Maryland Million Day 2016 @ Laurel Park

Regular readers of this site will note that we don’t have the joie de vivre we once did for life in Baltimore. Lately we’ve been down on everything from music to politics, and we barely even enjoy a trip to Camden Yards anymore. But in 2016 there’s one thing we love more than ever and it’s thoroughbred horse racing… particularly Maryland racing.

And why not? It’s been a banner year. After last year’s historic Triple Crown win by American Pharoah we started out the Spring of 2016 with our first ever visit to a steeplechase meet at Fair Hill, which was a blast to watch and a great betting day. Triple Crown season saw us win enough money betting online we could start to claw back some actual cash profits from our advance wagering account. Throughout the Summer we paid visits to both of the Baltimore area’s brand new OTB locations at Horseshoe Casino and Timonium Fairgrounds. Both venues are clean, quiet and comfortable enough to stay all day and play a whole card easily. We even made a trip to Maryland’s fabled Riverboat on the Potomac which is a building on pilings located at a swimming beach, not a boat, and has a panoramic deck and full bar and restaurant. (It’s only technically in Maryland, adjacent to the lovely little town of Colonial Beach, Virginia.)

Of course, we made several visits in person to Laurel Park this Summer as well. With free admission, free parking, and even twilight racing in the Summer lasting all the way until sunset it’s clear that the Jockey Club has made a pleasant and effortless fan experience a priority in a way that the MLB and NFL can’t or won’t. Then there’s the multimillion dollar improvements continually being added. It’s not an exaggeration to say that every time we visit Laurel they’ve found a way to outdo themselves. Handles are up and the sport is healthier than it’s been in years. It may be sacrilege to say so, but it’s hard to buy into the annual hand-wringing over Pimlico when Laurel is transforming itself into a world-class facility right down the road.

As long as we’re blaspheming, we’ll add that for our money Maryland Million Day is the very best day of racing our state has to offer, including the Preakness and Black Eyed Susan. Our homegrown fields include horses with nationwide star quality like Ben’s Cat, Rockinn On Bye, and Phlash Phelps, and the atmosphere and fan experience on Maryland’s Day is the best you’ll find anywhere, in any sport.

We’re so excited for this weekend’s races we dove in early, did our homework (in advance, as any good handicapper should) and made our 2016 selections so we can enjoy Marylandia to the fullest. In a first on this site we’re going to publish those picks here, with commentary. Picks are in order of preference. All ticket prices reflect suggested wagers at the minimum base price. Enjoy and good luck!

Race 1

We look past the morning line favorite Head Games who seems very vulnerable in this position. Instead we go to the 6 Sarah’s Treasure who was washed off the turf two back and had enough to hit the board last out but for being DQ’ed. Number 9 Bete Noir brings turf experience and gets Trevor McCarthy along with what looks like a hidden class drop on this big day of racing. We’d also use the 3 Cherished Prize on exotic tickets being in the money four of her last 5 tries.

Race 2

The 6 Chapel of Chimes is one of 3 horses we’d use as a single today. The connections are clearly very savvy at taking advantage of the condition book and this horse stands out well above the rest of the field. She will be a short price but when you believe a horse will win it’s best not to bet against it. This race starts a P3 and P4 and that’ll probably be our angle. In exotics we’d use the 7 Star Eighty, one of the more consistent in this field and we’ll look at the 9 Next Best Thing who may be just that if she draws in.

Pick 3: 6/ 3,4,6,7,11/ 2,8,9,13 = $8.00
Pick 4: 6/ 3,4,6,7,11/ 2,8,9,13/ 2,3 = $12.00

Race 3

Two year old races are tough to pick and this one looks pretty wide open to us. We go to one on the AE list O Dionysus with the breeding advantage. Sired by Bodiemeister and purchased for $190,000 as a yearling, he’s got a win and a second so far to back up those credentials. We also noticed the 6 Slick Man, who figures to be among the last first-timers by the prolific Maryland stallion Not For Love who was euthanized in May at age 26. Not For Love has progeny in many of today’s races but Slick Man may well be a slick entry in this spot. We’ll be watching him closely in the paddock. The 4 In Arrears is in good form and could easily improve on a sharp win last out. Number 7 Greatbullsoffire failed as a short price favorite in a similar spot last month but can’t be ignored completely today.

Race 4

The 8 Diamond Dollar is another by Not For Love and looks to have a class advantage here. She’s yet to put up any eye-popping speed figures but has won at this level and never missed the board in five starts. We think an average performance by her today may be enough to get it done. The 2 Item will be a serious threat with any improvement at all. Number 7 Freisani looks to be working better than her lone start and may be a great price. AE 13 Misty On Pointe will draw interest if she’s in.

Pick 3: 2,8,9/ 2,3/ 2,7,12 = $9.00
Pick 4: 2,8,9/ 2,3/ 2,7,12/ 10 = $9.00

Race 5

Going with yet another Not For Love pick we like the 2 Devilish Love. Proven on the turf and with stakes experience we think this grey will be tough to beat. Her 5-1 morning line would be a gift from the Gods at post time. The 5 Northern Smile is similarly positioned and has a great shot today. AE 9 Vielsalm loves Laurel and loves the distance and should take a lot of money if she’s in. The 3 Rocky Policy looks like a bounce candidate after a gaudy 103 Equibase figure last out and doesn’t impress us too much. She’s cross-entered in today’s 9th race as well. We think she’ll run here but we hope the connections get what they deserve for pulling such a stunt.

Pick 3: 2,3,5,9/ 1,2,7,12/ 10 = $8.00

Race 6

This race sucks. It’ll probably be a year-maker for whatever small potatoes trainer wins it. The top 3 program selections are 2, 7, and 12 and they’re the only ones that look like live runners to us along with the 1 first off the claim for Wayne Potts.

Pick 3: 1,2,7,12/ 10/ 4,7,1 = $6.00

Race 7

In our biggest single of the day we’re going to the 10 Phlash Phelps whose got the speed over turf making this his race to lose. If he weren’t in it we’d be looking to number 1 Here’s To Mike or the 3 Spartianos, both of which would be fit to win a race today, but maybe not this race. The 11 Lord of Love may figure in the exotics but reeks of Seconditis with just 2 wins in 33 tries lifetime on the turf.

Pick 3: 10/ 4,1,7/ 11 = $1.50
Pick 5: 10/ 4,1,7/ 11/ 4,6,7/ 7 = $4.50

Race 8

Chalky though it may be, in the Sprint Handicap we’ve got to go with the 4 Morning Fire. Along with a couple of stakes wins his recent running lines show him running behind horses like Counterforce and Destin, so he’s been facing some of the stiffest competition in the country and we think he can outgun the old man Ben’s Cat. With a legendary 32 wins in 59 starts the Cat is a threat to win every race in which he’s entered, and he may make some magic today so we won’t ignore him entirely.

Pick 3: 1,4/ 4,8,11/ 4,6,7 = $9.00
Pick 4: 1,4/ 4,8,11/ 4,6,7/ 7 = $9.00

Race 9

The Distaff handicap brings us our Price Play of the day with number 8 Wowwhatabrat at a 15-1 Morning Line. There’s some consistent improvement here between this filly’s 3 and 4 year old years and her last race at Parx was a big (but not too big) step up with a win at 30-1. She can excel at 7 furlongs and may leave a lot of people scratching their heads. We also like the 4 Scip’s Sonata who looks like she’s coming into her own in mid-career and makes the switch to a hot young rider in Nik Juarez. She should be a very square price too. We can’t leave out the heavily favored 11 Loveable Lady (another by Not For Love) who’s got a lot to like but the price is not one of those things.

Daily Double: 11,4,8/ 4,6,7 = $9
Pick 3: 11,4,8/ 4,6,7/ 7 = $4.50

Race 10

The Maryland Million Classic will definitely be a show this year and while there are a lot of ways it can go we think the edge belongs to the 4 Admiral’s War Chest. He looks like the one most likely to survive a hot pace over long distance. It could be they want to send him to the lead and let him try to hold it, which worked last out, and which may be as good a plan as any. Program favorites Flash McCaul and Just Jack definitely have speed, but may do their best work at shorter distances. Also Eligibles Noteworthy Peach and Eyeplayeveryday could make an already tough race even more challenging.

