Game 80: Orioles at Twins

Time: 7:10 Central

Weather: Mostly clear and calm, first pitch 81°

Opponent’s SB site: Camden Chat

TV: BSN. Radio: Where Gladden may or may not remember to tell you the score

Now-29-year-old starter Spenser Watkins had considered quitting to coach high-school ball before the Orioles gave him his first MLB callup last season; he wasn’t great, but was good enough to stick around with the Orioles, who are very bad right now. It’s always worth remembering that any player who makes the big leagues, even on a bad team, is better at baseball than most of us will ever be at anything. He throws a low-90s fastball, high-80s slider/cutter (his best pitch), a curve and change. 2022 digits:

Yes, Watkins is righthanded. He struggled against righties last year, too. His mound opponent, Joe Ryan, struggled with both illness and effectiveness in June, so here’s hoping that magical calendar flip helps.

Is it time for Crazy Owner Stadium Talk? It’s always time for Crazy Owner Stadium Talk! This one’s even weirder than usual, though.

So the Orioles want, and it looks like they’re getting, a massive amount of renovation money to “upgrade” Camden Yards (read: put in more s**t rich people will pay extra for). This should, operative word, should, ensure that the team is committed to their lauded stadium for years to come; as the great Neil deMause points out, not all the details about a lease extension are finalized, yet, meaning the Orioles may scheme some way to sign a lease with escape clauses in it.

So far, so normal — teams want public money thrown at them, dog bites man. But how about some owner brothers going to Court War with each other?

Majority Orioles owner Peter Angelos is quite old and incapable of running the team anymore. So it’s been up to his sons John and Louis for a few years. And now Louis is accusing John of trying to steal the team from him!

In a lawsuit, Louis claims that while Peter intended ownership to be divided equally between the two sons, John never had any intention of allowing this to happen. That he’d secretly grabbed power within the team’s front office, and was even manipulating their mother with mean phone calls, “angrily feeding her half-truths and outright fabrications that paralyzed her with confusion, fear and indecision.” Oh, and that John wants to move the team to Nashville.

Yep, just your standard “my brother is filling Mom’s head with lies in order to swindle me out of my birthright” family squabble. One or the other of them is certifiably kinda crazy. Or they both are. Well, they are rich...

A few more non-Baltimore baseball odds-and-ends I’ve stumbled across recently:

— ESPN had this actually pretty interesting interview with Rob Manfred. The author, Don Van Natta Jr., is maybe a bit more “insider access” chummy with Manfred (and Bug Selig) than we the commissioner-skeptic might want, but it’s certainly thorough (and I don’t even hate all Manfred’s ideas for increasing game speed). A revealing quote is how Manfred considers his job to be, essentially, taking the heat for owners: “Every time it’s me, it ain’t one of those 30 guys — that’s good ... I don’t have $2 billion invested in a team ... They deserve that layer. I believe they deserve that layer of protection.” Methinks this translates as “my bosses are unlikable jerks who’ve hired me to take the blame for their insatiable greed, and I loooove it!”

— You may have seen clips from Sunday’s Angels/Mariners brawl, which delayed the game for 18 minutes and resulted in several suspensions. Over at the Mariners’ SB site, Grant Brondon called the Angels “cowards”; both for some sucker punches in the brawl, and for upholding “unwritten rules” by throwing at Mariners hitters. Basically, saying any intentional macho BS that could injure another player is garbage. I agree, although I wonder if Angels fans think that Mariners pitchers started this. I don’t know, because the Angels’ SB site hasn’t posted any articles since, apparently, March. While the Vox job page, which usually has dozens of openings for editorial staff on various SB team sites, doesn’t list any at all. Strange.

— The Twins’ giveaway promotion tonight is a “Twins Bucket Hat.” Lest you get your hopes up that this is a hat that can later be used as an actual bucket, here’s a similar item I found on one image search:

That won’t be the design for tonight’s hat, although I think this one’s pretty neat with the state outline. It you’re among the first 5,000 fans and you get one, share what it looks like!

— Finally, TwinkieTown reader favorite Josh Donaldson recently filed suit against his former landlord in Connecticut for renting him a horrible house. The house had “a widespread mold problem, an unusable pool, an infestation of ants and squirrels, nonworking showers, water damage to the bathrooms and faulty electrical wiring,” supposedly. Since Donaldson’s partner is pregnant, that mold could have been scarily harmful. Whereas squirrels that “found a home in one of the house’s bedroom ceilings” is actually pretty dang funny if it’s not happening to you.

In comments on the article, some people pointed out that the rental price of that house, at $55,000 per month, is fairly... um, extravagant might be a word? It’s his money, I suppose. But the ostentation of the thing makes those squirrels even funnier.