The Belfry and the Business of Baltimore Baseball, Part 3 Bob's Backstop for February 14 , 2006

It turned out that the ‘crusade’ to restore ‘Baltimore’ to its proper place in the Orioles’ scheme of things has proven to be a lone voice crying out in the wilderness.

 If this were a grave social injustice, there wouldn’t be anything wrong with that. Since it’s only the short-sighted marketing-study-fueled bad judgment of a bunch of untalented marketing people that would never respond to any sort of debate on the issue, it’s not worth further pursuit, considering the lack of interest among Orioles fans and the media.

 Still, I think it’s worth revisiting once more, even if only to cement some of the concerns – especially some of those that were distorted in my WBAL Sportsline appearance, as well as responding to some of the countering comments made by Steve Davis and Peter Schmuck. After that, it’ll be just my forwarding all three articles to the Orioles, where they will lie unheeded and unacknowledged, as does everything that they get, as far as I can tell. (This has truly become an Oriole-fan-unfriendly organization. Hard to believe, but it’s simply the truth.)

 The basic thrust of my point concerning the Orioles’ marketing fallacies does not rest with the lack of ‘BALTIMORE’ flowing in script or block lettering across the road jerseys. That decision was made nearly twenty-five years ago, and the Orioles are not the only team who does this. I’d agree with any decision to return the city name to those jerseys, but it’s not a major concern.

 What IS a major concern is a concerted effort now extending throughout the franchise to market the team as not the ‘Baltimore Orioles’, but instead as just ‘The Orioles’.

 The concept here, as I understand it, is to ‘market’ the team to as wide a region as possible, to make the team more ‘adoptable’ by those who do not live in the metro Baltimore area. Since the removal of ‘Baltimore’ from even team business cards this year coincides with the second season of the Nationals, one might reasonably infer that the Orioles intend to ‘cozy up’ to Nats fans, or fans sitting on the fence as to their baseball allegiance, feeling that if they are not thumping their chests as the ‘Baltimore’ Orioles, that somehow the team might be less offensive to those casual or fence-sitting fans in the DC area. This was one of the points made by Peter Schmuck in our discussion on the radio. (I will specifically address this at the end of the column.)

 What is wrong with this decision? Plenty. It shows a lack of understanding of the Soul of the Machine, the very concepts that make fandom of a MLB team click. The city in which one plays is part of the very fabric of the team, and no fans should be expected to deny the city and/or its persona while embracing the ball club. That just doesn’t happen.

 There will be some fans that will take interest in both teams. Some of them preside here at the Belfry. That’s well and good for those folks, but they are in a distinct minority. It’s fruitless to attempt to pander to the ‘DC Fan’ or the ‘Casual Fan’ or the ‘fence sitting fan’…especially in this market, where Peter Angelos and the fight over the DC market polarized a great deal of the baseball community. Already a lightning rod for controversy, Angelos’ opposition to the DC team drove away most of the fans in the DC market who had not become die-hard Orioles fans over that time.

 No Orioles fans blame Peter for that. He was, after all, just trying to protect his franchise and the future of Baltimore baseball. (And as any regular reader of this page knows, I agree with his position that the presence of the Nats is bad for both the short and especially long-term health of the Orioles, but that’s another oft-told story.) But the DC fans have been bombarded with red-hot screed from the like of Tom Boswell and George Solomon and Tom Lovello portraying Angelos as the third most dangerous man in Washington after Bin Laden and President Bush.

 There is nothing to be gained by emasculating yourself to appeal to those fans as ‘hey, we’re just a baseball team. We don’t represent Baltimore, we just happen to play there.’ BECAUSE THEY HAVE MADE UP THEIR MINDS.

 The flip side of this is that in attempting to appeal to everyone, you instead dilute your appeal. There’s no message. There’s no face. You don’t stand for anything. Baltimore is part of what makes the Orioles appealing. Not the city itself, but its persona.

 And what is that persona?

 A little quirky. Very lunch-pail, blue-collar. Maybe a bit tacky, but shrewd in the way of the street. Ethnic. Fifties retro. Barry Levinson. Little Italy. Fells Point. The Inner Harbor. Hamden. The Rotunda. The Senator. Bengie’s Drive-In. Johns Hopkins. Crabcakes. Corned Beef Row. Lexington Market. Rowhouses. Pigtown. An underdog, but an underdog worth rooting for. A survivor.

 And that’s what the Orioles have always been, too. For most of their history, the Orioles were The Little Train That Could, low-key excellence in a backwater second-tier gritty eastern seaboard town.