Race 11

We usually don’t bother with the Get Out race but today the 7 Publishanditerate really catches our eye. Sire Tapit’s six figure stud fee is really eye popping in a field of horses who aren’t worth that price combined. As a first time gelding and with a 5 pound weight break it looks an awful lot like juggernaut Sagamore Farm is trying to come in with one of their sneakiest trainers (DePaz is 3 for 9 and let the horse walk 5f in a 1:05 workout last week) and steal a purse after a big day of racing while everyone’s heading for the parking lot. We wouldn’t treat this entry like a traditional single, but we don’t think enough of any of the others to use them so we may use him on the end of horizontal wagers or even back him in the win pool if he looks fit in the paddock and circumstances allow.

What’s the Matter With Downtown Baltimore?

There’s been a lot of talk in town recently about the paltry attendance figures at Camden Yards in 2016. Five weeks ago we wrote a detailed post about the many reasons we think attendance has suffered lately. Since then, the TV ratings numbers have been released, putting the Orioles in the top 5 in Major League Baseball, and indicating that all of the cities where ratings are highest are mid-sized cities comparable to Baltimore. We take this as further evidence that the team is failing to sell tickets despite a broad base of interest in the area.

One factor in Orioles attendance that we barely mentioned in that post, but which is often cited in O’s discussions is the reluctance, real or perceived, of suburbanites to visit downtown Baltimore. This is often brought up with respect to the aftermath of last year’s riots, in which the ballpark played a fairly significant role, especially on Saturday April 25, and the fear of city violence generally.

Violence in Baltimore is what sunshine is to Florida. It is omnipresent. It permeates everything it touches. It gets into your skin and it changes you. No matter what measures you take to avoid it or to insulate yourself from it, it will touch you at some point. You will feel its effects. Just like the Sun, violence touches everyone in Baltimore. The only question is the degree to which it will burn. This is a fact of life.

Because violence and crime in our city is a pervasive and permanent condition, we all have a need to reckon with it personally, and relate to it according to our own personal philosophies. So when it comes up in conversation those conversations, much like small talk about the sunny weather, usually don’t get very far.

Are Suburbanites scared of crime? We don’t know. You’d have to ask them about that, and get them to answer you honestly and in detail and find out how their feelings in the aggregate affect behaviors as a whole over time. But we don’t think they’re particularly scared of crime. No one leaves their house convinced they’re going to be a crime victim that day. It just doesn’t work that way no matter where you live, so maybe “scared” is the wrong way to think of things.

It’s also a mistake to think of Suburbanites as a wholly different breed of human from city-dwellers; a breed apart that’s less cultured, less tolerant, less hearty, etc etc. A very high percentage of households in Central Maryland are made up of ex-city dwellers. Even if our county neighbors never lived in the city, it is certain that many of them have some connection to the city, and have spent sufficient time in the city to have formed their own opinions about it, and have at the very least generational connections to the city. Our point is that people who live in the suburbs of Baltimore don’t base their opinions and actions just on headlines, they base them on their own lived experience. So being a city dweller and taking the opinion that ‘those hicks just don’t know what they’re missing out on’ is counterproductive and helps no one.

 

Context.

A phrase we’ve heard repeated often over the last month is that Downtown Baltimore is “relatively safe.” Whenever someone says that any part of Baltimore is “relatively safe” what they are relating it to is the ‘wings of the butterfly,’ that is, those parts of East and West Baltimore where drugs, crime, and violence are so pervasive that shootings happen literally several times a day. They’re relating Downtown to some of the most violent neighborhoods in America. By the standards of Oliver or Sandtown virtually everywhere in the world is relatively safe.

Downtown is not actually safe. It is an unsafe place. Period. An unbelievable amount of crime happens downtown every day. Just this week, a few blocks up Howard Street from the stadium some insist is perfectly safe someone ran over one of the guys who was trying to carjack him. There was also an armed robbery right in front of Miss Shirley’s on Pratt Street, which aside from the Harbor Promenade is about as ‘nice’ as downtown gets. These are just two examples. If you wanted to go and find police data on what crime is happening downtown, it’s out there. Reading through a week of it will make your head spin. But we’re not going to go deep into the numbers here because crime numbers are only a small part of a very broad story. For every crime that’s reported, there are many more unreported, and for all of those unreported crimes there are about a thousand little things that aren’t quite crimes, but which make downtown Baltimore a highly unpleasant environment.

For those of us who live in the city, and who frankly don’t get out of it often enough, it can be easy to forget just how safe the rest of America is. Right now we’re in Jacksonville, where walking downtown is so clean and peaceful it’s shocking. Although Duval County has a longstanding reputation as the state’s murder capital, and people here love to clutch their pearls about murders, Jax had 96 murders last year spread over an area ten times bigger than Baltimore with a larger population. So to say “well crime is bad everywhere” just doesn’t wash. The murder rate here was 11.4 per 100k last year. Ours was 55. Jax, Raleigh, Richmond, Nashville, and dozens of other cities present a stark contrast to downtown Baltimore. This is nothing to do with city size, since Baltimore’s downtown core is small enough to compare to much smaller cities [we’re referring to the area bounded by President/Fallsway- MLK- Franklin Street and Lee Street] and since many larger cities manage to be much safer, cleaner and more pleasant. But one need look no further than the rest of Maryland to find safe urban cores. Annapolis, Frederick, Towson, Columbia are all orders of magnitude safer than Baltimore is, even adjusted for population.

It is our belief that downtown is dangerous in general, but that there is a specific threat associated with leaving the ballpark after Orioles games. Leaving among the crowd is all well and good, but much of that crowd parks in the stadium lots and nearby garages. If you walk more than about 3 blocks from the stadium in any direction that’s not due east toward the Inner Harbor, the character of the streets starts to change rapidly. It is on these fringes where criminals have been known to target Orioles fans specifically, where the crowd has fallen away, the orange shirts are easy to spot, and the wide expanse of West Baltimore provides a convenient maze in which to fade away after an attack. We have a friend who was robbed in this manner, and was beaten badly. We’ve heard many people (from both within and outside the city) say they were formerly in the habit of parking for free across MLK and no longer do so for that reason. Just as we said before that criminals target cyclists in specific locations, so too do they target Baseball fans in the same way. Here’s an example from 2014 that made the news, and it’s not the only one of its type in the news, but if you’re lucky enough not to get stabbed in the attack it won’t generate any press.

Since 2014 the problem of groups of teens robbing people has become much worse, with no improvement in sight. But don’t take our word for it, read what the police and State’s Attorney’s office had to say about the problem just this week. From the article:

“Robberies were up 12 percent this year through Sept. 24 compared with the same period last year, according to citywide crime data, reaching at least a six-year high. The increase has pushed overall violent crime up 5 percent, despite declines in other crimes, including homicides, rapes and arsons.

The spike in robberies is being led by carjackings, up 44 percent, and “miscellaneous” robberies — at schools, Metro stations and other semi-public locations — which are up 64 percent. Residential robberies are up 7 percent; street robberies are up 16 percent.

It’s worth noting that when anyone says “murders are down from last year” that last year was an all-time high in terms of murder rate, so we’re slightly below the all time high. And what are our city leaders doing while all of this is going on? The Mayor and the State’s Attorney are sniping at each other in the paper like the couple of incompetent prima donnas they are, the police union just chose one of two loudmouth racists as a president, and cops are saying on the record to a national audience that we “should get used to 300 murders a year.”

So the entire city of Baltimore is a very dangerous place and downtown is not immune from that.

But let’s put that aside for now. Let’s assume for a moment that you and your family can walk down any street in Baltimore and be assured that there is a zero percent chance you’ll experience or witness violent crime. Would you be eager to come downtown then?

Probably not. You might want to visit the Inner Harbor, which we will admit is a fine thing. We would go so far as to say that along with the stadiums themselves the Inner Harbor and the attractions immediately ringing the water are just about the only part of Downtown that don’t need a major overhaul. Which is probably why myopic city leaders are so damn eager to give it one. Of course the harbor would be a hell of a lot nicer if we stopped dumping tens of millions of gallons of sewage into it every year.

 

The Clusterfuck.

