You really can’t make this stuff up.
In the midst of what might be the best Orioles season in a generation, word emerges that MASN announcer Kevin Brown has landed in the doghouse with team management for saying something critical on the air.
If the past is any guide, the franchise – in the middle of a pennant chase, no less – is imposing a loyalty test on a talented broadcaster, thus placing his credibility and that of the broadcast up for grabs,
As the site Awful Announcing first reported Monday, Brown, who last appeared on television at the end of the Tampa Bay series July 23, has been off the screen since then, though he did switch over to radio broadcasts for the ensuing Philadelphia series. He has not been seen or heard from since.
Allegedly, Brown’s recounting of the Orioles’ previously horrid record at Tropicana Field was the offending act that got him grounded for the last two-plus weeks.
Though the Baltimore Banner is quoting a “senior Orioles official” as saying Brown will be back soon, The Sports Business Journal’s John Ourand reports that Brown is not scheduled to work the Houston series this week, nor is he on the list to broadcast the team’s upcoming West Coast swing of games through Seattle, San Diego and Oakland.
The objection to Brown’s reciting of factual material is even more puzzling considering that there was a graphic to support what he said. That means that this topic came up in a production meeting and some unnamed (and perhaps unpunished) producer thought, correctly, that including that information was worth it.
It’s possible that Brown may be taking some planned time off. Legendary radio announcer Jon Miller and Gary Thorne, the former lead television play-by-play, would routinely take extended vacations following the All-Star break.
However, history suggests that like Miller, Brown has run afoul of someone’s sensibilities perhaps because he didn’t bleed enough “black and orange.”
That’s a phrase that Orioles owner Peter Angelos said to me 27 years ago when I wrote a sports media column for the Baltimore Sun.
To recap, Miller, who received the Ford C. Frick Award from the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2010 and is on any short list of the best announcers in the game’s history, was coming to the end of his contract here and was receiving pushback from Angelos.
Angelos’ concern was that Miller was not sufficiently pro-Orioles on the air.
“You have the detached observer, but that’s the role of the journalist,” Angelos told me then. “I don’t think that’s the status of a team broadcaster. They should be an advocate for the team. They’ve got to bleed a little bit for the Orioles.”
Let’s get one thing straight: Anyone who tunes into any team broadcast, be it Orioles, Ravens, Maryland or a high school game, expecting the person doing game to be unbiased is on a fool’s errand.
Most team broadcasters travel with the teams and rely on access to coaches, managers and players to provide information to their audience.
That access, in many cases, is contingent on keeping the negative off the air, unless it is so blatant that it can’t be ignored. Also, the employment of many of those announcers is approved by the club, who also, in many instances, pay their salaries.
Considering that Brown is an employee of MASN, which is mostly owned by the Orioles, it would behoove him or anyone else not to be as much of a Bird-backer as possible.
That’s not to say that Brown doesn’t do a good job. To the contrary, Brown is as good as the Orioles have had in a while, and, at 33, could be in the booth at Camden Yards (or wherever the Birds end up if current CEO John Angelos doesn’t sign a lease extension) for decades.
But the specter of Peter Angelos’ declaration about Miller hung over the Orioles’ broadcast booth – radio and television – for years. A lot of very talented and dedicated people – in front of and behind the cameras and microphones — were tainted by the broad brush the elder Angelos painted them with.
Peter Angelos and apparently his son, believe that the viewers and listeners – you – don’t care who talks about the team so long as who says it bends over backwards to say it in as friendly a way towards the team as possible, perception and reputations be damned.
Miller, who understandably found the owner’s demands untenable, bolted for San Francisco. If this nonsense drives Kevin Brown out of Baltimore, it may take a change in ownership before the franchise gets someone of quality and integrity in the booth again.
Sports Media Analyst
Milton Kent is a veteran of Baltimore and Maryland journalism. Kent began a long association with the Baltimore Sun in 1985, serving as the Evening Sun’s Howard County reporter for 2 ½ years before joining the paper’s features department as an entertainment writer in 1988. In the following year, Kent began covering men’s and women’s college basketball for the Evening Sun, concentrating on the Maryland men’s and women’s teams. He continued covering college basketball when the writing staffs of the Evening and Morning Suns merged in 1991. From there, he covered the Orioles for three seasons before becoming one of the nation’s first fulltime sports media critics for parts of six years. In 2000, he began covering the NBA until 2004, when he launched a high school sports column, which he wrote until he left the Sun in 2008. Kent joined the staff of AOL Fanhouse, an online sports operation in 2009, covering sports media and women’s basketball, until operations ceased in 2011. He then joined the faculty at Morgan State University in the fall of 2011, where he has taught until the present day. In addition to writing for various platforms, including Sports Illustrated.com and TV Guide, Kent has hosted “Sports At Large,” a weekly commentary program airing on WYPR (88.1 FM) since 2002.