My honorary hometown baseball team, the Baltimore Orioles, have just announced that they’re changing their road jerseys to read “Baltimore” on the front for the first time since 1972. The jerseys previously read “Orioles,” since the franchise considered parts of southern Pennsylvania, Delaware, Washington, D.C., and Virginia their hometown market in addition to Baltimore and its Maryland environs. I’m pretty sure it’s no coincidence that the last time they dropped the “Baltimore” name from the jersey was in 1972, immediately after the second and final Washington Senators team relocated to Texas following the 1971 season. Now that the Washington Nationals are on the stage, I guess that competing for DC metro area fans is no longer as important as it once was to Orioles owner Peter Angelos.
There’s a bit of a history between Baltimore and Washington regarding the baseball team issue. Traditionally both cities have been considered to be part of the same baseball market, and since 1972 the Orioles had zealously guarded their exclusive rights to that market. This naturally annoyed many DC residents and old-timer Senators fans, who remembered that the owners of the original Washington Senators waived their exclusive rights to the region to allow the St. Louis Browns to relocate to Baltimore in 1954. During the various MLB expansions during the 1990s Washington was always at the top of the list of cities to receive a new team, and it was always scuttled by the Orioles office.
When it became clear that the Montreal Expos weren’t going to be able to stay in Montreal, Angelos announced his opposition to a proposed move to DC. MLB commissioner Bud Selig obligingly did everything in his power to prevent the move. First, there was lots of talk about how cruelly inappropriate it was to “steal” a team away from its hometown (not, of course, that this stopped St. Louis from losing the Browns, or Washington from losing two teams in ten years), even when it was clear that the hometown wasn’t actually interested enough to buy tickets. Then, there was talk about moving the Expos to Puerto Rico: during the teams last two seasons as the Expos, in fact, they were treated as a dual hometown team, playing half of their home games in Montreal at Olympic Stadium, and the other half in San Juan at Hiram Bithorn Stadium. It was clear, though, that San Juan was not as lucrative a market as Washington, and so the next idea was contraction: dissolve the Expos outright, along with one other team (either the Minnesota Twins or the Tampa Bay Devil Rays) thrown in so as not to be too blatantly obvious. Never mind that this new idea was in open contradiction of the League’s earlier horror at depriving a city of its hometown team, mind you. Anything to keep the Orioles front office happy, I guess.
Eventually, though, they ran out of excuses. The League gave up and bought off Angelos, and the Expos moved to Washington as the Nationals. The Orioles and the Nationals even have a joint broadcasting venture, the Mid-Atlantic Sports Network (MASN), which broadcasts all of the games of both the Orioles and the Nationals. MASN is, of course, majority-owned by the Orioles, and the network has a slight, but noticeable, bias towards the Baltimore team.
So I hope that this decision to redesign the away jerseys to emphasize the Orioles’ status as the home team of Baltimore is part of a broader effort to get over their sour grapes regarding the fact that they’re not the only player in town any more. New York gets along just fine with two teams, after all, and the combined Baltimore-Washington market is plenty big enough for both the Nats and the O’s. My father is still a proud season ticket holder for the Orioles, despite have fond memories of the old Senators teams from his childhood. I don’t hate the Orioles by any means, but I wish there was more of a “live and let live” attitude there.