Aside from these attractions Downtown is a fucking mess. Earlier this week the Sun’s Colin Campbell shined a light on the problem of constant roadwork everywhere downtown. There are so many infrastructure failures, lane closures and private construction worksites that one can hardly turn a corner without being stifled by cones or having your ears assaulted by jackhammers. The problem is no more pleasant for pedestrians and cyclists than it is for drivers. And while the story just appeared this week, the problem has been ongoing for least 2-3 years and is not limited to downtown. Likewise the City Paper wrote its feature this week on the ongoing sinkhole boondoggles plaguing Baltimore’s streets. As a writer and a Baltimorean, CP’s Woods is pretty dense. He thinks Lexington Market is “vibrant” and violent gang members are ‘community activists’ (some later indicted for violent charges like good ole Meech and the latest one, indicted just this week). So when someone like him starts using phrases like “alien hellscape” it’s pretty clear we’ve got a big problem. If people who live in the very near suburbs are requiring over an hour to drive home from work as the Sun article says, they are goddamn sure not going to get back in the car and show up for a 7:05 Orioles game.

All of this work is just routine maintenance. None of it is the kind of radical redesign that is truly necessary downtown. So many of our major streets, Lombard in particular, are 3-5 lane speedways designed to power through as fast as you possibly can and were fit to make into a literal Indy Car race track in a  tourism gambit that was an epic failure so bad we don’t even have to link to it. To fix downtown, to make it the kind of place that people truly desire to spend time (and money!) means to adopt radical measures like a full redesign, banning private vehicles from the dead center of town, and eliminating the circulator entirely in favor of making transit options downtown free of charge. We haven’t got the time, money or political inclination to accomplish that for ten generations and everyone knows it. Upcoming improvements like the Maryland Avenue Cycletrack are just piecemeal offerings that will allow the city to claim Progressivism while pissing off drivers en masse and serving cyclists unsatisfactorily. The recent examples of Roland Avenue, Fallsway, the JFT and the ‘alien hellscape’ that is the patched-up crime ridden miles of Guilford Avenue show that this has been and will continue to be the city’s approach to non-car infrastructure.

 

Public Safety Beyond Crime.

Even if a visitor could make himself immune to crime, he can still never know when the next sinkhole will open under his feet or the next water main will burst, the next building will crumble, or the next car will crash without the cops even bothering to show up. The Howard Street Rail tunnel dates to the Civil War and has been known to alternately flood and derail trains and catch on fire for days at a time. Despite losing a federal grant to modernize it the folks in charge are dead certain that big payday is right around the corner. There is no good outcome here. If they don’t get it, maybe Howard Street collapses the same way 26th Street did. If they get it, it’s another major downtown street closed for several blocks for 2-3 years. You get a cone! And you get a cone! And you get a cone!!!

There’s also the matter of the people who make downtown an undesirable place to be. If you come up President Street or MLK it’s hard to find an intersection without a homeless guy begging, aggressive squeegee kids or both. Both sides of downtown are now host to permanent homeless encampments, which the city has demonstrated it has neither the will nor the ability to deal with adequately. Junkies, dirt bikers, roaming bands of teenagers numbering as many as 200, political demonstrations, predatory tow truck drivers, meter maids and traffic cops; these are all people you’re likely to find in downtown Baltimore and while you may think one or all of them are just fine, most regular folks would like to limit their exposure to these people as much as possible, which means that as long as downtown is given over to them visitors will be discouraged from spending more time than is necessary downtown.

Businesses of all types downtown have been suffering badly since at least the time of last year’s riots. This is another fact so commonly accepted as to not necessitate a link. Receipts are down so much that even the most eager boosters of downtown have had trouble spinning the situation publicly. This fact alone is strong evidence that a reluctance to be downtown is at least a part of what’s dragging down attendance at Camden Yards. It seems very unlikely the Orioles would be the only business unaffected by a widespread general trend.

But we believe, for all the reasons just stated, those people who do come downtown for any reason; work, sports, to visit an attraction, run an errand, or even just pass through are unlikely to spend any more time than is necessary there. This means that people who work downtown aren’t popping over to happy hour and then going to the game, the people who are going to the game aren’t walking over to Power Plant Live afterward, and people going to the theater aren’t dining beforehand, etc. In this way downtown is not integrally connected to itself. People go there to do what they need to do, and nothing more.

 

What is Downtown?

Perhaps this is a good time to take a look at Downtown. What is it made of? Downtown is many things to many people, but what is it block by block?

Let’s say there’s 100 square city blocks downtown. We’re not sure what the exact number is but the area bounded by the streets we named above is roughly 10 x ten blocks. An area of about 3 x 3 blocks is water, 17 blocks are taken up by the major attractions around the harbor and Camden Yards itself. Some of these major attractions (the convention center and arena in particular) need updating to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, money which is not about to materialize any time soon. That leaves 74. We count 16 blocks occupied entirely by University of MD Hospital and its related buildings, as well as Mercy. So we’re down to 58. We estimate about 12 blocks dominated by government buildings, including the Holocaust memorial and the useless BCCC building. 46 left.

Let’s assume ten blocks are given over to nothing but parking garages. There are more garages than 10, and some sites have garages built in, but we’d guess about 10 blocks is just parking, leaving 36 blocks.

Roughly 20 of those blocks are north of Fayette and west of Liberty (Cathedral) Street, not including a couple UM buildings already counted. This area includes Lexington Market, which is a shithole that visitors in general do not like at all with the possible exception of Faidley’s, the giant empty acres of disused government buildings at the end of the highway to nowhere, and the long blighted and crumbling Light Rail corridor. One of the better blocks in this area is 200 Saratoga Street, which was profiled in detail by WYPR’s Out of the Blocks program. It’s a sympathetic portrayal, but the life described by the residents of that block in their own words is pretty rough. An immigrant shopkeeper talks about having been robbed repeatedly and having no recourse. Virtually everyone who is there is there because the rent is dirt cheap and for no other reason. Our own great grandparents used to own a store in that block. They fled it about a hundred years ago.

So we’re down to 16 blocks. One of those blocks is The Block, 400 East Baltimore street, which despite the nostalgia factor has outlived its usefulness and is to our mind a net negative for downtown. In the fifteen blocks that remain there are an outsized number of churches. While the churches are typically well-kept and historical in character (think Old Otterbein, Zion Lutheran, Basilica, etc) we’re not sure how much they fill the pews these days and excepting Poe’s grave they are not tourist attractions in their own right. Let’s say, conservatively, that churches occupy 3 blocks. That means the rest of downtown, the part where locals are wont to live, work and seek recreation, are limited to 12 blocks. Those dozen blocks contain their own fair share of eye sores, like the site of the former Mechanic Theater, but are in the main dominated by hotels, of which there is approximately a metric fuckton downtown, and offices, many of which have had significant trouble leasing space since Harbor East came into its own, becoming effectively a second, much nicer downtown sitting right at the edge of the crappy, gross, dangerous real downtown.

Office space is in so little demand in downtown Baltimore that the conversion of offices to luxury apartments continues apace. It is safe to say that the only people interested in renting these apartments are out-of towers who don’t know any better, and who have never taken a block-by-block look at downtown such as we just laid out. The Kirby Fowlers of the world are quick to point out that downtown is “in the middle of everything” but if those new arrivals decide to stay in town permanently most of them will eventually move to either the county, or to one of the actual harbor neighborhoods that they wanted to be close to in the first place. The positives, the actual amenities for locals that exist downtown can be counted on your fingers. Power Plant Live and Port Discovery are okay for their clientele, the Everyman, Hippodrome, the Main Library, and the newly opened Shakespeare theater are pretty nice. There’s maybe half a dozen decent restaurants that cater to locals and about two decent bars and a couple of coffee shops. That’s it.

 

The Importance of Being Connected.

But no discussion of what Downtown is can be complete without acknowledging that it’s a transit hub.

Our transit system, the buses in particular, are completely fucked up. That’s not just our own opinion, it’s the finding of a recent study which ranked Baltimore 24th out of 25 cities rated by transit time. That study provided the lede of a story in the current issue of Baltimore Magazine, which draws a pretty complete picture of the current state of transit downtown. It also mentions that unlike some other cities, Baltimore has the very highest income disparity between transit riders and non-riders.

We could crunch numbers all day long but what this means at street level is the bus is full of poor people. Regular readers of this site will recall that we recently lived four years without a car in inner-city Baltimore, (more total, rest assured) and we can tell you from firsthand experience that while the low quality of service makes for an unpleasant ride, the people on the bus make the experience even less pleasant. We won’t go into detail now because we already did two years ago. (Ironically, the ferry dock featured in that post as an example of a nice thing downtown suddenly collapsed into the water a year and a half ago and will probably never be rebuilt. It’s now just another example of a lack of public safety on a catastrophic level.)

