BALTIMORE — The Baltimore Orioles are on fire.
By win-loss record, as of August 22, they're a top-3 team in baseball. It's been a while since they were this good. But again, the team is the subject of scrutiny off the field.
In comments made to the New York Times, John Angelos, the Orioles' chairman, signaled uncertainty in re-signing the team's top young talent, currently on inexpensive early-career contracts. And he says if they do, it could affect how much you pay.
"…Let's say we sat down and showed you the financials for the Orioles," Angelos explained to the Times. "You will quickly see that when people talk about giving this player $200 million, that player $150 million, we would be so financially underwater that you'd have to raise the prices massively."
"Now, are people going to come and pay that? I don’t know if we’re at the limit," he continued. "I don’t know if we’re in equilibrium elasticity, supply and demand. Maybe we are. But really that’s just one team. What I’m really trying to think about is macro."
In his interview with the newspaper, the leader of the O's brass, in essence, argued that in an unequal system, Baltimore is too small a market to afford to keep their great young players, without a drastic price increase.
“The hardest thing to do in sports is be a small-market team in baseball and be competitive, because everything is stacked against you — everything,” Angelos also said to the paper.
For many O's fans, with such a great season taking place on the diamond, Angelos' words to the Times seemed out of left field.
"I'm really concerned, because I feel like we paid a lot for the tickets we're going to have tonight, and I'm concerned there won't be a lot of people who are going to afford an increase in prices," said Nancy Zeller, an Orioles fan, when asked about a potential increase in prices.
"This is what, three weeks in a row that he's come out with public statements that were kind of negative for the fanbase and the Orioles, and it's not what you want to hear. The team's going good," said Matt Michael, an O's fan from Bel Air.
Team cornerstones Adley Rutschman, Gunnar Henderson, and Felix Bautista, just to name a few, are on those currently-light early-career deals. If they are not re-signed, they will each eventually become free agents, meaning they can sign with any major league club.
"This could be our year - and to keep it going for the next five, eight years, we need to keep some of our talent," pointed out Craig Householder, an O's fan who made the journey from Hagerstown Tuesday night.
It's not the first time this month the attention has gone away from the diamond. It was just a few weeks ago that the club suspended announcer Kevin Brown for sharing unflattering statistics about the team's past performance in Tampa.
Now, the organization faces more scrutiny on social media and at the ballpark.
"That's just going to degrade the team, because I don't think that it'll continue to draw the fan support, if the prices go up, he's going to price people out of being able to come to the ballpark," said Tom Erickson, an Orioles fan attending Tuesday night.
Whether the club actually keeps the young players driving their newfound success is a question that may take years to answer.
WMAR asked the team for a further comment beyond Angelos' statements to the Times and did not hear back.
