MikeyChalupa

Hey, if you want to hate the Yankees because of Steinbrenner and his money, then let us hate the Orioles for Angelos and his tightwad whining. To me, that's just as distasteful as Steinbrenner "buying championships" is to you. Angelos has happily fielded a mediocre team for the better part of a decade, just like Toronto and Tampa. Hey, he improved the team from 4th place to 3rd place this year! Congratulations! You're still 22.5 games out. All three teams know that from opening day, the AL East is a two-team race. Instead of publicily complaining about losing fans to a NL team, he should be doing what the Yankees do and the Sox have recently learned to do: whatever it takes to put a team on the field that people want to watch because they win more games than they lose. If you do that you won't have to worry about losing fans to a nearby team. Do you think the Yankees worry about losing fans to the Mets? Or the Lakers to the Clippers? If it was the Orioles who had won their division the last 6 (now 7, as of last night) years running, you wouldn't have heard a peep out of him when baseball considered Washington for the Expos relocation. Angelos made a good start this year by adding a few quality players (Palmiero, Tejada, Lopez). Build on that! And then, you know, hope a meteor strikes the stadium during a Yankees-Sox game or something.

What Angelos SHOULD have done, as I've heard suggested before, is petition MLB to switch Baltimore from the AL East to the NL East, and have the new Washington team play in the AL East. The Orioles would be a much more competitive team in the NL East without having to play the Yankees and Red Sox a total of 38 times, and pretty much only have to worry about Altanta. They'd still get to have the interleague rivalry. Plus, he'd get the last laugh of "You want baseball, Washington? Welcome to some REAL competition. We'll be over here in the NL pounding the Mets in the ass."

-Mikey