The Baltimore Orioles are having quite a magical season, sitting in first place in the AL East on Aug. 8, but on Monday they grabbed national headlines for all the wrong reasons.
The Orioles suspended play-by-play announcer Kevin Brown indefinitely for comments he made on a July 23 broadcast when he noted that the Orioles have won more games at Tropicana Field this season than they had the last three years combined.
Awful Announcing first reported the story, which was confirmed by The Athletic’s Britt Ghiroli, who joined 105.7 The Fan in Baltimore on Tuesday to discuss the story.
LISTEN TO FULL INTERVIEW WITH BRITT GHIROLI
“There’s no rhyme or reason for this kind of stuff,” she said. “This is a pattern. Ryan Wagner got fired hours before the home opener for benign tweets. Gary Thorne and his treatment there. Jim Hunter. Rick Dempsey. The list goes on and on. It’s crazy he’s got in trouble for this but it’s not based on what’s happened in this organization before. This was an easy story to confirm and get so many people to say yes, this is what happened.
“There is no rhyme or reason but there hasn’t been whole lot of rhyme or reason anything John Angelos does. This is the guy who berated Dan Connolly for asking about baseball on Martin Luther King day. This is a guy who said he’d open the books. He never opened the books. This is the guy who said the lease will get signed by the All-Star break. … Doesn’t really surprise me and shouldn’t really surprise anyone who’s been around this team, really.”
News of Brown’s suspension led to several play-by-play announcers across baseball take jabs at the Orioles and criticize its management for suspending a broadcaster for making a rather innocuous comment about the team’s lack of success prior to this year.
The Orioles have said this is not the reason Brown was suspended, but Ghiroli said no one was able to provide anything on the record that her reporting was not factual and that she was accused of her story being a media creation.
“Somebody who works for John Angelos said to me you couldn’t wait to write this article. It’s Monday night. I have a 1-year-old and it’s 8 o’clock. I just wanted to sit and watch TV,” she said. “[The Orioles] made it so this was a story. You made it so every broadcast on the air last night was making fun of you. …They still don’t realize this. They think the media made this headline. That the media is out to get John Angelos. No, stop doing things that are so stupid that the entire country talks about it and we’ll stop writing about it.”
Ghiroli said that Brown is expected to return to the air on Friday, although that could change.
“That’s what I was told was the expectation,” she said. “Certainly that could change. Honestly, they should just have him come back tonight, but then they can say oh he was off for a reason. That is the plan right now. That could change. But I also think they gave out a few statements that he could return soon.”
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