Rosenthal: For Peter Angelos, the Baltimore Orioles were only part of his story

“Are you sitting down?”

Tom Keegan, my colleague at the Baltimore Sun in Nov. 1994, was laughing so hard, he could barely get out the words. Keegan had in his possession a news release from Baltimore Orioles owner Peter Angelos. The release was two pages, double-spaced and full of pointed language.

Though the subject was not named, it was clear who Angelos was talking about.

Me.

I had written a column questioning the Orioles’ hiring of Syd Thrift as farm director, criticizing Joe Foss, the club’s vice chairman of business and finance, for interfering in baseball matters and saying some club officials feared, “Thrift’s train-wreck personality.”

“How can a responsible newspaper allow one of its so-called columnists, who is nothing more than a character assassin and name caller, to write such vitriolic nonsense, hiding behind unnamed ‘club officials’ for his cover …” Angelos wrote.

“The brickbats thrown at (Foss) were absolutely misdirected and offensive in the extreme. Those particular comments represent the caterwauling of an insolent twit whose journalistic fulminations vilify and randomly splatter written bile upon those with whom, in his distorted state of mind, he disagrees.”

Angelos died Saturday at 94 after being ill for several years. Yes, we had our issues from time to time — OK, almost all of the time — after he purchased the Orioles in 1993. But even though Angelos was not always the best owner, the Orioles were only part of his story, and a small part, really.

A statement from the Angelos family: pic.twitter.com/vRtrc4Y6Gq

— Baltimore Orioles (@Orioles) March 23, 2024

The son of Greek immigrants, Angelos was an attorney who was elected to the Baltimore City Council at 29 and ran for mayor on the first citywide biracial ticket at 37. He became a millionaire by taking on asbestos cases and recovering damages for thousands of Maryland workers and their families, beginning a long run as a staunch advocate of labor. Among baseball owners, he was the lone conscientious objector as a member of management during the 1994-95 baseball strike, refusing to sign replacement players or support a salary cap.

But perhaps more than anything, Angelos was a champion of his community, donating millions to the University of Baltimore and other organizations in Maryland. His affection for Baltimore is how he came to purchase in the Orioles in the first place. He did not want the team sold to an out-of-towner.

Bill DeWitt Jr. — yes, the same Bill DeWitt who now owns the Cardinals — was to be that out-of-towner. A St. Louis native who had made his fortune as an investment banker in Cincinnati, DeWitt initially had agreed to buy the Orioles from their owner at the time, Eli Jacobs. But the $145 million purchase fell through when Jacobs filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy, and the team instead was sold in an auction that took place in a sweltering New York courtroom on Aug. 2, 1993.

In a last-minute maneuver, Angelos incorporated DeWitt’s group into his own, leaving art dealer Jeffrey Loria — yes, the same Loria who would later purchase the Marlins — as the other primary bidder. The pace of the auction was furious. The scene in the courtroom was electric. In the end, the Angelos group prevailed at $173 million — at the time, the highest price ever paid for a sports team in the U.S.

Larry Lucchino, who had been an Orioles executive since 1979 and the president and CEO under Jacobs, left the team shortly after the sale was completed, eventually assuming prominent roles with the Padres and Red Sox. Angelos bought out DeWitt in 1995, and came to run the Orioles much as he ran his law practice, in which he was the only partner.

His early years as owner, while among his most successful, were tumultuous. At the time, I was a sports columnist for The Sun. The Orioles, until the Ravens arrived in 1996, were the only major professional sports franchise in Baltimore. I had covered the team previously as a beat writer, so naturally I wrote about them frequently as a columnist. And while fans initially celebrated the Orioles’ return to local ownership for the first time since 1979, much like Mets fans rejoiced over Steve Cohen’s purchase of their club, the honeymoon for many faded quickly.

Angelos was a columnist’s dream, providing endless opportunities for scrutiny as he ran through managers and general managers, even letting go of radio play-by-play man Jon Miller, who, in his words, “didn’t bleed black and orange” — in other words, wasn’t enough of an advocate for the team. Miller’s style later worked just fine with ESPN and the San Francisco Giants, and he won the 2010 Ford Frick Award for his contributions to baseball broadcasting. But for years the mere mention of his departure in print would infuriate Angelos — Miller was just an announcer, not a player, a manager or GM!

On the baseball side, Angelos essentially had little choice but to fire Johnny Oates, the manager he inherited, after Keegan reported he was denied permission to talk with the Athletics’ Tony La Russa, a request that signaled the owner was ready to make a change. Angelos then named Phil Regan over Davey Johnson as Oates’ replacement, a choice that made sense only in a broader context: The Rangers also wanted Regan, and they had just hired Doug Melvin away from the Orioles to be their GM. Melvin instead turned to Oates and the Rangers made the playoffs in three of the next four seasons, while Regan lasted only one season in Baltimore.

