HEY! HO!
It wouldn’t be an off-season in Baltimore without massive amounts of fan unrest. This year, it seems they are trying to outdo themselves. After falling one game short of the ALCS in 2012, the Orioles had a quiet off-season, much to the chagrin of Orioles fans everywhere. They had no inclination to take the next steps necessary to take the 2012 team to the next level. With all of the luck that came in 2012, it wasn’t hard to see the 2013 regression coming.After falling back to a tie for 3rd place in the division in 2013, it seemed it was time for the Orioles to start progress towards either supplementing a core that is running out of years of team control or to moving pieces to get back younger talent to help down the road. Unsurprisingly, the Orioles have elected to do neither.
However, what you may not have seen coming was to fail the off-season to a degree that embarrasses the franchise throughout the baseball community and returns the fans to late 90s and early 2000s morale. In a way fan morale may never have been lower. A taste of a couple of winning seasons has created a thirst among fans. In the 2000s, Orioles fans knew the team would lose, and knew the team was “rebuilding”. There were no expectations. Now, they expect to win and want to win more than ever before and the organization appears to be set on spitting in their faces.
The Grant Balfour situation is still ongoing and new information is being released every day that further paints the Orioles organization in poorer and poorer light. Peter Gammons wrote a piece today which includes a quote from former Orioles GM Frank Wren in which Wren says that Angelos uses physicals to stop deals he doesn’t like. Angelos meddling has been rumored about for a long long time and there’s good reason for people to think he was involved with this, he probably was. All signs point to it, and whispers from his former employees and agents who have dealt with him are telling that same story. Peter Angelos isn’t going anywhere in the immediate future and the club clearly does not care about winning with him at the helm. There’s a reason our GM was out of baseball for 10 years and the job was passed on by several other candidates first. So, what do we do as fans? There’s not much we can do really. You can stop going to games but he’ll still get his TV money. You can stop watching the games but people still watch the Nationals. We’re fucked. We know it, and Angelos knows it.
All I can advocate is to laugh it up, and make fun of them…possibly start a blog to do it on. It’s kind of fun.
Fuck you, Peter Angelos.
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