If baseball fans didn’t know Orioles announcer Kevin Brown before, they probably do now.
Big-name broadcasters continue to voice their support for the MASN play-by-play man after the Orioles’ John Angelos reportedly suspended him for factually referencing the team’s past struggles at Tampa Bay’s Tropicana Field during a July 23 broadcast.
Viral comments by the YES Network’s Michael Kay, SNY’s Gary Cohen and other industry titans including Dan Patrick and Al Michaels shined a national spotlight on the situation ahead of Brown’s return to the booth, which is expected to happen Friday, according to The Athletic.
“There should be a suspension here,” Michaels said on ESPN’s “Outside the Lines” program. “They should suspend the doofus that suspended Kevin Brown.”
The suspension, which Awful Announcing first reported Monday, began after Brown pointed out the Orioles had won three games in Tampa this season, tying their combined win total there over the previous three years. A televised graphic accompanied Brown’s comments, while the same statistics appeared in the Orioles’ game notes, according to The Athletic.
“If John Angelos, the owner of the Orioles, didn’t like that, then he’s thin-skinned, he’s unreasonable, and he should actually get a call from Rob Manfred, the commissioner of baseball, because it’s unconscionable that you would actually suspend a really good broadcaster for no reason whatsoever,” Kay said this week on his ESPN New York radio show. “He didn’t do anything wrong.”
The drama comes nearly two decades after Jon Miller, now the TV voice of the San Francisco Giants, was let go from his job as the Orioles broadcaster after the 1996 season. Miller was told at the time that Angelos’ father, Peter Angelos, said he wanted an announcer who would “bleed more orange and black,” according to The Athletic.
Miller remains frustrated Angelos never said as much publicly.
“He said, ‘No, of course, we wanted him to stay,’” Miller told The Athletic in an interview this week. “Everything Angelos told my agent, Angelos denied. He’s a lawyer. He said, ‘I didn’t say those things. Do you have a tape of it?’ It hit me wrong, how he lied about all of that.”
Cohen referenced Miller on Monday’s Mets broadcast, during which he suggested the Brown situation overshadows the resurgence of the first-place Orioles.
“Let me just say one thing to Baltimore Orioles management: You draped yourself in humiliation when you fired Jon Miller, and you’re doing it again,” Cohen said on SNY. “And if you don’t want Kevin Brown, there are 29 other teams who do. It’s a horrendous decision by the Orioles.”
Brown hasn’t publicly commented on his absence, while an Orioles official denied to Awful Announcing that a suspension took place.
“You have to be so thin-skinned as an owner where you’re going, ‘Wait, he’s saying that we used to be bad!’ Yeah, you did,” Patrick said on his syndicated radio show. “But that makes it even more special what you’re doing this year.”
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