The Orioles have been one of the best stories in baseball this season. Baltimore currently holds a two-game lead in a tough AL East division as it looks to return to the postseason for the first time since 2016.
Unfortunately, the Orioles have been the talk of the league this week for other reasons.
Orioles announcer Kevin Brown was removed from the broadcast booth for his pregame comments a few weeks ago. But unlike some other instances over the past few years, Brown’s comments were rather innocuous.
WEEI Red Sox announcer Will Flemming sounded off on the Orioles’ suspension of Brown during his appearance on Audacy’s original podcast “Baseball Isn’t Boring” this week.
“When I saw the headline I thought ‘OK, I’ll watch this back and I’m going to hold my breath,’” Flemming said (7:25 in player above). “And then you watch the clip and you think to yourself, ‘You got to be kidding me. There’s got to be another layer to this. There’s got to be more to this story.’”
In case you haven’t seen it, here is the segment that reportedly led to Brown’s suspension:
Brown was suspended due to his so-called criticism of the team, but that couldn’t be further from the case.
“The word ‘criticism’ is not well-placed here. He didn’t criticize the team. He stated facts on a graphic that was built for him by their network,” Flemming continued. “That’s sort of just kind of doing your job and telling the truth.”
The Orioles have had more than their fair share of incidents like this in the past. It’s nothing new for the Angelos family in Baltimore.
“This was purely a recitation of the facts,” Flemming reiterated. “If there’s any impact, maybe the Orioles would learn something, but they’ve got such a history of this stuff going back to Jon Miller and a lot of other people they’ve had on air with players.
“All the people that are employed there have to be very careful about what they do and don’t say … that family and that ownership group has a track record that is pretty hard to ignore, so I think they probably are whiplashed a little bit by the effects of this. Let’s just say I’m not exactly holding my breath thinking this is going to effect some massive change there.”
Flemming was one of many announcers from across the league to voice his support for Brown. Camden Yards even broke out into an audible “Free Kevin Brown!” chant on Tuesday night.
Rather than the Orioles continuing to be a fun story, Angelos put a damper on that.
“This was the biggest own goal of all time,” Flemming said. “This is an absolutely outrageous abuse by the ownership of the Baltimore Orioles… I would probably say that almost no ownership group is like them or ever would be like them.”
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