 And that’s who they still have to be. They aren’t the Nats, they aren’t the Yankees, they aren’t the Red Sox. To get the maximum mileage out of their persona, they need to embrace it, trumpet it, BECOME it…not deny it even exists.

 There is no rhyme or reason to baseball fandom. That is the mistake these folks are making in their marketing decisions. They think marketing studies that tell them to homogenize to appeal to as many fans as possible is the way to go, when in fact, nothing could be further from the truth.

 Appeal to the fans touched by some mystic chord as an underdog, a bit quirky, lunch-pail. A fan who appreciates ethnicity, diversity, fun. Build an organization that can outsmart the other guys, or at least appear first-class in everything they do (which means no more drama from the front office) that can appeal to a more cerebral fan that may be pained by the way the Yanks and Sox go about their business.

 Peter Schmuck made the comment that “I’m from Annapolis, so I don’t care what the Orioles call themselves.” With that statement, he illustrates the folly of the current marketing approach. This attempt to become everything to everyone just really doesn’t work…if a fan from Annapolis is an Orioles fan, it’s not because the Orioles do or don’t call themselves the BALTIMORE Orioles. It’s because they are drawn to the club for a hundred other reasons, professionalism and winning very high among them.

 Still, in the final accounting, the Baltimore Orioles is who they are, and who they should be. To deny it is to take away too much of what makes the Orioles…the Orioles.

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Many thanks to Steve Davis of WBAL for allowing me on the air to plug the Belfry and to talk about this issue. Steve has been supportive of past columns, even reading some on the air, and we greatly appreciate that. It was difficult discussing the issues in the format he suggested, because it was basically two against one, I was constantly aware of the time constraints, and I think that my position was somewhat skewed towards the ‘Baltimore on the Road Jerseys’ Issue. I got the feeling they both saw me as more of a homer for Baltimore (which is sort of amusing, since I’ve only worked in Baltimore for seven of my seventeen years in the area, and I’ve never lived in the city) rather than as an advocate for sounder marketing practices that do not turn their collective backs on the most fervent of their fan base in a misguided effort to draw in fans that could care less about them.

 That being said, there were a couple of things that they brought up that I was either unable to respond to, or they didn’t really accept my responses as a counter-point (I felt I was being lectured to a good part of the time, rather than this being give-and-take. Some of our readers who were listening confirmed this feeling. Considering the quality of the previous callers that night, I can see how these guys felt that they were having to ‘correct the misconceptions’ of all of the night’s callers. J)

 The concept of a Washington rivalry as something the O’s should not play up was the issue with which I most strongly disagreed. Both Steve and Peter brought up the concern about alienating fans, that there were many fans of both clubs. Steve also brought up the old bromide about Baltimore having more of a problem with Washington than vice-versa, that DC really didn’t think of Baltimore at all.

 I think that in everyday life, this is quite true. In baseball, though, the fight over the very existence of the Nats replaced antipathy on the part of DC fans with something approaching loathing, from what I’ve experienced. ‘Old’ Orioles fans, the die-hards who still love the O’s, are probably not Nats fans. If they are, they are only casual Nats fans. They had to listen to guff from Nats fans all least season, as the Nats were the ones who assumed the ‘underdog’ mantle, while the Orioles were the Great Satan With All the Money That Can’t Even Get Out of Their Own Way.

 This is going to continue. It’s going to become even more acute now that the teams are going to play. If you’re an O’s fan living in the DC market, like me (the last 14 years in Howard County in Columbia and Laurel, now in Carroll County about equidistant from RFK and Camden), you’ve pretty much cast your die. You’re either an O’s fan, or a Nats fan. (I tried going to three Nats games last year. I had a good time, I’ll go again, but I really can’t root for them. Why? I’m an O’s fan…deep down, I really don’t care what the Nats do, and I really don’t want to have to take guff from Nats fans among my friends and work associates…I’d much rather be dishing it out myself.)

 So I disagree that marketing the Nats as a rivalry, the concept that ‘we don’t want to emphasize our Baltimore-ness to Washingtonians’, is a bad thing. I think the Orioles should emphasize everything about their legacy, their history, and what they stand for. ‘Baltimore’ is a big part of that. It’s a pity, but so typical of how this franchise has treated its fans for too long, that something so simple and yet so fundamental to the health of a club can be cast aside by a franchise who these days seems to think only with a marketing study instead of with what really captures a baseball fan…a heart, a mind, a soul. And an identity.