The point is that rich people will never volunteer to ride buses with poor people. For a complete picture of transit segregation in Baltimore we’ll refer you to Alec MacGillis writing in Places Journal earlier this year. While the scores of buses jamming the streets of the choke-point hub are themselves unpleasant to visitors, the large crowds of very poor people waiting on bus stops are even more of an anathema to visitors and their tourist dollars. This is why they seldom stray far from the harbor, and why the area around Lexington Market is decidedly blacker than the rest of downtown. And it’s not as if the poor themselves are well-served by this arrangement. If you think they like being made to sit at the stop for half an hour or more, or go from stop to stop and mode to mode, they don’t. Downtown, more than any other part of the city is neutral territory- a place where you’ll find people of all races and incomes, and so too it’s among the parts of the city with the most social tension, which has been markedly increased since the death of Freddie Gray.

On Friday, a Twitter friend of ours, who is a new city homeowner and a true believer in Baltimore posted a detailed series of tweets describing the terrifying street harassment she’d faced on a bus downtown that morning. It was so bad it’s leading her to consider buying a car so that she won’t have to go through it again, which will certainly happen given enough future bus rides. Any person who can afford even a very basic used car would think and do likewise. This alone is a book-length topic.

 

Tone Deaf Leadership.

Baltimore’s own Keiffer Mitchell was astonished, just astonished! to hear this week that baseball fans don’t wanna hop on the bus and come out to the Yard. He even used that phrase again- “relatively safe.” When we were finally able to get a reply out of him all he had to say was “Don’t you live in Towson?” Which we found to be incredibly condescending. As much as we’d love to move out of the city today, our house failed to sell at a loss so we’re stuck here for the time being. Maybe this is a fine town when your family name is carved into the major downtown buildings, but when you can’t afford to sell your home and you and your friends are repeatedly crime victims it doesn’t look so rosy. But beside this, Keiffer misses the point. The point is that not enough people from outside the city are coming downtown and spending money. Which he should, you know, give a shit about if he weren’t too busy advising Larry Hogan on how to fuck up transit even worse.

Mitchell isn’t alone in believing that publicly saying downtown is safe can wish it into being. Councilman Eric Costello had a mini-freakout this week when local sportscaster Mark Vivano tweeted something sarcastic about downtown crime vis a vis the Orioles. We follow Costello. We’ve never seen him react so suddenly to news of an actual crime in his district of which the examples multiply daily, or turn up at the scene of a crime, or, goddamn it, do a single fucking thing to make downtown safer. Earlier this year an employee of the Downtown Partnership, one of the very people hired to make downtown clean and safe stabbed a homeless man in a fight. Where was Costello then? But let someone with a whopping 11,000 twitter followers even hint that downtown is unsafe and Costello will give that person his undivided attention, asking immediately to talk privately via DM.

At the very same moment Costello was tweeting at Viviano The Baltimore Sun was publishing the first installment of a blockbuster yearlong piece of investigative journalism on why gun violence in Baltimore is now more deadly than ever. It really is a landmark piece of journalism which will probably get Justin George a Pulitzer, and of course Costello is silent about it.

Some background on Eric Costello: He was head of one of the neighborhood associations around Federal Hill and was handpicked by incompetent grifter and council president Jack Young to be appointed to a vacant seat. So of course he can be counted on to never break with Young on anything. Costello’s district includes all of downtown, a large part of Mount Vernon, and neighborhoods Northwest of downtown but his main base of support is Fed Hill Yuppies and waterfront condo dwellers. We’d be surprised if you could find a dozen people in Upton who have ever heard of him. So far his major accomplishment in office has been saving the Circulator’s Banner Route from elimination, which is fitting because that route is the perfect example of duplicative service that is expensive to run and serves only to allow South Baltimore residents to get downtown and back without giving up a parking spot or getting on an MTA bus with all those nasty poors. So Costello has done his part to keep transit segregated.

Also at the very same moment Costello was panicked about a tiny bit of bad Twitter PR and the Sun was winning a probable Pulitzer, the Baltimore Brew published a story about Jack Young voiding a part of the city charter to allow him to solicit money to throw council members appreciation parties. This money can come from organizations with business before the council, and if that organization is charitable that money can be written off. This is graft and corruption, plain and simple.

The voters of course do not appreciate the council, which is why half of those motherfuckers are leaving office in the first place. This has been absolutely the worst council in living memory, and we don’t think there’s a credible voice inside the city who would disagree with that. In a subsequent report the Brew sought comment from current and presumptive councilmen and Costello’s name was one of many conspicuously absent. This is par for the course, inasmuch as Costello’s social media presence amounts to a constant PR stream aimed straight at South Baltimore to the point of using neighborhood accounts as campaign platforms and blocking anyone, even constituents, who are even slightly critical. He’ll probably block the Chop on Twitter for writing this.

But we want to know, Eric. Did you know about Jack Young’s party plans? And now that the story is out what do you have to say about them?

And what would you say to the woman who came downtown all the way from Delaware for a special event, Bike Party, and had a group of teens attack her and her friends when they fell behind the group and had their bikes stolen on Biddle Street in your own district! Just three hours after you freak out on Twitter, Councilman Costello, the very sort of visitors we so desperately need in our city come downtown and suffer violent crime immediately. What would you say to her? How much boosterism do you think it will take to get her to come back to downtown Baltimore again? There’s no amount of Facebook posting that will get her back. She’s likely done with Baltimore forever.

 

What Now?

None of this is meant to denigrate the people who live downtown. If you live there, or near there, and you genuinely like spending time in downtown Baltimore and are very happy with it the way it is that’s great. We’re happy for you and we wish there were more people like you. But to pretend that downtown Baltimore is objectively good or clean or safe or vibrant is disingenuous. It would require a massive amount of replacing, retrofitting and investment to make it what we would all like it to be. Now that our city has invested astronomical sums in Harbor East, Harbor Point, and Port Covington the renaissance needed in downtown is virtually guaranteed never to happen in our lifetimes. It will continue to be a space dominated by a few large institutions with the gaps between them either sitting idle for generations, as with the Superblock or the abandoned bus station, or various unremarkable businesses coming, going and barely subsisting, as with the 200 Block of Saratoga.

There are a few people whose entire job it is to sell the idea of downtown. The BOPA, Downtown Partnership, BDC, Visit Baltimore and their ilk make very high tax-generated salaries for planning events large and small, successful and not, for being (ahem) a liaison to anyone in the business community who hasn’t completely given up on downtown, and for getting quoted in the paper about how great it all is. The problem is that most of what’s great is all in some distant and misty future. The harbor will be swimmable by 2020 or the Superblock will be developed as soon as the lawsuits are settled or once we get a new arena- man oh man won’t that be great! The Hipsters are just about to turn the corner on Howard Street and the Bikeshare is going to open any day now and the Robicellis are going to save us all with cupcakes!

But we were told all that in 1980 when Harborplace opened and again in 1992 when the stadium opened and the light rail was completed. A full generation later is downtown any better off?

When we started this site, the intention was to be overwhelmingly positive. We wanted to highlight great things happening in Baltimore every single day. And for a few years we did- we wrote glowing things every day on topics and events in which we were genuinely interested. We used to post about shows at Sonar and the Talking Head. We used to go downtown to those shows but what happened? Both sides of that club got shut down and both owners were involved in major drug trafficking. Paradox just shut down too. No clubs ever last in Downtown Baltimore. There’s always some motherfucker shooting someone. Just last month it happened again. We used to go to ballgames all the time before they tripled in price. As time goes by there’s less to draw us downtown, and more to drive us away when we are there. We don’t like that we’ve become almost entirely negative all the time on this site and about the city in general, but what’s more important that what we like is saying what needs to be said and isn’t being said elsewhere, and being as honest as possible about a city we do still love. After all, if we just didn’t care we wouldn’t sit here tapping out five thousand words of angry negativity at a time. Someday we’ll live somewhere else. We’ll have the luxury of hoping for all the best for our hometown and its people and not paying too much attention to the details. But until that day comes we’re going to keep being critical as often as is necessary, because we know the people of Baltimore deserve better.

Baltimore’s $15 and Hour Minimum Wage Bill Sent Back to Committee In Council

Ed. Note: Today’s post is by guest author and Baltimore resident Gabriel Sikowitz. You can follow him on Twitter @GabrielSikowitz.

