Baltimore Orioles: John Angelos should learn that silence is golden

It’s hard to know how to react when a sports owner opens his mouth, because what comes out is almost always something you wish they could unsay. So it is with John Angelos, who technically doesn’t own the Baltimore Orioles but is somewhat the public face of the franchise because his father, Peter Angelos, is 94 years old.  Angelos said in a recent interview with The New York Times that there was no way the Orioles would be able to sign any of their young stars to long-term deals without “massively” raising ticket prices.

You could parse this statement in a number of ways, but, mostly, you just wonder why he bothered to rile up Baltimore Orioles fans.

Clearly, the Baltimore Orioles have a bunch of players who will eventually make a bunch of money, and it’s entirely possible that some or all of them will leave town when they have the opportunity.  But Adley Rutschmann won’t be a free agent until 2028, and Gunnar Henderson until 2029.  Worst case scenario is that the Orioles have five more seasons where they can build a roster around those two cornerstones, not to mention the other prospects that are on the roster or in the pipeline.

Rather than be a prophet of gloom why wouldn’t Angelos celebrate what his team is achieving?

Besides, much of Angelos’ rant is based on the Orioles being a “small-market” team. It’s true that Baltimore lost a good bit of potential revenue when they had to split the market with the Washington Nationals, but they also blew off a decent amount of revenue by souring the goodwill of their fans with a four-year tank job. With the Nationals in the midst of their own rebuild, it would be farfetched to think that the Orioles’ attendance wouldn’t rebound, particularly if they maintain the on-field momentum that has brought them to the top of the AL East. After all, Camden Yards is still as good a place to watch baseball as there is, and seven million people live within 50 miles of Baltimore, per StatsAmerica.

If that were to happen, maybe there would be enough revenue to sign Rutschman and Henderson to long-term deals. If not, maybe they would sign medium-term deals, say five or six years, that would tie them to the Orioles through the end of this decade. Or maybe the deep farm system generates replacements, enabling the Orioles to trade their stars for cheaper alternatives and remain in contention. It has worked for Tampa Bay, an even smaller market.

But Angelos just decided to be a buzzkill because he implied that raising ticket prices would solve the problem, which just shows an ignorance of how business works. If the Orioles could raise ticket prices without hurting attendance, you can bet they would have already done so. There’s no guarantee that raising ticket prices would even result in more revenue. One thing for certain is that threatening a price increase years in advance kills fan goodwill without getting anything in return.

I’m not telling John Angelos that he should do whatever it takes to keep his team intact. Just ignore the fact that his father’s investment of $173 million in 1993 is reportedly now worth 10 times as much, an annual return of 8.3%. Angelos is correct that it isn’t sustainable to operate in the red year after year (although his argument would carry more weight if he actually made his books public so we would know that a team with revenues estimated at $251 million (according to Forbes) and a player payroll of $44 million in 2022 (according to Spotrac) is just scraping by). Again, he’s under no obligation to do so, but we’re under no obligation to believe him, either.