Kevin Brown, in the Orioles broadcast booth at Camden Yards. He’s said to be returning 11 August—the Orioles’ administration must have felt the heavy heat when the suspension they won’t call a suspension went viral.

I had to look. On 23 July, which proves to have been Orioles announcer Kevin Brown’s last day on the television air, the Orioles won a second straight from their American League East rival Rays in Tampa Bay. They’ve won nine of thirteen since. So, at least, the Orioles icing Brown so witlessly didn’t affect the team on the field.

The Oriole ownership that thinks it was worth suspending Brown indefinitely for pointing out what was in the team’s own game notes guides—that the Orioles did better in the Rays’ stadium this year than they had over the previous two—had better not even think that nine out of thirteen means they can win no matter who’s doing the television play-by-play.

Because if they’re foolish enough to think that, the roasting they got from Gary Cohen, the lead broadcaster for the hapless Mets, whom the Orioles just spent a weekend sweeping (and out-scoring 19-6), may seem like a jacuzzi bath compared to what they’d invite then.

“That was really all he said,” Cohen said of Brown’s plain-fact, non-opinion description of the Orioles’ issues in Tropicana Field. Then, with Mets first base legend and co-colour analyst Keith Hernandez sitting to his right, as the Mets led the resurgent Cubs 5-1 in the bottom of the fourth Monday night, Cohen let the Orioles have it but good.

And for that, the Baltimore Orioles management decided to suspend Kevin Brown. Let me just say one thing to the Baltimore Orioles management. You draped yourself in humiliation when you fired Jon Miller, and you’re doing it again. And if you don’t want Kevin Brown, there are 29 other teams who do.

It’s a horrendous decision by the Orioles. I don’t know what they were thinking. But they’ve gotten exactly the reaction that they deserve. And it’s just a shame, because the Orioles are playing so well, and now they’ve diverted attention from that, and now made themselves a laughingstock.

Cohen is hardly alone among baseball’s broadcast family. Some of them, and some of us writers, would say we don’t know if the Orioles’ administration was thinking. It wasn’t as though Cohen had failed to speak on behalf of telling it like it is on the air in the past. The Mets beat writer for The Athletic, Tim Britton, remembered a 2019 interview in which Cohen couldn’t understand why every baseball organisation doesn’t believe in letting its broadcasters speak the truth.

“Many believe that in not telling the truth, that you’re doing a service to the organization, and the fact of the matter is it’s just not true,” Cohen said then. “Because if everything is great and everything is sunshine, then when things really are great, there’s no differentiation.”

Part of being a baseball fan is experiencing the highs and lows as they happen and understanding them for what they are. I think that’s what the Mets have always allowed their announcers to do. There’s always a line to tread, there’s always a path that would be the wrong one to go down, but if you do your job correctly, then you know where those lines are and you express yourself in a well-informed way. Then everybody wins.

If only Cohen had been around for a time when it wasn’t quite true with the Mets. When an ancient Mets regime trashed and then sent Hall of Fame pitcher Tom Seaver out of town in the notorious “Saturday Night Massacre” in 1978, the Mets ordered cameras not to show dwindling Shea Stadium crowds, or fabled “Sign Man” Karl Ehrhardt holding up his once-fabled WELCOME TO GRANT’S TOMB placard.

They also didn’t let their announcing team speak of it readily, much the way the Orioles today are known to object when certain former players are mentioned on broadcasts. Finally, the original Mets broadcast team of Lindsay Nelson, Bob Murphy, and Ralph Kiner broker up when Nelson—fed up with both the censorship and the dismantled Mets’ losing ways—took a hike.

Cohen may not remember either that a later Mets administration decided they’d had it with  Tim McCarver’s analytical candor, too, telling him to take a hike in favour of Seaver himself (who’d been a Yankee TV analyst for five years), whom the Mets believed was more likely to be a “team player.” (Read: Shill.) But he was hardly alone in roasting the Orioles, merely the one who went absolutely viral first and most when Awful Announcing‘s scoop on the suspension hit social media running.

“Somebody didn’t like the facts very much,” said the Red Sox’s lead television announcer, Dave O’Brien, calling the Brown suspension “a fiasco, that that’s allowed to happen. And I think every announcer in the league feels the same way . . . I thought it was a joke, initially, when I read it.”

“It’s amazing to me,” said Yankee broadcaster Suzyn Waldman, while the Yankees met the White Sox in Chicago. “How can you do your job if you can’t tell the truth? But he didn’t even say anything negative. He was extolling how good they are, because look what they’ve done this year, and in the past they didn’t do it. So I don’t understand. When I saw the clip, I was waiting for him to say something horrible. And it was not.”

“[Brown] continuously provides an example worth emulating & sets a high bar,” Xtweeted Royals play-by-play announcer Jake Eisenberg. “That not only goes for on the air, but also off the air. This situation is ridiculous, and that’s an understatement at best.”

The Orioles’ administration may have felt higher-temperature heat than a Las Vegas summer over the disgrace. The Athletic has Xtweeted “sources with knowledge” have told their reporter Britt Ghiroli that Brown will return on 11 August. When Ghiroli herself reached the Orioles for comment, the team declined and “a spokesperson” for co-owner John Angelos even said “there was no suspension”—but refused to answer her followup questions.

“Who cares what they called it?” she fumed. “We all know what it is.” Indeed we do. We also know it exposed the Oriole brass as censorious bird brains.