Why Colin Cowherd is Right About Orioles Fans
There’s two things that I’ve learned about Colin Cowherd in listening to his show for the past couple of months. He’s not going to give you an opinion based on emotion, and he’s likely to say it in a way that will cause you to react to him emotionally.
That’s what makes him the king of sports talk radio.
That said, I think he’s kind of right about Baltimore Orioles fans’ and their treatment of Mark Teixeira in yesterday’s Opening Day mauling of the New York Yankees. He called out the fans in essence for booing a guy who made a great decision in not coming to a morose franchise ran by a largely inept owner for a streak of 12 years.
You can’t knock him for speaking the truth on that. We are booing a guy who made a decision we all would make in similar fashion. We all would take the money, the Manhattan penthouse and the chance to play for one of the greatest franchises in all of professional sports. We likely wouldn’t make overtures to our hometown team and raise expectations like Teixeira did and continues to do, but we’d all take the money. We’d be stupid not to.
Boo him for misleading you. Boo him for making public a false desire to be home and rebuild a team. But don’t boo him for being as sensible as you are.
The Orioles are a completely self-destructive franchise, and it starts from the top. My favorite anecdote about the Orioles’ ownership came from a guy who worked directly with Peter Angelos in a few years ago in public relations. “Think about Peter Angelos’ law practice,” he said. “Hundreds of attorneys – not one partner.” That mentality of knowing all and never bowing to any other sense but his own has positioned the Orioles in a terrible place of not paying money and not getting great players excited to come to Charm City.
And it has been a long time since the Orioles had any relevance in Major League Baseball outside of having the most people named in the Mitchell Report. Cal Ripken Jr’s streak, while a permanent halo around Baltimore sports fandom, was years ago. A winning record seems about as laughable as it does distant, and don’t get me started on how Camden Yards is now a defacto home game for any visiting club of note.
So he’s right on all of those accounts, and he said it in such a matter-of-factly, smug way, that all of the emotions washed up in years of failed ownership and years of underachievement has spawned this – an outcry against the court jester.
Now, Cowherd was wrong on his account of the Orioles having no past or future. The past is well-documented, and the present seems to be in pretty good shape when three pitchers and the top minor league catcher will likely be called up. But while he was wrong about the factuals of the Orioles franchise, he was right to get Orioles fans riled up about his comments.
And when you can be wrong and still be right for your appeal, you’ve got it made.
Because that’s what makes us listen, call in, write in, and everything else that boosts his ratings.
I respect Cowherd. As a virgin in the radio business, I’d love to get to a place where he has the kind of platform and influence that creates this kind of furor. He may be dead wrong in our hearts, but in our minds he’s as right as rain on this one. As O’s fans, we’d be better suited to take this one upside the head and keep the focus on not believing that our annual meltdown is imminent.
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Boo him for misleading you. Boo him for making public a false desire to be home and rebuild a team.
Hey JC, that’s the reason why he got boo’d. No one is booing Tex because he decided he wanted an extra $40MM. I think we’d all play for the Yankees for $40MM. The boos are a product of Teixeira’s (and Boras’s) disingenuous pandering to the media about loving Baltimore when they never intended to sign anywhere but New York. The boos are a product of Tex saying that he wore a Yankees cap to Memorial Stadium, has been a Yankee fan all his life, and his switch hitting was inspired by Don Mattingly – but then later saying that in a perfect world, he’d be an Oriole and his switch hitting inspiration was Eddie Murray.
Tex has earned the boos, not for signing with the Yankees, not for “selling out” and taking the money, but because he’s a phony and a cocktease.
Mark Teixera & The Yankees, The perfect symbol of greed
and a fantastic example of why the entire country is the way it is!!!!
Lets make it as simple as possible. THE YANKEES BUY EVERY
GOOD FREE AGENT PLAYER THAT COMES ALONG. PERIOD
THE ORIOLES HAVE NO HOPE. The Blue Jays are a very good team
and guess what, Zero Freakin playoff appearances in 14 straight years.
The Rays finally made the playoffs for the first time, It will be a long time before they go back. I guess all these teams are just second class cities like Cowherd says, Yes the’re just horrible organizations with complete morons running the operations. Right! Sinopsis TEIXERA WILL BE BOOED OUT OF THE STADIUM
EVERY TIME HE SHOWS UP. I could go on forever about this Bull Shit
but it’s getting a little old. It would really be fantastic to see fans come to
gether and just stay home for 1 year in cities like Kansas City Pittsburgh
Toronto Baltimore and a few others, and the players union and MLB
realize it can’t be run like this anymore. Really sick of it. Mike
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[...] Wait. colin Cowherd is right? < Stet Sports [...]
Since when should an Orioles fan not boo a Yankees player? Screw Tex.
For all of you O’s fans getting bent over Teixeira, grow up. We had him here in Anaheim, offered him more than you did, practically guaranteed him to have a chance at a title every year (something Baltimore hasn’t even sniffed since 1982!), and would have re-tooled everything around him, all without having to go through any “re-building” phase… Do you honestly think he’s gonna lose any sleep over someone who has to pay to come watch him? Hell no, and neither would I, especially in some 2-bit, never was, alleged “sports town”. I’m sure Baltimore loves it’s Ravens & O’s, but get real, you are a 2nd rate , small-time market that has nothing to offer, and even if Tex is a bust w/ the Yanks, he still has the cash…
Cowherd is terrible. He’s trying to suck up to Yankees fans, but we don’t like him. We want Kellerman back in NYC
Whoa! I never thought I’d hear the words “We Want” and “Kellerman” in the same sentence.
In one way, Cowherd is definitely right–if Teixeira had signed with the Orioles his salary would have eaten so much of the Orioles’ payroll that they could no longer afford to attract good pitchers, which is so important for success in the AL East nowadays.
The Tampa Bay Rays will be successful because they do have a young, very effective pitching rotation, and because they’re mostly from the Rays’ farm system it also means the salary demands aren’t somewhere in the stratosphere, either.
In short, this unfortunate situation won’t resolve itself until MLB adopts some sort of salary cap AND minimum, which will better equalize the teams across the nation. As such, it appears outside of the Rays (with their strong pitching staff) and the Phillies (with their strong hitting lineup) the only teams that have the realistic chance to win the World Series on a long-term basis are the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, Los Angeles Dodgers, Chicago Cubs, New York Mets, New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox.