An Absurd Suspension Has Turned a Baseball Announcer Into an Accidental Martyr

This is the worst of modern sports management at work.

Being a Baltimore Orioles fan on Monday morning was neither dismal nor embarrassing. The youthful and fierce squad had just finished a weekend sweep of the New York Mets, which gave them the best record in the American League at 70–42, three games ahead of the Tampa Bay Rays in second place. All players were hitting, including Gunnar Henderson, a 22-year-old who was destined to be a superstar, and James McCann, a 33-year-old backup catcher. Shintaro Fujinami, a rookie pitcher who was acquired from the awful Oakland A’s in the middle of the season as a reclamation project, was throwing a fastball that could reach 102 mph and pummeling the corners of the strike zone.

Then word leaked out that, in retaliation for comments Kevin Brown had made on the radio prior to a game against the Rays, the team had covertly suspended Brown. The tale remained virtually impossible even as it ascended the verifiability and prestige scale, picking up information along the way, from a claim made by a local sports blogger on Twitter to a post on Terrible Announcing to a feature in the Athletic. What Brown stated in an interview with colleague announcer Ben McDonald, apparently infuriating Orioles acting owner John Angelos, was this: