John Angelos Talks Orioles 2017 Season, Keeping Machado & More
John Angelos, President and COO of MASN & Executive Vice President of the Baltimore Orioles, joined Ken Weinman and Jerry Coleman who were filling in for Vinny and Haynie Thursday morning just before the calendar flips over to 2017 to discuss the upcoming season. John weighed in immediately with his thoughts of how Baltimore has approached this offseason.
"I think it's going well in terms of effort. Dan and Buck are going through a deliberative process and doing everything they can to try to improve the team for the coming seasons," he said.
In Major League Baseball contract figures are sky rocketing as high as ever, with players commanding deals north of 20 plus million per season. An interesting offseason to take a look at will be in 2018 when multiple players will such as Bryce Harper, Clayton Kershaw and Manny Machado will command max deals worth well over hundreds of millions of dollars. John gave his thoughts on the current landscape of baseball's salaries and the climbing cost of signing a marquee player.
"There are two discrete parts of the issue here. One is total compensation in the league rising and the way that compensation is paid out… Total compensation rising, in many ways that should happen in my view, that should happen because of the natural order of the sport. The industry of baseball is growing, the industry of baseball now is approaching let's say Nine Billion Dollars now. Under the CBA of any league, and baseball in particular, the players are entitled through a bargaining process to be paid around something half of that amount. And in that sense that is entirely right, entirely fair, this is a partnership of the teams and the players. So the players should be getting half the money and as the industry grows, those numbers should grow."
John did not go on to say the current system of the CBA is without flaws, in fact he has concerns about the differences in markets. "The other issue that I think is a big problem is what is Major League Baseballs CBA doing, what are the work rules doing to make sure that the way all players are paid creates the best game for the players, the best game for the fans, the best game for the club owners and there I think we do have a big problem. I think last year the top five teams out spent the bottom five times by three or four times."
Ken asked John if the Orioles view themselves capable to resign Manny Machado down the road. "Of course the ownership is going to do everything they can to keep all of our best young players and there is no better example of that than Manny."
You can listen to the full interview here!
