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her Baltimore Orioles T-shirt, Maureen Hall has been hooked on baseball since she was seven years old. The clacking sound of metal baseball spikes reminds her of the time she caught eyes with franchise legend Brooks Robinson as he jogged onto the field at Baltimore’s old Memorial Stadium. The muffled sounds of AM radio remind her of the nights she tucked a transistor radio underneath her pillow so she could listen to the Orioles before falling asleep. Weekday afternoon games remind her of when she ditched the nuns at Seton High School in favor of a deli sandwich and a daytime ballgame.
Standing beneath the brick buildings that tower over the right field pavilion at Camden Yards, Hall has the Orioles logo dangling from her earlobes, adorning the temples of her sunglasses and tattooed on the inner part of her left arm. She worked for 25 years as a middle school teacher, but that didn’t stop her from attending every opening day and, if she was able, around 50 games per season. Since Camden Yards opened in 1992, she spends as much time in the stands as she can.
“It’s just kind of my happy place,” she says. “It’s my Disneyland.”
Hall is like many Orioles fans: devoted for generations and starved for wins. And she says that this might be the most exciting season that she can remember.
The Orioles are baseball’s unlikeliest success story. Entering the 2023 season, Baltimore had the most losses of any franchise since 2018 and the game’s second-lowest payroll in a division featuring wealthy blue-bloods like the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox and the brainy Tampa Bay Rays. Thanks to elite homegrown talent and dominant relief pitching, the Orioles entered Friday with the best record in the American League and have a 97% chance to make the playoffs according to Fangraphs.com. Often dormant in the late-summer months, Oriole Park at Camden Yards is teeming with locals donning orange and black to watch baseball’s most irresistible Cinderella story. On course for a legitimate run at their first World Series title in 40 years, Baltimore are averaging 5,500 more fans per game than they did in 2022, many of whom don jerseys and T-shirts of young stars like Adley Rutschman (25 years old), Gunnar Henderson (22) and Cedric Mullins (28).
Except the team’s historic success wasn’t the dominant storyline when the defending World Series champion Houston Astros arrived in Baltimore last week. Late Tuesday, the website Awful Announcing reported that popular play-by-play announcer Kevin Brown was indefinitely suspended by MASN, the team-owned cable network. The Orioles refused to comment on the suspension, but sources told Awful Announcing that Brown’s discussion of the Baltimore’s road struggles against the Tampa Bay Rays angered owner John Angelos.
The backlash across baseball was swift and fierce, particularly because Brown simply recited statistics from an on-screen graphic documenting the team’s futility in past seasons. New York Mets announcer Gary Cohen devoted about a minute of airtime lambasting the Orioles and declaring that if they did not want Brown, “there are 29 other teams that do”; Boston Red Sox announcer Dave O’Brien labeled it “a fiasco”; even CNN News Central anchor John Berman mocked the team for its pettiness, jokingly suggesting that the network should get Dr Sanjay Gupta to diagnose the owners with “chronic thin-skinedness”. Brown is expected to return to the air on Friday, but some fans brought signs calling for Brown’s immediate reinstatement while “Free Kevin Brown!” chants erupted during the Orioles’ Wednesday and Thursday games.
“Kevin Brown has been the soundtrack to this great Orioles season,” Eisenberg says. “The broadcasters are the conduit to the team and integral to the fan experience. And if you get a good one, that’s a great thing for the fans. And if you mess with it, the fans do not like it and they do not forget.”
