Longtime Baltimore Orioles majority owner Peter Angelos died on Saturday, March 23.
Before he was a nightmare sports owner, Peter Angelos was a dream sports owner. His buying of the Baltimore Orioles in 1993 was nothing short of an act of deliverance for the city and the fans. It came a decade past the 1983 World Series, the final championship in the Orioles' generation-long reign as the best-run franchise in sports. In the years between, on the field, the team had plummeted to the 0–21 start of 1988, risen back to almost win the division the next year, and sagged again. Off the field, ownership had passed from the just-out-of-town hands of Washington, D.C. big shot Edward Bennett Williams to the wholly out-of-town hands of the New York financier Eli Jacobs, whose plans and aims for the team seemed arbitrary and mysterious, right up to the point he lost control of the franchise in bankruptcy.
