Hearts were all twittery last week when Bloomberg News reported that David Rubenstein was trying to buy the Orioles baseball franchise. Rubenstein, 74, is a multi-billionaire lawyer, businessman and philanthropist born and raised in Baltimore.
Such facts are important. The current owners of the Orioles, the Angelos family, also have lots of money, but seem loath to spend much of it.
This is particularly noticeable in a week in which the Los Angeles Dodgers announced they will pay Shohei Ohtani $700 million — $70 million annually over the next decade — while the Orioles’ payroll last year was about $60 million.
Sixty million for an entire team; $70 million for one player.
Once again, this highlights the absurd system in which Major League Baseball is divided into the rich kids (the Dodgers, the Yankees, etc.) and everybody else.
John Angelos, currently boss of the Orioles, says he’d have to raise ticket prices to unreasonable levels if he paid the kind of monstrous salaries currently being handed out by the rich teams.
I was never very good at math, but I know that John’s dad, the ailing Peter Angelos, paid about $173 million when he purchased the Orioles. Today, Forbes magazine estimates the ball club’s worth at about $1.7 billion.
According to my calculations, that’s a ten-fold increase in value.
And John Angelos is crying poor?
One summer night in 1994, Peter Angelos sat in the owner’s box at Oriole Park and talked about the day he fought to buy the O’s at auction.
“I didn’t care how high the bidding went,” he said. “In my mind, I knew I would go higher. I mean, I was thinking, ‘When is this SOB gonna give it up?’ But until he did, I wasn’t leaving.”
There was a reason for this. Whatever his faults, Peter Angelos was a Bawlamer guy who’d already seen his hometown lose its pro football and basketball teams and wasn’t going to see the baseball team get away.
Maybe David Rubenstein’s got some of the same emotional makeup. He went to Baltimore City College at the same time as former Mayor Kurt Schmoke and the late U.S. Rep. Elijah Cummings.
Then he attended Duke, went on to get a law degree and co-founded The Carlyle Group, which became one of the world’s largest private equity firms. He’s reportedly worth somewhere approaching $4 billion.
Is the initial Bloomberg story holding up? At this moment, it looks shaky. The day after Bloomberg reported Rubenstein “in talks” with the Orioles, The Baltimore Banner reported John Angelos called Gov. Wes Moore and told him his family wasn’t interested in selling the ball club.
At that point, who knows what Moore was thinking? Angelos has already misled Moore once on negotiations for a new lease at Camden Yards. Their initial announcement that a deal had been completed did serious damage to Moore’s credibility.
Angelos’s credibility was already in question. So is his willingness to fully invest in his baseball team.
That’s why so many hearts were thumping at last week’s news on David Rubenstein — and hoping the story will play out.
A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books.
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