If you can remember as far back as two winters ago, then-Baltimore Orioles owners the Angelos family agreed to sign a 30-year lease extension for Camden Yards in exchange for $600 million (or more) in state money for stadium renovations. The new lease had an out clause, though: If the Orioles owners can’t agree with the state on a development agreement around the stadium by the end of 2027, they can break the lease after just 15 years. As I wrote at the time:
What’s left now is for the state and Angelos to negotiate the development agreement, but [Maryland Gov. Wes] Moore has effectively tied his own hands in those talks, since if he doesn’t agree to what the O’s owner wants, Angelos can spend his $600 million and then walk. Or, more likely, spend the $600 million and then demand more in about a decade, since he’ll be able to point to his expiring lease.
The end of 2027 is getting ever closer, and for the Orioles owner — now private equity goon David Rubenstein, who bought the team from the Angelos family in 2024 — the above scenario is becoming ever more real:
Catie Griggs, president of business operations for the Orioles, said this week the priority for the club and the Maryland Stadium Authority was to complete the upgrades to the ballpark this winter.
“What I will tell you is MSA has been an incredible partner throughout the process of getting this done,” Griggs said, “so I have full confidence that as we enter the season to sort of pick our heads up to look around again, that they will continue to be great partners.”
That sounds like a … backhanded compliment? Veiled threat? One of those?
Early indications were that the development agreement could amount to a whole lot of extra free money for Rubinstein — as much as $7.1 million a year in new revenues just from taking over the historic warehouse in right field for 99 years, in exchange for less than $1 million a year in rent. And Rubinstein has the hammer in the form of that 15-year out clause, though I suppose Gov. Moore could be equally hard-nosed and say he’ll pull out of the entire development deal if it’s too rich for Maryland taxpayers’ blood, damn the extra 15 years of stadium lease. That could work, just so long as he doesn’t first … oh noooooooooo:
“The thing that we know is that we’re completely aligned on this being the long-term home of [the] Baltimore Orioles,” Moore said of the priorities for the city, state and team owners. “That was a key priority for me. Gone are the days when we were doing one-year deals and two-year deals. I would only accept a long-term deal because we need to have certainty for downtown Baltimore and certainty for the Baltimore Orioles, and I’m grateful that, with this new leadership team, we got that.”
Yup, Wes Moore is very, very bad at this.
If you want to learn more about how the Orioles stadium came to be, meanwhile, student journalists at the University of Maryland have put together a website with a bunch of videos that claim to be the “most complete telling of the Camden Yards story.” I haven’t watched it yet, because I’ve already read (several times) an extremely comprehensive story of the making of Camden Yards. But admittedly that didn’t include hour-long video clips of Edward Bennett Williams testifying, so if you have a ton of time and an enjoyment of YouTube, neither of which describes me, it may be fun to poke around in.
I see where the Vegas-area affiliate of the MLB A’s radio network is an FM HD2 station.
These owners for decades nurtured the notion of other municipalities just slavering for their teams (such as what the O’s are now doing to Bal’more, per report). I try to take heart in even the smallest evidence that the salivary glands are running dry.