Is a new day really dawning at Camden Yards?

You thought the National League West ogres in Los Angeles had a long World Series title drought? The Orioles haven’t won a World Series since over a week following the premiere of the first Hooters restaurant. (In Florida.) And, since a decade before Peter Angelos bought the team out of bankruptcy court.

“Bankrupt” has been a polite way to describe the Angelos reign of error. Oriole fans celebrated, then cringed too often for comfort after Angelos bought the team from Eli Jacobs. Now they may have cause to celebrate something sweeter than the Orioles’ slightly unexpected return to competitiveness last year. May.

Once upon a time Angelos swore the Orioles would be pried from his literal cold, dead hands, as in upon his death. Now, his son John, who’s been running the Orioles since his father was diagnosed with dementia, plans to sell to two equity billionaires, David Rubenstein (the Carlyle Group) and Mike Arougheti (Ames Management Corp.). The price: $1.73 billion.

This, writes The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal, whose career as a baseball writer began by covering the Orioles for the Baltimore Sun, could portend the turn toward a new direction.

The Rubenstein-Arougheti group won’t take complete control of the team right away. They’re beginning with a minority investment but intend to take complete control upon  Peter Angelos’s death, allowing the Angelos family a tax benefit by waiting to give the group full ownership. (Rosenthal observes they’d have faced a capital gains tax levy on the difference between the team’s 1993 and current valuations.)

Rubenstein is known to have Baltimore ties and to be a significan philanthropic presence in the region. His personal worth is said to be $3.8 billion, while Arougheti’s is said to be $1.8 billion. Rosenthal also cites a Baltimore Banner report saying Hall of Fame shortstop and Orioles icon Cal Ripken, Jr. is going to be part of the new ownership group. Could the future look any sunnier for Oriole fans?

Well, they once thought it was sunny days ahead when the elder Angelos bought the team, too.

Two years later, in the wake of (let’s call it as it really was) the owner-provoked and pushed players’ strike, Ripken made it safe to love baseball again when he passed Lou Gehrig for consecutive games played and marked the occasion with a hefty home run off Angels pitcher Shawn Boskie in the fourth inning.

The Orioles have been to a few postseasons and through a lot more losing in the Angelos era. The elder Angelos became too hands-on despite a lack of common baseball sense. Tom Verducci of Sports Illustrated once described his style as slash-and-burn management, as in burning eleven managers in eighteen seasons before the comparative stability of Buck Showalter (8.3 seasons) and incumbent Brandon Hyde (entering season six).

From 1998-2011 the Orioles endured what was once believed unfathomable for a franchise with a history proud enough: a fourteen-season losing streak. The elder Angelos also dithered on creating an international Orioles scouting operation and presence and let his already chaotic front office mistreat valued players.

Things once hit so far bottom that Verducci reported in 2001 that agents with Oriole clients found those clients telling other free agents, “You don’t want to come here.” That sentiment was inconceivable in the era between their first World Series title (1966) and their last.

Last year’s Orioles surprised the world by reaching the postseason at all. They saw enough of their young talent start coming of age, and they saw a farm system looking plenty good enough for the seasons to come. Right?

Oops. Along the way, John Angelos was stupid enough to suspend his lead television broadcaster Kevin Brown over information on a team-provided graphic comparing last year’s O’s against the Rays to previous seasons in which the Rays seemed to own them. Oriole fans can’t be blamed if enough of them think they can’t have nice things without something nasty along with them.

Barely had the news sunk in about the Rubenstein-Arougheti group agreeing to buy the Orioles when bing!the team swung a trade for former Cy Young Award-winning Brewers pitcher Corbin Burnes for a shortstop on the cusp of Show readiness but with a few warning signs, a pitcher who might project as a useful reliever, and the 34^th pick in the 2024 draft.

Further warning signs, though: Burnes has lost some hop on his signature sinkerball, his strikeout-to-walk ratio has dipped, and big boppers had a finer time with him last year than two years earlier. (2021: seven homers allowed. Last year: 22 homers allowed.) But he’s still Corbin Burnes and he’s still formidable enough. For a season to come at least. They hope.

Thus far the apparently glandular adulation thrown the new ownership group seems to be precisely what NBC Sports-turned-independent Craig Calcaterra calls it: “he’s not John Angelos, therefore he’s perfect, and if you suggest otherwise, blogger boy, you’re a hater.”

But Oriole Nation has been there/done that in the past, a little too often. The Angelos Era may be over, but then Mets fans threw champagne parties over the end of the Wilpon Era and the advent of Steve Cohen, too.

Cohen has been through more than a few growing pains thus far. Met fans whose patience rivals that of the piranha at mealtime (they are legion) think one bad inning equals grounds for summary executions—in April. Oriole fans may be far more patient, but the Angelos reign of error wore that patience to the thickness of a sheet of paper.

The Rubenstein-Arougheti (-Ripken) Group has quite a job ahead, assuming the rest of baseball’s owners approve their advent and their purchase deal. It’s not simple being viewed en masse (and perhaps prematurely) as saviours. Once upon a time America thought (really) that even Richard Nixon had to be an improvement over Lyndon Johnson. How did that work out?

Oriole fans may (underline that) be wise to consider what investigative journalism giant Sidney Zion used to advise: Trust your mother, but cut the cards.