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This past week the Baltimore City Council sent a bill authorizing a $15 minimum wage back to committee. It will almost surely be brought up with the new Council. At the current minimum wage of $8.25, a full time job at or on the minimum wage cannot feed a family and it cannot provide for rent in the vast majority of Baltimore’s neighborhoods.

Workers who make the minimum wage are not youths and college students looking to make extra money. Nearly 43% of minimum wage earners in Baltimore provide for kids or are married. Nearly 30% of minimum wage earners are parents. A fight for $15 an hour is a fight for families that can work with dignity and fewer hours.

One of the most consistent arguments against a minimum wage is that it will increase unemployment. This is false. Modest increases in the minimum wage boosts wages, while having little effect in the unemployment rate. There is always anecdotal evidence of businesses that close or move or claim they will. However, economists agree that increases in the minimum wage do not increase unemployment.

The Baltimore City Council recently sent the proposal for the $15 minimum wage back to committee, all but assuring that it will come up with the new council. The current minimum wage for Baltimore City is $8.25 an hour and the tipped wage is $3.63. This bill does not raise the wage overnight to $15 an hour but it will phase (in) over the course of four years. The bill also limits the amount of money that employers can withhold and strengthens the Wage Commission’s ability to fight wage theft.

As I stated earlier, the minimum wage wouldn’t immediately jump to $15 an hour, it would be phased in over the next four years. While the bill was sent back to committee, the new council is most likely to support bringing it up again for debate and it would look very similar. The present bill would phase the wage in like this:


July 1, 2016, $8.75;
January 1, 2017, $10.00;
July 1, 2017, $10.50;
July 1, 2018, $12.00;
July 1, 2019, $13.50;
July 1, 2020, $15.00;

After the fourth year (2020) the wage would be tied to the Consumer Price Index and any increases would be tied to increases in the index. Tipped wage earners would also benefit from a similar boost. Their current wage is $3.63 an hour. It would then slowly increase until it hits $15 an hour.


January 1, 2017, $4.50;
July 1, 2017, $5.25;
July 1, 2018, $6.00;
July 1, 2019, $7.50;
July 1, 2020, $9.00;
July 1, 2021, $10.50;
July 1, 2022, $12.00;
July 1, 2023, $14.00;
July 1, 2024, $15.00;

After the fourth year (2024) the tipped wage would be tied to the Consumer Price Index and any increases would be tied to increases in the index. It should be noted that the tipping is not a universal custom and in some countries it is frowned upon if not an alien custom.

As with all pieces of legislation different departments have the ability to comment on the bill. The Baltimore Development Corporation officially took no position, however it strongly implied its opposition. The BDC suggests that because Baltimore has a higher minimum wage, people from surrounding counties will seek work in Baltimore City in direct competition with Baltimore workers. The BDC also provided a survey of businesses. The survey found that there is not a strong opposition to raising the minimum wage in Baltimore amongst business owners. Roughly 39% of respondents are opposed to the minimum wage, 25% support the increase and 36% took no position. Below is what employers would say the impact of an increase would be on them.

The Case for $15 in Baltimore:

In 1964 Baltimore felt that neither the state nor the federal minimum wage was high enough for workers to enjoy a minimal standard of living, in doing so it became one of the first city minimum wage laws. Since then the state and federal government have increased the minimum wage, however workers have seen their wages stagnate.

The current minimum wage in Baltimore is the same as most of the rest of the state, which is $8.25 an hour. If one works eight hours a day, five days a week for 52 weeks a year that comes out to $17,160 a year pre-tax. That’s great news if you are a single person household, but bad if you are a family of three. The Federal poverty level for a family of three is $20,160 a year.

$15 Varies across the country and $15 can get you further in Ottumwa, Iowa than in Baltimore, indeed it will go further in Harford County than it will here in Baltimore City. It is more expensive to live here than it is in other jurisdictions. Our wages should reflect that. Last year it was estimated that while Maryland’s minimum wage was $8.25 the purchasing power of that was $7.44, slightly above what the minimum wage was last changed at the Federal level in 2009 to $7.25 an hour.

The Tax Foundation published a report earlier this month on how much $100 is worth across the country. This is a result in purchasing power differences. Cities and suburbs are more expensive places to live than rural and exurban areas. In the Baltimore metro area $100 has the purchasing power of $92.89, while in Cumberland $100 has the purchasing power of $113.10. It should be noted that the Tax Foundation describes itself as non-partisan but some view it as pro-business.

The Economic Policy Institute broke down what an increased minimum wage would mean in Baltimore. The demographics make it clear that minimum wage earners in Baltimore are working families and not part-time workers. An increase in the minimum wage would be a boost for almost 98,000 working people; almost 27% of all workers in Baltimore City. This would not be a boost for teenagers, 95.7% of all minimum wage workers are 20 or older and almost 80% are 25 and up. Women make up 55.3% of workers who earn the minimum wage almost a ¼ of working mothers and 1/3 of single mothers would get a bump in their paycheck. Any increase in the minimum wage would disproportionately benefit racial minorities, 54.2% of workers who earn the minimum wage are African-American, 8.3% are Hispanic, and 5.1% are Asian. Workers who would see gains in their incomes make up roughly 54.6% of their families’ income. 20% Of workers who earn the minimum wage are a family’s sole provider. This increase would have a disproportionate impact on people who work full time. 73.8% of those who’d benefit are full time workers, and only 7.7% are part time workers who work 20 hours or less.

The minimum wage is not a living wage in Baltimore City. The people who earn it aren’t teenagers looking for extra money or college students picking up a couple of shifts between classes. They are working men and women, many of whom have families. We cannot continue to have a wage that keeps people in poverty who work full time. We cannot have families who have one or both parents work full time and still just get by. A $15 minimum wage will lift people from earning poverty wages to earning closer to a living wage.

Orioles Attendance: The Airing of Grievances

Yesterday we heard, once again, for about the millionth time in our life as a baseball fan, that the attendance figures at Camden Yards just aren’t good enough. It’s not just yesterday. We’ve been hearing mumbles and groans to this effect for months. But yesterday it became louder than that when Dan Connolly published his latest piece calling Camden Yards a Red Sox haven. The piece got some traction on social media and was discussed more or less all day for two days on sports talk radio, with Connolly making an appearance on 105.7 Wednesday afternoon. As usual, he was wont to remind listeners exactly how much experience he has covering the Orioles (sixteen years, if you were blissfully unaware of that fact).

Like most people who are a little too close to the club, and like some of the team’s most vocal fans, Connolly pursues willful myopathy when searching for reasons why the Yard isn’t full to capacity more often. He also takes the lazy and wrong approach of simply blaming the fans for not showing up. The attendance numbers at Camden Yards are not the fault of general, casual fans, and today we’d like to explain why.

First of all, we’d like to dispense with the notion that Oriole fans are the ‘best fans in baseball’ or that such a thing even exists. This is a myth spread by nearly every MLB team for marketing purposes. Fandom is not an active, competitive sport and any attempt to rate and compare fan bases through ticket sales, jersey sales, ‘pride’ All-Star voting or any combination is just folly. No one team’s fans are better or more knowledgeable or more loyal than another’s. You can’t market your way into building a fanbase. It doesn’t work like that. It takes decades of custom and tradition to create a true fanbase.

Not altogether apart from, but certainly distinct from fanbases there are markets. It is also foolish to try to casually compare one MLB market to another. It should be obvious that Baltimore is a world apart from cities like New York, Chicago or San Francisco which have millions of people living within just a few miles of the ballpark. Nor are we Boston or Saint Louis or Atlanta, whose markets and fanbases cover giant swaths of territory over several states. Even if you do find another city to make an apt comparison, its wholly inadequate to look only at a few top-line factors like population, team record and ticket prices to make a comparison. To be of any real meaning, such a comparison would have to be comprehensive, and take into account more factors (number of plan holders, giveaways, sales promotions offered, historical attendance, schedule, etc) than could easily be considered in a blog post or a talk radio segment.

It is the lot of each MLB franchise that they must market to the market in which they play. The Orioles must do their best to sell tickets to Marylanders, and not sit around the warehouse wishing they had the fanbase of the Cubs or the Red Sox or anyone else. As it happens, they’re doing a very poor job of it in 2016.

Major League Baseball has made mistakes. Of course the commissioner’s office, with all its pomp and self-importance, will never admit that but certain of those mistakes are so obvious as to be a naked-emperor situation. The unbalanced schedule has shown itself to be in need of reform. Its whole raison d’être was to heighten the pitch and excitement of the pennant race in late August and September (thereby selling more tickets and drawing more TV viewers, of course). This never created a playoff race that was more exciting than one which occurred naturally, but since MLB changed the playoff structure and added the extra wild card, with the express purpose of getting more teams into the postseason, the unbalanced schedule has become even more absurd.

It’s common knowledge that the unbalanced schedule has hurt the Orioles on the field. What’s seldom discussed is that it also hurts the Orioles in the stands. The Orioles play almost half their season against the East, meaning almost half their home games are against the same four opponents. Half of those are against the Yankees and Red Sox.

The marketing minds at the Warehouse, and at the Commissioner’s office on Park Avenue subscribe to the theory that fans should fall all over themselves and pay a premium to see 1. An artificially induced pennant race and 2. Big name players like Jeter, ARod, Texiera, Mariano Rivera, Papi, Papelbon, etc etc. Well guess what? Those guys are all out of baseball or soon to be. The gravy train has left the station for the big markets. Even when the Yankees and Red Sox were at their peak, they were not particularly likable teams.

Their front offices, as the Dan Connollys of the world are often reminded, do a good enough job of marketing that they either induce fans to travel to see the team on the road, or reach/create enough fans down the east coast to sell a large number of tickets to our games year after year. It’s bad enough to ask Oriole fans to watch the same unlikable teams over and over again, but it becomes even more unpleasant when you’ve got to deal with 10,000 obnoxious opposing fans. These teams are just not a draw for Baltimore fans and the Warehouse still doesn’t get it. On top of that the Orioles think fans should pay more for the privilege, and charge a premium for Yankees/Sox games. This is why we personally haven’t bought single-game tickets to a NYY/BOS game in 10 years. It’s also why season ticket holders very often offer those tickets at resale to offset the price of plans.

So, having given up on seeing the Yankees and Red Sox live as a fan, we too often end up seeing the Blue Jays and Rays over and over and over again. In the long run it would help Orioles attendance greatly if there were more opportunities to see other teams, and to see live the rest of baseball’s big-name stars. This was the idea behind interleague play, but the MLB has botched that completely as well. However, that’s a topic for another day.

Another mistake MLB has made and will never admit is a mistake is running its television and blackout system the way it does. Once upon a time there were a decent amount of games broadcast on WJZ. Now there’s maybe one, two a year? The only way to watch the Orioles regularly now is to pay for cable. Like many fans, we do. In fact, watching the Orioles is the only reason we subscribe to cable in the Age of Streaming. So we’re already paying over $1000 a year to watch them before we even buy our first ticket. And the TV coverage is good. It’s among the very best in baseball. It’s a pleasure to stay at home in one’s own air-conditioned house and drink one’s own cheap beer and listen to Jim and Gary call a game. If we were given a viable and money-saving option for streaming games, we’d buy it from the league directly, and probably attend a couple more games a year. But since we’re already paying for cable, we’re going to enjoy watching it.

But the MLB isn’t the only entity making mistakes here. The Orioles’ front office has made more than a few, and continues to press on as if there were only one way to market baseball.

Perhaps the point we most want to make, one that cannot be overstated, is that fans do not owe loyalty to a club, especially when that loyalty takes the form of specific behaviors like buying tickets. Despite what Manny Machado or any self-appointed “superfan” may say, the fans aren’t obligated to buy tickets, and once they have (as with a season plan) they aren’t obligated to actually show up. It is the front office’s responsibility to continually, year-in and year-out do their best to make us want to come to games. They need to Always Be Closing and not take the fans’ support for granted which they often do, to their continual disappointment and bewilderment.

The price of tickets is just too goddamned high. Period.

When hack writers like Dan Connolly take pains to point out how O’s prices compare to other cities or how the most recent price hike is “only the third in 12 years” they’re merely parroting GM Dan Duquette who routinely uses these and other justifications for gouging fans. This misses the point entirely. A better approach would be to compare ticket prices to the local cost of living, to the recent rise in wages locally (which has been at or near zero for many years) and most importantly, how baseball stacks up against other entertainment options. After all, this is what you’re really competing for: each fan’s disposable income budgeted for entertainment. When it becomes much easier and more affordable to go see a concert or a movie or take a day trip, people are going to do that instead of coming to the ballpark.

Let’s say we have a family of four and want to plan a trip to the ballpark this weekend. We just looked on the orioles site and four tickets (middle/average seats, the yellow coded ones) to Saturday’s Astros game will run $236 with taxes and fees included. Add parking and call it $15 and you’re in for $250. $250!!! For one game!!! For that kind of money hundreds of thousands of people are going to pack up the kids and go somewhere like Gettysburg, or get weekend passes to a music festival or any number of other options. After all, they can still see the game on the cable they pay for. They don’t even have to miss the game.

(We are aware that the Ravens command hundreds of dollars for seats, but they host 8 games a year, which makes baseball and football an apples-to-oranges comparison. Admission to our other favorite sporting venue, Laurel Park, is free. Not coincidentally, we now attend more live racing dates than baseball games each year.)

Now, (and this is important) many people will point out that tickets can be had for less on Stubhub, but Stubhub is a cruelly efficient market and is not a solution to the problem of high ticket prices writ-large. First of all, the prices there correlate directly to what the team charges for seats including fees, which is too much. Second, Stubhub sucks for sellers, taking just enough in fees to maybe make it worth selling (season) tickets rather than exchanging them or giving them away. And of course, as use of Stubhub by buyers (demand) rises, so will prices of those tickets posted. Left field nosebleeds for Wednseday’s game started at $17, which is $2 OVER “face” value. There is also the problem of sellers selling tickets only in pairs or groups.)

The Orioles management and their defenders will also point to things like the Dugout Club which help with family affordability. This is true. The Dugout Club in particular is a very good value and they sell a lot of tickets through that promotion. The problem is that once a family has bought tickets to multiple games in advance, they are committed to going to those games, and are very, very unlikely to spring for additional tickets at $250 per game.) Between this, Sunday season plans, Kids Run the Bases Sunday, and some Sunday giveaways Sunday has basically become family day at the park, and the front office is kind of shooting itself in the foot if it wants to get those fans to show up on Thursday and Friday as well. This Sunday, for example, there is a shirt giveaway on top of the ongoing promotions. Why would you run so many promotions concurrently and then expect people to just show up to a full price Friday game with no giveaway?

Another promotional strategy which may have worked too well is the way the team incentivizes and pushes really fucking hard at the beginning of the year the 13 game plans and various mini-plans or flex plans of four or six games. In addition to being a significant savings on 6 games, these have become the only way to obtain Opening Day tickets, and as such sell very well. But again, if fans have already put down hundreds of dollars at the beginning of the season and have taken pains to plan ballpark trips around everything else they’ve got going on throughout the Summer, they’re unlikely to buy additional tickets on a whim because they’ve got an upcoming game to look forward to, for which they’ve paid significantly less than an additional game will cost them.

There’s also the way the team shot themselves in the foot with the playoffs in recent years. They pushed very hard to sell 13 game plans, and putting a deposit on one was virtually the only way to secure the privilege of paying hundreds more for playoff tickets. Many people did, and season ticket sales swelled. While it may have looked great on TV, being crowded in with 47,000 towel-waving, 7-Nation Army-chanting bandwagon fans was not totally enjoyable for us personally, and it wasn’t something we were keen to repeat. We know too that many people who did buy plans for the sole reason of securing playoff tickets were met with hassles, headaches and frustrations when trying to use the team’s online system to buy those tickets, and at least a few were shut out.

Raising prices right after you’ve attracted thousands of new mini-plan holders was a particularly stupid business decision. When we gave up our season plan at the beginning of this year we told our plan representative that it was a direct result of the price hike and his reaction was about what you’d expect.

Let’s now consider the position of those fans (and there are not as many of them as the Orioles think there are) who are in the market for single game tickets and want to buy them more than a week in advance and are willing to pay whatever they cost at the box office. Why in the world would they not pick a giveaway date? Of course they all do. Of course! Bobblehead or Floppy Hat or Fireworks is better than no Bobblehead or Floppy Hat or Fireworks. The team draws extremely well during popular promotions, but it does so at the expense of non-giveaway games, and it needs to find a way or ways to correct that.

