenicke, Belanger, Dauer, Dempsey, McGregor, Palmer, Tippy, Stanhouse, Stoddard, Flanagan, Stewart, Stone -- ALL either retired or started significant age-related decline. DeCinces would have had more left but he had been traded. Dennis Martinez was battling alcoholism. So our nucleus was down to Eddie, Cal, and Bod****er, essentially. Yeah, a 20 game winner and 2 HoFers but still not enough to build around. Storm Davis didn't quite live up to his promise. Our farm system was producing nothing (Ken Dixon, Ken Gearhart, Larry Sheets, Mike Young, Eric Bell, etc).

So EBW went out and signed veteran free agents. Lacy, Lynn, Aase, Juan Beniquez. Some still had some productivity left but they were certainly on the downside of the age curve. Just like in the 2000s, the attempt to patch up a team that had too small a nucleus of good talent and not enough coming through the pipeline, failed miserably.

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I'm not even sure what you guys (Tony and Shack) are arguing about? Is one of you trying to say EBW marketing to Washington had no effect, while the other is trying to say the it is the sole cause for attendance going up? As usual, the world isn't black and white, the truth is usually found in shades of gray. It had some effect, but certainly there were many other factors.

I'm saying the D.C. angle is much larger than the Colts one based on the numbers.
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I'm not even sure what you guys (Tony and Shack) are arguing about? Is one of you trying to say EBW marketing to Washington had no effect, while the other is trying to say the it is the sole cause for attendance going up?

I don't blame you, I'm not sure either. Everybody agrees that PA has been a terrible owner. The only disagreement that I'm aware of is that when people say "PA destroyed a once proud franchise", they're saying something that's just not true. There's plenty of bad stuff to say about PA, we don't need to make up additional bad stuff that's phony. What happens is that I just point out that EBW is the guy who put the franchise in the toilet, that's all. Next thing you know, we have a big argument about how EBW wasn't such a bad guy, and people start giving the man credit for fixing attendance (when it's not that simple) and for creating OPACY (when it's not that simple). That's exactly like saying that PA is a good guy because of MASN and the Gnats deal.

I have no doubt that EBW continued Hoffberger's effort to market the team in DC. I just don't believe the sudden and dramatic upswing in attendance in '83 is primarily due to EBW, just like I don't think the '83 ring is due to him either. AFAIK, that's what the disagreement is about: Everybody says that PA sucks as an owner, and everybody is right about that. The problem comes up when some of us point out that EBW was the very first O's owner to suck and do real damage to the organization. For reasons I cannot fathom, some people wanna make excuses for EBW left and right. But, nomatter how you cut it, when he bought the franchise it was the best one in baseball, and when he was done with it, that great organization had been completely destroyed. Every owner who had 8 years has more good stuff to show for those first 8 years than EBW. That includes PA, which tells you how bad EBW really was. The real test is whether you leave something better than you found it. EBW sure didn't, he left it way, way worse than he found it. That says nothing about how bad PA had been, it's just an Actual Fact all by itself.

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Logically, by definition, it's not possible to get any lower than "total destruction." Having said that, IMO, the reputation of the franchise today is much lower than it was in the 1980s. Therefore, if it was "totally destroyed" back then, what possible absolute term could apply to the team in the 2000s?

The mantra that the franchise was completely destroyed is nonsensical hyperbole. It wasn't destroyed then nor has it been destroyed today. That's my big objection to this nonsense.

Williams didn't meddle from practically the get-go, like Angelos did. Williams kept what he inherited from Hoffberger, Weaver, and unfortunately, Hoffberger's GM, Peters.

The Orioles had a winning record in the strike-shortened 1994 season and still Angelos saw fit to replace Johnny Oates with...Phil Regan, and that sure turned out well. :rolleyes: Angelos got smart and hired Davey Johnson, only to drive him out of town.

Williams did not direct who his manager hired as his coaching staff, unlike Angelos.

Williams did not go into the draft room at the last minute and tell his staff who to draft, unlike Angelos.

Williams would have had the same number of postseason appearances as Angelos had the wild card been in effect in his time.

What has Angelos done for team attendance? Prior to Angelos, in 1993, the total at Camden Yards was 3,644,965. The absolute highest attendance got under Angelos was 3,711,132 - a whopping 1.8% increase over 1993. Attendance then went on a steady downhill slope from 1998-2003, to rebound in 2004 and 2005, only to fall off the cliff again to the worst figures in the history of Camden Yards the last two years. A total of 672,996 more fans attended in 2006-07 combined than the park drew in 1993 alone. 2007 attendance was 40.6% lower than in 1993. OPACY was the goose with the golden eggs until Angelos cooked it.

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The real test is whether you leave something better than you found it. EBW sure didn't, he left it way, way worse than he found it. That says nothing about how bad PA had been, it's just an Actual Fact all by itself.

Tony, the quote above is my bottom line. PA is one topic, EBW is another.

If you wanna invent lame excuses for EBW by bringing up what PA did after EBW was dead, you can do that... as you have been for several pages now. You can spin it any way you want to. None of your excuses and spin change the basic fact: EBW is the guy who bought the best franchise in all of baseball, and turned it into a bad franchise with a bad organization. PA had nothing to do with that. EBW did it years before PA was involved in any way.

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