Where are the owners?

[Moose Milligan]

1 minute ago, atomic said:

But he does meet with the press and is open with fans.  He fired the GM finally.  I didn't say he was a perfect owner I just said that he met with the press and fans and that one of his teams had won a championship recently.  And they have been good a long time so an accessible owner doesn't mean meddling. 

If you can show me where meeting with the press and being open with the fans directly translates to wins on the field, I'll buy you a 6 pack of your favorite beer.  

[DrungoHazewood]

On 4/7/2019 at 6:25 PM, atomic said:

The team is a disgrace and I hear nothing from them.  No interviews in the papers. Nothing on MASN.  No press conferences. Nothing but silence.

Baltimore?  Maryland?

[theocean]

1 hour ago, atomic said:

What the plan is with the team. Are they going to build a real facility in the Domincan.  Are they really going to spend internationally.  Does the team have a long term plan or is it just about cutting expenses.   They could have been at Fanfest.  I am not sure why they can't take the time to attend events like that.  Why did they do the Gausman deal.  Why didn't they spend on the Cuban players over the summer. 

6500 fans last night.  Do they not care about attendance?  I think being up front with the fans and showing some leadership would go a long way to keep fans interested when the team seems to be just trying to cut costs.  I do attend games. I want to see a decent product on the field.  

I went to the game on Sunday. It was mostly Yankee fans and people with small kids who weren't really watching the game.  Those people aren't going to be there going forward. 

There's clearly a plan with this team - cut on-field expenses as much as possible in order to invest in areas that will help the team have future, long-term success: analytics, international operations, player development. Simultaneously, they are trying to improve the talent level in the organization so that the O's farm system isn't always ranked in the bottom third of teams.

Pretty much anybody will tell you this is what needs to happen. It's going to be painful for a while, but the O's hired the right people to do the job. The game has changed so much in the last few years - and the O's aren't going to be able to compete until they build a solid foundation for 21st Century Baseball.

That being said, I do think the posters here beat up on your unfairly sometimes atomic. I've been reading the posts on here since I was a teenager - and I do think there has always been a tendency for many of the vocal posters here to overvalue prospects and be excited about rebuilds more than a normal baseball enthusiast. They call fans who don't agree with them ignorant and not-as-knowledgable - but prospects fail and rebuilds don't work out all the time. I think Elias is a great hire, but what he's doing could totally not work. We could totally be in store for another fourteen years of losing. And, being honest, Elias and Hyde have done some things already that have really confused me. They aren't infallible. We can criticize them, as we should.

So, I see your posts as completely valid opinions. People were beating up on Roy the other day because he mentioned that he couldn't bring himself to be excited about this team and everybody got on him. That rubbed me the wrong way because he had a valid opinion and the entire point of this site is to hear opinions that are different than your own.

Anyway, I disagree with you believing there isn't a plan - there definitely is and I support it, but I do agree that attendance is concerning - like you mentioned, a minor league hockey team in the middle of Pennsylvania is outdrawing a pro baseball team in the 20th largest metro area in the country. Winning fills stadiums - but as a baseball lover, I don't find that short periods of winning creates baseball fans. It temporarily brings in sports fans who want to see a good team. But, they don't stick around.

I have so many friends who got into the Orioles during their recent winning period and now could care less about baseball. And they still don't even know basic rules after watching a bunch of games.

I'm just worried that a scorched earth rebuild is going to leave behind a generation of potential-Orioles fans and I think there were some pretty easy, low-cost things they could have done this offseason to try and prevent that. It's kind of scary of me to think that if this rebuild takes five more years - at that point, anyone under the age of 35 will have only seen at most five playoff seasons of Oriole baseball - two of which many were probably too young to really remember. That's concerning to the O's ability to stay long-term in Baltimore.

 

[DrungoHazewood]

24 minutes ago, theocean said:

There's clearly a plan with this team - cut on-field expenses as much as possible in order to invest in areas that will help the team have future, long-term success: analytics, international operations, player development. Simultaneously, they are trying to improve the talent level in the organization so that the O's farm system isn't always ranked in

Anyway, I disagree with you believing there isn't a plan - there definitely is and I support it, but I do agree that attendance is concerning - like you mentioned, a minor league hockey team in the middle of Pennsylvania is outdrawing a pro baseball team in the 20th largest metro area in the country. Winning fills stadiums - but as a baseball lover, I don't find that short periods of winning creates baseball fans. It temporarily brings in sports fans who want to see a good team. But, they don't stick around.

I have so many friends who got into the Orioles during their recent winning period and now could care less about baseball. And they still don't even know basic rules after watching a bunch of games.

I'm just worried that a scorched earth rebuild is going to leave behind a generation of potential-Orioles fans and I think there were some pretty easy, low-cost things they could have done this offseason to try and prevent that. It's kind of scary of me to think that if this rebuild takes five more years - at that point, anyone under the age of 35 will have only seen at most five playoff seasons of Oriole baseball - two of which many were probably too young to really remember. That's concerning to the O's ability to stay long-term in Baltimore.

 

In 2012 the Astros, playing in the 4th largest city in the US, were 16th in the NL in attendance, and had multiple games in the low-to-mid teens in attendance.  Then they rebuilt, got good, won the Series, and in 2018 only had a handful of home games under 30,000.

From 2011-2014 the Orioles gained 700,000 in annual attendance, just for having three straight winning seasons.

Expansion teams like the D'backs drew as many as 3 million a year despite not having a home team to root for from the beginning of time through 1997.

[Slappy]

I know I'm just adding to the ridiculousness, but...  how does this OP get 7 pages of replies?!

[Can_of_corn]

1 minute ago, Slappy said:

I know I'm just adding to the ridiculousness, but...  how does this OP get 7 pages of replies?!

Not enough posters have OP on /ignore?