Camden Yards is arguably the best ballpark in the MLB. With its favorable downtown location the club should be selling at least five or six thousand walk-up tickets to even the least desirable games. There’s no reason they couldn’t top 10k in walk up tickets for a good weather weekend game. But they’re nowhere near that. It’s almost as if they are trying to kill walk up sales. And succeeding.

When fans do decide to come to the park either as a walk-up or buying tickets online a few days in advance (or God forbid the same day) they are absolutely crushed with fees. The only way to avoid a fee is to show up more than 24 hours in advance at the ballpark in person to buy tickets, which is very impractical for even nearby fans. The Dan Duquettes of the world will point out how prices compare favorably around the league, but will never, ever mention that fees are a part of the price. The Orioles have become as sleazy as any airline when it comes to charging fees. We personally were planning to buy tickets to one of the games that Dan Connolly and talk radio have been bitching about, but a $15 left field nosebleed increases to $22.50 after fees are levied. That’s a 50% hidden markup and it’s fucking unacceptable on its face. It’s especially odious when we consider that the baseline to get in the park used to be $9, and you could actually get in for $9. On Tuesday bargain nights you even got a free T-shirt to boot.

What happened to bargain night? It was a long-standing and very popular and effective promotion that filled seats on tough-sell weeknights reliably. We’ll tell you what happened to it: Duquette decided that because the team has a few seasons of winning records behind it Bargain Night is now beneath the dignity of the club, and people should be expected to pay a premium because there’s a slightly higher chance they might see a win.

Strangely, Student Night is still not beneath the dignity of the club, and is still a giant mess of drunk kids making the LF uppers completely inhospitable to any fan wanting to watch without a Spring Break atmosphere surrounding them for 9 innings. Student night ought to be ended and replaced with a student-ID discount available for all games.

We want to explain this explicitly to Connolly, Duquette, talk radio and our fellow fans: Yes, we do want the team to attract and retain players like Machado and Jones BUT this also has very little effect on how often the average fan will decide to visit the park. They use phrases like ‘product on the field’ but the uniformed players are really only a tiny part of what keeps fans coming back loyally year in and year out. When we go to a baseball game, we’re not going merely to watch statistics be compiled in real time. To walk through the gates is, in a way, to escape time and place entirely. The city, the world outside becomes an afterthought and it’s only what’s inside the park that matters. Then too, when a fan watches a game they’re not watching only one particular game, Boston in August, as it were. We’re watching in our mind’s eye every game we’ve ever attended. When we watch from the stands, we can still see Ripken and Brian Roberts, Brady Anderson and every other player we’ve ever watched live. Everyone we’ve ever brought to a game is there with us; friends who’ve left the city, fathers who’ve passed on, kids we knew growing up… they’re all there with us when we come to the park.

The bible says “What has been will be again. What has been done will be done again. There is nothing new under the sun.” So it is in the game of baseball. This is the key to building a loyal fanbase over generations, and it is the entire difference between going to the ballpark and watching on television. The Oriole front office, to their credit, has done some very good work in this way, specifically with the kids run the bases and Fathers’ Day/Mothers’ Day promotions. But for every success they’ve had in helping fans to create new memories they’ve also been guilty of trotting out the same half dozen hall of famers a few times too many to sell nostalgia back to a new generation at inflated prices. We’re 36 years old middle aged! and we’re too young to have really seen the Robinsons and Palmer play. It means more to us to make the ballpark accessible and fun now, to make us want to come to as many perfectly ordinary games as we can attend right now than to get weepy and nostalgic for the legendary teams we never knew. By charging exorbitant premiums, forcing us to walk through metal detectors, and yes, the ongoing travails of the city’s government and crime the park is becoming less welcoming with each passing year.

Aside from the fees, we could easily write another 2500 words just on the Orioles’ newly introduced dynamic pricing, but we’re going to touch on it as briefly as possible. We’re often reminded that dynamic pricing is becoming the accepted norm around Baseball, but the Orioles are not the only team, and not the only +.500 team experiencing sluggish attendance. Like instant replay, dynamic pricing is a disgrace to all of baseball and a mistake the MLB will never admit.

The top two levels for O’s tickets are prohibitive to most fans, or are at least a disincentive. The middle two levels are about what fans expect to pay, but again, the fees are onerous. The value games, which the marketing department is quick to point to, are very few, and the games that are value games are bullshit; they’re all 12:35 weekday getaways or early-season freezing-rain specials… or are at the same time as Ravens away games. The club will do its level best to fill the opening weekend and then wonder why people don’t want to come back the very next day to watch the Rays in rainy 50 degree temps. Knocking $5 off an already exorbitant ticket isn’t going to entice fans to do that. It would be tough to give those tickets away.

Speaking of giving tickets away… ten years ago the club did it all the time. There were several promotions each season in which you could earn tickets by patronizing the team’s corporate sponsors. These are now apparently also beneath the dignity of a winning team. There’s been one this season, via Pizza Boli’s, but even that had some fans looking askance when the come-on offered four tickets but the promotion was actually good for two. Giving away between 25000 and 50000 tickets over the course of a season may look like lost profit, but when those seats are going unsold anyway, when the recipients of those tickets are going to buy hot dogs and beers, and when the Dan Connollys of the world are bemoaning empty seats ticket giveaways are a very effective way to fill those seats.

As we said, we were planning to go to one of those Boston games. We were going to pony up and pay the cost, but we didn’t. And we’re glad we didn’t! For one: as much as everyone likes to remind us that the Orioles are in first place, the Orioles are not in first place. They are, as of this writing, third in the AL East above only the fire-sale Yankees and the hapless Rays. They’re barely holding onto that bullshit second wild card. Chris Tillman missed his scheduled start. Davis got shuffled into right field. The Orioles lost both games miserably. The “product on the field” is not the premium first-class team that some keep insisting it is and the fans know this- we’re not stupid. If we’re going to pay a premium for tickets we want to do it when the team has a good chance to win.

It’s also important to note that rain was forecast for both days of the series, and Wednesday’s game was mercifully called in the sixth inning with the score at 8-1 as severe thunderstorms and flash flooding overtook downtown and even the Oriole Park concourse itself. The club can’t control the weather of course, but if we’re being asked to shell out $30, $50 $100 or more to go see a game, you better believe we’re going to check the goddamn forecast first. If this particular series was poorly attended then yeah… that might have had something to do with it. We don’t all get to sit in a nice dry press box like Dan Connolly, who among other writers will continue to call Orioles fans pathetic whether they turn up or not.

We’ve said a lot here, but we want to wrap up with a reminder to all of the talk-radio callers, Facebook homers and self-appointed superfans who call other fans pathetic when they don’t show up, then want to police every other fan’s behavior in minute detail when they do come to a game.

We’re talking about the people who excoriate other fans for leaving early with no concern for how early some others may have to work the next day. Who demand everyone stay through every rain delay. Or gripe that fans don’t stand with two out and 2 strikes. Too often Orioles fans will demand other fans wear only team gear or specific players’ gear and ridicule anyone in an out-of-date jersey. What the hell does it matter if other fans want to take selfies or play Pokemon Go at the park? You know who likes to do the Wave? Most fans, that’s who. Those same fans you complain about when they aren’t there, you bitch about when they show up and make an earnest effort to enjoy themselves. There’s no such thing as the Best Fans in Baseball, but if there was… Baltimore, we ain’t it.

The team, its ownership, the front office, and the fans need to figure out how to make Oriole Park as fun, affordable and accessible as possible over the course of the whole season, and until they do the team will reap what it’s sown as attendance continues to suffer.

Lor Scoota’s Murder and the ‘Imperfect Route’

The first time we ever heard the song Bird Flu was two summers ago out of the speakers of our neighbor’s radio 2 porches down. Even as someone who pays little to no attention to rap the song stood out for its particularly problematic chorus “we sellin’ scramble, coke and smack.” While some music writers and fans may wax poetic about how great the song made them feel we can recall exactly how we felt the first time we heard it: afraid.

