Make no mistake, the Baltimore Orioles are the most miserable franchise in Major League Baseball. Arguments could be made for perennial losers like the Royals or Expos, or for recent expansion mishaps like the Devil Rays, but no team with half the market, budget or fan base that the Washington/Baltimore area affords could come close to Orioles in terms of utter worthlessness. For the past four years, the Orioles’ payroll has been expanding as quickly as their winning percentage has been shrinking. This year, however, their last grasp at marketability, Cal Ripken, who had actually been hurting his team for several seasons, has retired. Last year, the Orioles ad campaign celebrated “The Kids Coming Out to Play,” when the team’s starting lineup averaged a whopping 35.7 years old. How are they going to even attempt to put fans in the seats this year?
It’s certainly not going to be through community relations. On March 18, Orioles COO Joe Foss told The Washington Post that the Orioles’ upper management strongly opposes baseball’s proposition to relocate the Montreal Expos to D.C. and would do everything in its power to stop the move. Foss claims that the area can only financially support one baseball club.
What Foss and the Orioles management fail to realize, however, is that they have no one to blame but themselves for their current woe. If the Orioles were any good, or if they even showed any promise, perhaps Washington baseball fans wouldn’t be longing for a team of their own. However, since the O’s AL East division championship in 1997, they have been the most horribly mismanaged ballclub in the big leagues. Hanging onto players for too long, signing players of finite talent to infinitely large contracts and trading away any legitimate prospects left the Orioles with an embarrassing 63-98 record last year. No player on the team hit more than 15 homeruns, and the team’s .380 slugging percentage was lower than White Sox shortstop Royce Clayton’s, and Royce Clayton is really, really bad.
Why would anyone in his right mind brave Beltway traffic to go see a baseball team who simply can not hit? And it’s not like there are exciting young players, either. The Orioles combined minor league winning percentage was .445 last year, good for (or should I say bad for) the third worst in baseball. Save for Boog’s Barbecue, a fabulous left-field eatery, or the chance to get cheap tickets to a game the Yankees are playing in, there is absolutely no good reason to head to Camden Yards. Thus, D.C. area baseball fans have grown impatient (rightfully so), and their pleas have caught the ear of commissioner Bud Selig.
The Baltimore Orioles brass can bitch and moan all they want about their financial dependence on D.C.-area fans, but, in truth, there is only one way they can avoid letting the Washingtonians get a team of their own: shutting up those that are begging for one. How could they do that, you ask? Well, they can start by giving up on winning the pennant this year, trading away all of the aging and mediocre players who fill up their roster and payroll for young talent and starting a rebuilding phase. Youth movements, although they won’t win games immediately, tend to at least excite spectators and bring people out to the park.
Most likely, however, the Orioles will continue to field a team of old, talentless losers until it’s too late, and, to tell you the truth, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. A baseball team in D.C. will be far more convenient to the busy Georgetown student, and if it’s the Expos, they can already boast more star power (Vlad Guerrero, Jose Vidro, Javier Vasquez) than any team the Orioles have fielded in four years. Here’s hoping, however, that the Orioles can right themselves so that the Washington/Baltimore area can indeed support two teams, and we can put an end to all this contraction nonsense once and for all.
