A few days ago, Baltimore Sun columnist Peter Schmuck used his blog to mildly chastise Orioles fans for booing closer Michael Gonzalez, who was in the early stages of a third straight bad performance at the time he was being audibly raked over the coals.  Schmuck has continued to hold to his opinion that the booing was, for lack of a better term, inappropriate because, in essence, though Orioles fans are frustrated it's not fair to take it out on Gonzalez after so short a period of time with the club.  

At a certain level, Schmuck has a point, particularly in light of a growing body of circumstantial evidence that suggests that Gonzalez has been pitching while injured and may have been doing so for quite some time.  Schmuck is arguably correct that Orioles fans taking their frustrations out on Gonzalez is unfair and amounts to, in my words, scapegoating.  There's likely more than a kernel of truth to that sentiment.

In the end, however, "fair" has very little to do with what's going on in Baltimore right now and as Schmuck implicitly--if not explicitly, based on his more recent blog entries and a few responses to blog comments--realizes, what's going on with the Orioles fan base has very little to do with Gonzalez per se.

What's going on is that frustration within the fan base has exceeded the boiling point.  That frustration, a product most obviously of twelve straight years of losing seasons (while staring down the barrel of a thirteenth), is manifesting itself in opening day sellout crowd booing and fourth-game-of-the-season record low ballpark attendance.  There are other seeds of frustration, ones that have a kind of "final straw" feel to them, including an apparently continued tone deaf ambiance emanating from the Warehouse business offices (the club's director of communications stating that fans are perfectly satisfied with the team's inexplicable new day-of-game ticket surcharge is the latest example).  But, at the risk of stating the incredibly obvious when the merely obvious will do, the main issue is unquestionably the long, sustained, no-clear-end-in-sight string of losing seasons.  

And Orioles fans, collectively, clearly have had it.  There's only one solution to this problem and that's winning major league baseball games.  The days of settling for moral victories are obviously over.  Accepting impressive minor league performances by would-be budding prospects won't cut it.  There's no more mitigating mounting big league losses by pointing to selectively impressive individual or collective bodies of work (e.g. pointing to seven decent or better starting pitching performances out of eight this season) or stating how the team's record would be better if not for this personal failing or that.  It's not that all of these things aren't arguably true; they may all be true, to a greater or lesser extent.  But at this point, the fan base has heard all of this, and then some, before.

This is major league baseball.  At some point, if not at all points, it has to be about winning baseball games.  Orioles fans have heard about an improved farm system off and on for years.  They've been through stretches where the starting pitching was excellent.  They've seen plenty of cases where "if not for [fill in name of your favorite O's screw up here] the team would be seven games over .500."

The Orioles have blown the considerable amount of goodwill that the fan base has held.  This shows up on both ends of the spectrum, from the record low attendance a couple of nights ago to the booing of Gonzalez on opening day (which apparently began with the pre-game introductions).  When fans show up they vent their disgust, in ways previously unseen in Baltimore.  The Gonzalez reaction is, as far as I know, unprecedented.  I have no recollection of an Orioles player ever receiving the kind of immediate, unrelentingly negative response that Gonzalez is getting.  But that's a sign of the--bad--times.  It's an indication of the changed relationship between this franchise and its time-jaded fans.

When the fans aren't showing up and booing, they're staying away in droves.  The club's season ticket base has fallen to an all-time Camden Yards low and is certainly in the bottom five in all of the major leagues.

There's no patience left, and this fact is being demonstrated in spades.  And goodness knows it's not surprising.  And how the frustration is being displayed may not be fair on the micro level, but who ever said life was fair?

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