It’s not that we scare easily. We’re not the guy on Nextdoor reporting ‘suspicious activity’ and we’re not fortifying our house with alarms and whatnot. We wouldn’t even say we’re afraid of our neighbors. But the song, and the fact that our neighbors identify so much with it is a clear reminder that if any neighborhood dispute ever arose these neighbors are, in fact, drug dealers, most likely with gang ties either formal or informal and very likely to be armed. Again, this is our home we’re talking about. If anything ever did go wrong, there’s nowhere to run or hide from here. We’re not sure where you live, but on our block the possibility of being terrorized by violent criminals is a very real concern. “Being in the game” has nothing to do with it. For a true life example of how bad these sorts of neighborhood dispute can get, check out this post from Prince of Petworth.

(We were not wrong in these assumptions. Recently the house in question has been raided twice by the warrant squad in full riot gear and battering rams, and drug arrests of two of our neighbors have been made.)

If Bird Flu was the sound of the streets, it is also an anthem of everything that is wrong with this city. It’s not possible to write a song like that without having lived the experience firsthand. Sure, you could try… but you’d end up sounding as corny and benign as the Beastie Boys did early in their career. It’s not possible to separate Lor Scoota’s life from his music. If he says in the song he was moving weight, he was moving weight. If he says he was carrying a gun, he was carrying a gun. The song’s appeal has everything to do with the singer’s street cred. There’s a reason the cleaned up ‘purple, orange and black’ version of that song never made a hit on its own.

And Scoota was carrying a gun, by the way. In this song he serves notice that he was in the habit of carrying a gun constantly. He was arrested with one at the airport a while back which had the serial number ground off. He also had a handful of domestic violence charges against him including a no-contact order. Personally, we don’t believe a serial woman-beater deserves much in the way of community support, catchy hooks notwithstanding. If you consider yourself a feminist, ally, or just someone who cares at all about the general well being of women, maybe sit quietly and think a while about whether or not you want to be the type of person willing to excuse violence against women because the perpetrator has earned some small measure of notoriety.

Indeed, Scoota was no stranger to the law, having racked up, by our count, 9 charges since he turned 18 in 2011, some of them drug charges. We can’t speak with certainty about the disposition of all those cases, but it hardly matters. The system is only as good as it is. You can’t plausibly claim that there’s no justice when a cop gets off, but when a rapper gets off it’s because he was squeaky clean. He wasn’t. Those 9 charges, which are a lot for any person to collect in 5 years and which are in addition to any possible juvenile charges Scoota may have had, are just the shit he got caught doing. It wouldn’t be very likely that these were the only 9 crimes he ever committed and happened to get caught every single time. This is someone to whom we think crime was a way of life. Of course this is just one writer’s opinion. We don’t need to meet the burden of proof of a court to make up our own mind, thank you very much.

And lest you think Scoota was maybe some kind of lovable outlaw, some latter-day Billy the Kid or something we kindly invite you to pull your head out of your ass. Billy the Kid was certainly an awful person to be around, just like our neighbors have been and just like we imagine Scoota himself probably was. He wasn’t selling your cousin heroin or beating up your sister or waving his gun at you, but if it had been you you might feel differently about it, no?

But in death as in life a lot of otherwise sensible people do seem to think Scoota was some kind of lovable outlaw. One of them is Nick Mosby.

Thirteen months ago in the aftermath of the riots Nick Mosby brought Scoota along with fellow street rapper Young Moose on a speaking tour of Baltimore High schools. In the resulting news article Mosby, a fool, is quoted as saying these guys aren’t role models but the fact is that they have been negative role models since the moment they broke out. Giving them a dais and the legitimacy of appearing with a sitting councilman is presenting them as a role model, whether you want to admit it on the record or not. Mosby asked these guys where they saw themselves in 5-10 years. We said at the time-to Mosby, on Twitter- that was laughable, and that in 5-10 years they would either be dead or in jail. He didn’t see it that way. One year later Scoota is dead and Young Moose is in jail. Another panelist, dirt bike rider Chino Braxton, was shot twice and survived and Mosby is (thankfully) on his way out of office. Young Moose’s brother, also, was recently murdered by the way.

The message that Chino Braxton has for kids now, namely Get the Fuck out of Baltimore, is one we can agree with.

The guy who wrote that Prince of Petworth post to which we linked above would have been a good example of someone to take on a high school speaking tour. We say again that we doubt Mosby would want his own young daughters absorbing the messages of Moose and Scoota. We doubt that you, Gentle Reader, would want that for your kids.

You can talk all you want about how Scoota was at a peace rally right before he was killed, or how he read a book to school kids once but are these reflective of the way he lived his life? Or are they public relations fodder because he knew he was in the public eye? Do you think Scoota, who once assaulted a high school teacher, was an avid reader in his life? Do you think he was committed to nonviolence and had put down his gun and come to Jesus? He wasn’t, and he didn’t.

There’s a wide gulf in Baltimore between people’s words and actions. That much is true of everyone; black and white, rich and poor. In the social media age everyone is hard at work spinning their own narrative every hour of every day but little of it has anything to do with the truth. In the Sun article about the speaking tour the author says Scoota and Moose ‘acknowledge an imperfect route’ to whatever ‘success’ they had achieved. Beg your pardon? What does that mean, exactly? An imperfect route? It means they were terrorizing their fucking neighborhoods and were dealing large quantities of narcotics. That’s not ‘an imperfect route’ it’s a goddamned life of crime. What’s more, it’s not clear that either Scoota or Moose have achieved real success by any measure. As far as we know they were self-releasing music, not exactly the fast lane on the road to riches. A little radio airplay in your hometown market and an Instagram of you with two or three actually famous rappers doesn’t amount to much in the great scheme of things.

Then there’s the question of Monday night’s vigil on Pennsylvania Avenue. There are many who are quick to draw comparisons between it and a recent vigil for the victims of the Pulse nightclub mass shooting. Why, they ask, was the police presence so much heavier on Monday?

Well, 2016 is a dangerous time to be a rapper in Baltimore. Besides Scoota and Moose’s brother, the last twelve months have also seen the killings of FMG Twizzle and G-Rock. Of course, we’ll never know all the details of what these guys were doing on a day to day basis in their personal lives, but to an outside observer there do seem to be some patterns present. There’s a difference in being struck by bullets and struck by lightning. We’d even wager that the police know quite a bit more than the Chop does- the Chop being merely a-guy-who-reads-the-news-often.

We weren’t there, and so we can’t say firsthand what happened. But here’s the thing: all the firsthand accounts we’ve seen so far have been either from cops or from activists who have demonstrated unreliability over the last year. Were bricks and bottles thrown at cops? We don’t know, but it seems reasonable to believe something was thrown, as we did see shit thrown last April at Mondawmin. That day, as now, neither side was really in the right. You can resent and criticize the police all you want but you cannot throw shit at them. Period. Did a cop raise a gun at a dirt bike rider? Maybe. But it seems more likely it was a beanbag gun. Why were the cops in riot gear at a peaceful vigil? Maybe because it’s the kind of peaceful vigil which includes dirt bikes, which the Orlando one probably did not.

But if you really want to know why the police came ready for trouble it’s because the likelihood of trouble starting was high. Grief does not preclude violence. After all, it was less than a month ago a West Baltimore man shot his father in a church at his own brother’s funeral. To assert that there were no drug dealers, no gang members, and no armed people in that crowd is either disingenuous or foolish. The police know, and the whole city should know that it only takes one half-assed gangster goddamned fool like Meech to turn up in a highly volatile crowd, discharge a gun, and cause utter chaos.

We would urge you strongly to read up on Meech if you haven’t. It seems to us that Sunday’s assembly had more in common with last May 4 than with either the Orlando vigil or Mondawmin. We even got to see the return of damn fool Catherine Pugh to the streets, this time with her puppet Kwame Rose in tow again. Thankfully, Scoota’s vigil ended with no one hurt and only three arrests.

After the vigil, once the police had left, the streets were not so safe. A few hours later and two blocks north a 16 year old kid was shot in the chest well after the city’s youth curfew. He was the second child shot on Pennsylvania avenue after midnight this month. Had he, his assailant or both been at the vigil earlier? We’d be surprised if they had not.

There are at least three official funeral related events scheduled to take place soon. All of them represent a volatile combination of grief, pain, hatred, resentment, ignorance and anger which could, if not very carefully managed, boil over into further chaos.

At this moment we still feel the same way we felt the first time we heard Bird Flu: afraid. We doubt that this is the last violence the city will see related to Scoota. We’re afraid his death will have little consequence other than to escalate the already out-of-control spiral of violence in our city.