Not a lot of good-guy owners in baseball. The Braves, Blue Jays, and Mariners are owned by corporations. The Dodgers are owned by a venture-capital firm. The Phillies and Giants are owned by groups of local businessmen whom no one gives much thought, and the owners of the Marlins, Mets, Royals, Cubs, and White Sox are among the biggest scoundrels in professional sports.
It might be, of all people, Peter Angelos:
http://www.mrdestructo.com/2011/11/man- ... learn.htmlQuote:
There was a time, and it wasn't too long ago, that Peter Angelos was a great man. In many ways—ways perhaps more important than baseball—he still is.
He was born on the last Independence Day of the Roaring Twenties and grew up during the Depression. The son of Greek immigrants and a few years too young for the Second World War, he made his way through college and then the University of Baltimore Law School. He began his career as a trial lawyer in criminal defense, where he remained for a time; in 1961, he founded the Law Offices of Peter G. Angelos. Immediately his eye turned to Baltimore's labor unions; from the early 1960s through the 1980s, his firm represented Baltimore's steelworkers and longshoremen against company owners and the city itself. Then, in the 1980s, like just about every savvy activist attorney with an established private practice, he embraced the class action lawsuit.
Never forget that the reason Peter Angelos owns a baseball team in 2011 is because he helped make asbestos a household word in Maryland in the 1990s, when a series of suits on behalf of Baltimore workers were consolidated. When a Circuit Court jury ruled that manufacturers knew their product was a slow killer and had sold it to the city's manufacturing base anyway, Angelos not only became a rich man but a hero. He was the man whose firm represented unions and tradesmen, whose landmark litigation punished one of the most negligent and in many cases actively malevolent industries in the country.
Angelos didn't stop at asbestos: his firm later pursued class actions against tobacco companies, as well as pharmaceutical giants that knew their diet pills were dangerous. He was and remains a generous philanthropist, a staunch, lifelong contributor to the Democratic Party—both tremendous positives in the city of Baltimore—and by the mid-1990s, he was the owner of the Baltimore Orioles.
There's no need to unduly canonize Angelos; after all, these cases did make him wealthy. But in a country where many of the men and occasional women who own professional sports teams do so either from inheritances or their more-than-occasionally dubious careers in the world of finance, a man whose wealth has a legitimate background in social justice is something to be recognized and applauded. And when Angelos bought the team, he seemed precisely the sort of owner with the money and the interest to keep them relevant for years to come.
Only owner to oppose replacement players during the strike.
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Molly Lambert wrote:
The future holds the possibility to be great or terrible, and since it has not yet occurred it remains simultaneously both.
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