Did Mike Mussina Leave Baltimore In 2000 Because Of A Bad Deal Which Included A BJ? Possibly.
https://twitter.com/ThomasBoswellWP/status/1087878269754580992
With the Baseball making their HOF announcements this week a lot of old stories about the guys voted in have been popping up. One in particular caught my eye. This Mike Mussina story from Thomas Boswell with the Washington Post should piss off most Orioles fans, but it's not very surprising because it involves Peter Angelos.
It was the summer of 2000 and the Orioles were floundering out with a record of 46-58 and needed to shed payroll and veteran players because it was obvious that they needed to sell players off. Mike Mussina was in the last year of his deal with the Orioles and I'm sure he was not confident that he would be back in Baltimore because of their lack of success in recent years. Mussina had a close friend on the team, left fielder B.J. Surhoff. Surhoff was a fan favorite in Baltimore, and he loved the city of Baltimore, for more than just the fans.
One of Surhoff's son is autistic and the family was using Johns Hopkins to get medical care for their son. Baltimore and the hospitals in the area were well known for their Autism programs. I'm familiar with this because this was right around the same time we found out my brother had autism. I think my parents even saw the Surhoff's at the hospitals. Regardless, Surhoff and his family wanted to stay in the Baltimore area so they could continue treatment and care for their son. Makes sense.
July 31st, 2000, the Orioles announce within the last hour of the trade deadline that they were trading Surhoff to the Atlanta Braves. It was the salary and veteran dump that we all thought would happen, but it hit Surhoff differently. I remember hearing and reading that Surhoff was in tears when he was traded and who could blame him.
"Yet after word hit the clubhouse that one of Mussina’s best friends, B.J. Surhoff, had been traded to the Atlanta Braves midseason, Moose called me to his locker — furious.
The Surhoffs had a child they believed could get better medical care at Johns Hopkins than anywhere else, and B.J. absolutely wanted to stay in Baltimore. But Mussina, and other Orioles, believed he was traded in part out of spite after petty tiffs with a member of ownership.
“That’s it,” spit out Mussina, who was in his free agent walk year. “I’m out of here.”
The next year, he was a Yankee. Cause and effect?"
Obviously this pissed off Mussina to the max, he knew he would be gone in the next few months, and this just added to the fire. Couple that with Angelos and the Warehouse asking Mussina to take a "hometown discount", that really sealed the deal that he was gone. They had pissed off Mussina because of the way his best friend was traded and in the following months Mussina signed a six-year, $88.5 million deal with the rival New York Yankees. No the Surhoff deal wasn't the biggest deal to the public, but obviously it struck a nerve with Mussina and it was clear he was done with the Angelos family and the Orioles. Shout out to Peter Angelos for trying to penny pinch to the extreme.
Could Surhoff and his family have stayed in the area and continued getting care at Hopkins? Sure, and the family did stick around. But maybe B.J. wanted to be with his family and son while he was getting tests done and going through therapy. The team was going NOWHERE, they were three years into a 14 year stretch where they didn't have a winning record, did they REALLY need to shave Surhoff's pay? That's a cheap move by Angelos in an effort to penny pinch, and it pissed off their best homegrown talent they've had in sometime. I mean look at this quote by Syd Thrift, the GM at the time.
So it wasn't a fire sale but they knew they wanted to trade Surhoff. Apparently Surhoff and a certain member of the ownership didn't get along or disagreed with each other, and players thought THAT was the reason B.J. was traded. Knowing that his family loved and NEEDED Baltimore for more reasons than just baseball. If that doesn't sum up Peter Angelos and his regime, I don't know what does. It's a shitty thing to do.
Who would have thought that a bad deal with a B.J. was possibly the straw that broke the camels back for Mike Mussina? Peter Angelos at his finest!