The Orioles head coach, their announcer, has been suspended due to a misunderstanding, which is unbelievable news for the brave fans.
For the brave fans, the news that the Orioles head coach has been banned because of a misunderstanding is astonishing.
Being a Baltimore Orioles fan on Monday morning was neither dismal nor embarrassing. The youthful and fierce squad had just finished a weekend sweep of the New York Mets, which gave them the best record in the American League at 70-42, three games ahead of the Tampa Bay Rays in second place. All players were hitting, including Gunnar Henderson, a 22-year-old who was destined to be a superstar, and James McCann, a 33-year-old backup catcher. Shintaro Fujinami, a rookie pitcher who was acquired from the awful Oakland A’s in the middle of the season as a reclamation project, was throwing a fastball that could reach 102 mph and pummeling the corners of the strike zone.
Then word leaked out that, in retaliation for comments Kevin Brown had made on the radio prior to a game against the Rays, the team had covertly suspended Brown. The tale remained virtually impossible even as it ascended the verifiability and prestige ladder, taking up information along the way, from a claim made by a local sports blogger on Twitter to a post on Awful Announcing to an article in the Athletic. What Brown stated in an interview with colleague announcer Ben McDonald, apparently infuriating Orioles acting owner John Angelos, was this:
According to [Orioles manager] Brandon Hyde, this has been one of the hardest ballparks to play in. However, the Orioles have a chance to make history today. They have already won two of the first three games of the series, securing at least a split. Additionally, they might defeat Tyler Wells in the series today.
A minute has passed. In June, the Orioles and Rays shared a two-game series. Here at Tropicana Field, they had dropped their previous fifteen series. The last time the Orioles won a series in St. Petersburg was on June 25, 2017, when our now-colleague Brad Brach secured a victory in the series finale. After winning three of the last eighteen tournaments in their combined prior three years, they are already 3–2 this year. Ben, there is a noticeable difference, and the Rays are not a terrible team. The Rays did not suddenly become an apathetic team in the American League East. The Orioles had led this division every day for the past two, but now they are again alone atop the standings.
A casual observer might see that Brown was celebrating the Orioles’ emergence as a dominant team in their division by praising them here. He was praising their current accomplishments by bringing up their past failures only once. (In actuality, he misspoke and unintentionally lowered the Orioles’ record of defeat; as the on-screen graphic indicated, they had only triumphed in three of the team’s twenty-one games played at Tropicana Field.)
Angry colleagues and commentators criticized the Orioles for the decision throughout the game. Not to be confused with the wall-punching former ace pitcher of the same name, Brown is an enthusiastic and pleasant commentator; as Michael Kay of the Yankees pointed out, there was no indication that the former ace pitcher had gone even slightly crazy, despite labeling the Orioles “minor league” and “disgraceful.” Brown’s pregame notes from the team PR department contained the figures she mentioned, along with a premade graphic. It was all a little unreasonable, arbitrary tyranny.
Following the dismal 2018 season, which saw the team’s previous successful iteration—which had led the majors in wins from 2012 through 2016—the team hired Mike Elias, the deputy general manager and scouting director of the Houston Astros, to take over as general manager. According to the account, Elias was there to put the Houston model into practice. In 2011, the Astros recruited general manager Jeff Luhnow to start over after their own collapse, losing 106 games. Instead of trying to make all the necessary changes at once, or even just some of them, Houston lost 107 games in the first year of the new administration, then 111 the following, before starting a slow but steady ascent to win the World Series in 2017 (albeit one that involved their pitchers’ suspiciously sticky baseballs and hitters’ sign-stealing schemes).
Leaving aside the controversies and considering the Astros’ performance, it is questionable if the Houston model is still valuable. All those defeats, over all those non-challenging seasons, remained authentic baseball matches, despite the squad virtually not striving for victory. The general manager was able to take a long break from competing with other clubs to find and sign quality major league players, while the owner was able to earn major league revenue for several years without having to pay for a major league payroll. Sports are hardly the only domain where austerity, devastation, and a lack of accountability are prevalent. Prior to becoming a baseball executive, Luhnow worked as a consultant for McKinsey & Company, as reporter Evan Drellich mentioned in his book about the Astros, Winning Fixes Everything: How Baseball’s Brightest Minds Created Sports’ Biggest Mess.
Despite all the hoopla, the Orioles did not truly adopt the Astros’ baseball philosophy. While the Astros used their extra losing years to give their 22-year-old prospects full-time major-league playing opportunities, the Orioles held their best minor-league players back to prevent them from accruing big-league service time, which would have delayed their eligibility for arbitration and a competitive big-league salary. A month and a half into the season and a year or more after he was obviously ready to compete with big-leaguers, catcher Adley Ruschman, the top pick in the 2019 draft, was the only player on the entire roster under the age of 25, on a team four years into supposedly rebuilding around youth, when he was finally called up to the majors last year at age 24.
Without a doubt, the Orioles reduced expenses. At the time, the Angelos family was fighting a long-running, losing battle against the Washington Nationals over how to split the revenue from the network that the family owned and carried the games of both teams. John and his brother Lou were engaged in a filthy internal struggle for control of the team. As the Orioles approached the end of their 30-year lease on Oriole Park at Camden Yards, some fans, more traumatized or paranoid than others, surmised that their manager, John Angelos, who is married to a country music manager in Nashville, might be stripping the team in order to get investors to help him move it to Tennessee.
Whatever the underlying reasons, for three complete seasons and into a fourth, the only discernible attempt on the part of Orioles management to improve the major-league squad was to reduce payroll to the theoretical minimum. The team didn’t make an offer when players were eligible for arbitration and a salary increase commensurate with their output. Attendance plunged as the few talented holdovers from the pre-Elias teams—including the entire starting outfield of this year’s victorious squad—played on dirt-cheap contracts surrounded by foolish retreads. While the team lost 110 games in 2021, center fielder Cedric Mullins hit 30 home runs and stole 30 bases, which accounted for 15 and 55 percent of the team’s total performance in both categories, respectively.
And now the Orioles are victors once more after all that suffering. The youthful athletes who had been relegated to the minor leagues have proven to be more than capable of participating. If the front office puts in the effort, it can make shrewd, successful pickups. It is inevitable to come to the conclusion that management wasn’t trying before this.
Fans of the Orioles can be pleased with this season and yet be unhappy about the history of defeats that preceded it. Brown was compelled to bring up this past, which he might have explained in far more graphic terms without being unjust. However, the team that was said to not care about losing is now punishing him for bringing up the defeat. It appears that the Orioles wish to claim credit for being masters of the “slash and burn” method of sports management, all the while refuting any evidence of any actual slashing or burning.
Players who intentionally lose games face an eternal ban from the game. When business owners and executives act in this way, they are rewarded for their good intentions, regardless of how flimsy the proof of their goodwill may be. Right now, Mike Elias is a great contender for Executive of the Year in 2023. Additionally, as the general manager of the Orioles, he is currently 91 games below 500. Was it really worth losing so much? Did all that loss really have to happen?
The Orioles unveiled a new response to those queries as of Monday: All that losing? John Angelos just said that his team’s previous past was off limits, instead of defending it. For the sake of the show, the loss never occurred. Nobody can criticize something if you are unable to discuss it.