At that point, Angelos went back to Johnson and brought in Pat Gillick to replace Roland Hemond as GM. The new management team guided the Orioles to back-to-back playoff appearances in 1996 and ‘97, but peace was not exactly at hand. Angelos undercut Gillick in ‘96 by vetoing his efforts to trade David Wells and Bobby Bonilla before the July 31 deadline. He had a good reason, not wanting to breach the faith of fans who had purchased tickets for August and September. And he proved correct in his decision to keep the team together after the Orioles made their first playoff appearance in 13 years. But Gillick resigned in 1998 at the end of his three-year contract, only to continue his Hall of Fame career with the Mariners and Phillies.

Meanwhile, Johnson’s departure was one of the more bizarre episodes in recent baseball history. Johnson capped his own feud with Angelos by resigning on the day he was named 1997 AL Manager of the Year, and jokingly asked reporters on his conference call announcing the award if they knew of any openings.

In my column on Johnson’s resignation, I wrote, “If Angelos owned Disney World, he’d fire Mickey Mouse. If Angelos owned the Rolling Stones, he’d fire Mick Jagger. If Angelos had owned the Sistine Chapel way back when, he would have fired Michelangelo.” Over the top? Well, my criticism of Angelos in those years often was not subtle or sophisticated. I was fairly young for a columnist, 35 at the time, and sort of like a pitcher who only knew how to throw 95 mph. At least in that particular column, I got the kicker right, saying of the Orioles, “Their decline begins today. Davey Johnson is gone.” Fourteen consecutive losing seasons followed.

Contrary to the opinions of some in Baltimore, this out-of-town columnist (from New York, no less!) took no particular joy out of criticizing the local owner. Baltimore is one of those cities where everyone knows everyone, and I had friends and relatives who were acquainted with Angelos and quite fond of him. But I did the job how I thought it had to be done. My criticism was not personal; I had met Angelos only a few times. I just did not like the way he ran the team.

What I eventually learned was that the dispute was not personal for Angelos, either. It was simply his nature to push back against authority, or those he believed were against him. A boxer in his younger years, he was like a street fighter always looking to land a punch. He viewed those he could not control as adversaries and often as enemies. He wasn’t simply this way with the media, as MLB could attest. Angelos was a handful for the league during the ‘94-‘95 strike, and he extended baseball’s equivalent of the 100 Years War — a dispute over how much the Nationals would receive in rights fees from the regional sports network the teams co-owned — even as he neared death.

He would scream at other Sun reporters about me, and according to a former Sun editor, tried to get the paper to fire me. Gillick’s assistant GM, Kevin Malone, would not talk to me on the field at Camden Yards, fearing Angelos or one of his advisers would spot him. One day, Angelos sarcastically told the Washington Post’s Mark Maske he found me “physically intimidating.” He and I were both short, but he was much thicker, had that boxing background and surely could have broken me in two.

Oh, he was a fighter, all right, massively powerful in both the city and state, frequently getting what he wanted, his tentacles reaching everywhere. He could not stop Major League Baseball from relocating the Expos to Washington, D.C., 35 miles south of Baltimore, in 2005. But he cut a deal to protect the Orioles, triggering the creation of the Mid-Atlantic Sports Network (MASN), in which the Orioles will always be the majority shareholder over the Nationals. As Angelos feared, the Nats cut into the Orioles’ market share. But eventually, he turned the Orioles around.

The recovery began when Angelos named Andy MacPhail president of baseball operations in 2007, then accelerated when he hired Buck Showalter as manager in ‘10 and Dan Duquette as GM in ‘11. The Orioles won the most games in the American League between 2012 and ‘16, reaching the postseason three times. They then entered another rebuilding period, losing 115 games in 2018, 108 in ‘19 and 110 in ‘21 before reviving under their current GM, Mike Elias. The team last season won its first AL East title since 2014 and finished with 101 wins, its highest total since 1979.

Angelos’ death comes at a time when the franchise is in the process of being sold. In January, a group led by a pair of private-equity billionaires, David Rubenstein and Mike Arougheti, agreed to buy the team from the Angelos family for $1.725 billion. The deal, pending approval by Major League Baseball, enabled the group to buy 40 percent initially and the rest following Angelos’ death.

Before agreeing to the sale, Angelos’ son, Orioles chairman and CEO John Angelos, finalized a lease agreement with the state of Maryland to keep the club at Camden Yards for at least 15 years and possibly 30. The long-term arrangement surely would have pleased the family patriarch, who by then was incapacitated but whose original intention in buying the team was to keep it in Baltimore.

He was a larger-than-life figure, a man of tremendous energy and accomplishment. He left an indelible mark on both his city and state. And, I’m here to remind you, he even could write. As the Washington Post’s Tom Boswell opined after Angelos issued his sharply worded news release about me in ‘94, “Wow! The man’s a born columnist.”

Bos had it right. Angelos, never one to back down from a fight, had beaten this insolent twit at his own game.

(Top photo of Peter Angelos: Bo Rader / Sporting News via Getty Images)