It's hard to imagine a time to buy the Baltimore Orioles that would offer new owners more growth potential in their pending purchase -- or a more willing fan base to woo. Assuming the sale by the Angelos family is approved by other owners, the hero potential is enormous for David Rubenstein and his group of minority owners.
The team is already loaded with some of the best stars of baseball's youngest generation, from Adley Rutschman to Jackson Holliday. Following years of tanking, the Orioles still have no long-term financial commitments. And Rubenstein & Co. will ride into Camden Yards wholly welcomed by a passionate fan base that has endured despite years of angry frustration with the ownership of Peter Angelos, who bought the franchise for $173 million in 1993, and in more recent years, with Angelos' son John.
The bar of leadership has been so low that all the new owners have to do to distinguish themselves is to sign just one of the organization's core youngsters to a long-term deal. If they manage to lock up Rutschman, Holliday and Gunnar Henderson into the future, the good folks of Charm City might rename roads for the new owners, with Calvert Street giving way to Rubenstein Way.
And there will be plenty of chances to curry favor even before negotiating those sorts of extensions. Though the MLB approval of the Orioles sale is not on the docket for the sport's owners meetings next week, there have been numerous examples in baseball's history when an outgoing ownership has gotten winks and nods from the incoming owners to make deals, even before formal approval is given.
As the San Diego Padres emerged from a fire sale of stars in the early '90s and the team was sold, the new owners embraced a 12-player trade proposal that resulted in stars Ken Caminiti and Steve Finley landing in San Diego; the Padres were in the World Series four years later. The Los Angeles Dodgers spent big as Frank McCourt gave way to the Guggenheim Group and have been World Series contenders ever since, effectively replacing the New York Yankees as baseball's Evil Empire.
That could be the case for Baltimore, too. In rival offices, there is concern that John Angelos will somehow botch the deal that will be worth 10 times what his father paid for the team. But there is an agreement of sale in place, and with a few weeks left to augment a roster and foster immediate success -- there is incredible opportunity for the new owners to add potential difference-makers right now.
The Orioles need starting pitching to complement the exceptional lineup general manager Mike Elias has built, and there are accomplished arms available in free agents Blake Snell and Jordan Montgomery. If Elias knows he'll have more future financial support from ownership, he could be more aggressive in swapping from the team's many tiers of position-player prospects, making possible a deal for someone like Dylan Cease of the Chicago White Sox. If the O's want to make a strong offense even better through the addition of an experienced star, they could target Cody Bellinger or Jorge Soler.
Baltimore won 101 games last season in the AL East despite the fact that the Orioles had only one player working under a multi-year contract, backup catcher James McCann. Excitement grew around the team, and in the first season following its 2023 division championship, it figures that Baltimore's attendance could spike again, even without big spending this winter. Imagine how it would be with some core fans who have stayed away from Camden Yards happily spending money they withheld in the last years of the Angelos ownership, and maybe a new face or two in the dugout.
The Orioles have a chance to become the vibrant franchise Peter Angelos bought in 1993, with the chance for sustained success that he wanted but never achieved. Cal Ripken Jr. became Baltimore's favorite son, playing in 2,632 consecutive games, because of a stubbornness that perhaps only Angelos could match. Angelos tended bar and drove himself through law school with an incredible self-reliance, but that strength that helped him build a wildly successful practice in plaintiff law worked against him as a baseball owner. He was slow to trust, if he trusted at all, even when he landed some of the best people.
The turning point in his ownership seemed to occur in the summer of 1996, as an Orioles team with great expectations struggled for four months. Pat Gillick, regarded as one of the most adept general managers in baseball history, recommended to Angelos to trade away players such as Bobby Bonilla and David Wells -- and Angelos, believing he had an obligation to field a competitive team for the daily Camden Yards sellouts, rejected the idea. Lo and behold, the Orioles rallied, made the playoffs and nearly reached the World Series -- and thereafter, Angelos never really believed the advice of his baseball executives, especially not if they conflicted with his own thinly based baseball instincts. He sometimes required his general managers to wait hours for him at his law firm while he did other business -- including conversations with reporters. "The experts," he would call his executives in conversation, with more than a hint of mockery.
Gillick eventually departed, and other general managers and managers would come and go. From 1998 to 2011, the Orioles failed to reach the postseason, attendance plummeted, and even after a short stretch of revitalization under manager Buck Showalter, the franchise continued to sink in its relevance, increasingly overshadowed in the D.C.-area market by the Washington Nationals, who won the World Series in 2019.
But not anymore. Several successful hits in the MLB draft left the Orioles with an outstanding young core -- they've had the top prospect in baseball for three years running. And with the Nationals early on in a complete rebuild, the Orioles are back to becoming the team of the mid-Atlantic, with superstar level young players, a clean slate in payroll, and a fan base starving for the sort of success and community connection that was a franchise tradition in the years of Brooks Robinson, Frank Robinson, Jim Palmer and Eddie Murray.
If the proposed sale is completed and Rubenstein throws out a first pitch -- if he does it alongside Cal Ripken Jr., who is expected to be part of the incoming ownership group -- Camden Yards will be filled with a cacophony of cheers, and the inherent possibility of many, many more in the years ahead. The Orioles are back, it appears.