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Grant Hill joins new Baltimore Orioles ownership group
Cal Ripken Jr. and Grant Hill are part of the investor group that has agreed to buy the Baltimore Orioles, and so are former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg and former Baltimore mayor Kurt Schmoke. The group is headed by Baltimore native David Rubenstein, co-founder of the Carlyle Group. Additional investors were revealed in a news release Wednesday announcing the agreement between Rubenstein and the Angelos family.
Rubenstein's investment team includes Ripken and Hill, who in addition to being Hall of Famers in baseball and basketball have ties to the extended area. Ripken, of course, is an Orioles legend who was born in Havre de Grace, Maryland. Hill is from northern Virginia, not far from Washington.
Leonsis has long had interest in owning a baseball team, sources said, with previous interest in the Baltimore Orioles. The Orioles are not actively up for sale, though many in the industry have long speculated the Angelos family is open to the team eventually changing hands.
Despite his decision to forego the pros to pursue education, basketball and (yes) baseball at Notre Dame, Pat’s 96-mile-per-hour fastball was tantalizing enough to make him a 38th-round pick of the San Diego Padres out of St. John’s Prep (Danvers, Mass.). And though the Baltimore Orioles took him in the fourth round in 2014, after his junior year, Pat still opted to return to South Bend to get his degree from the Mendoza College of Business, before taking his talents not to the MLB, but rather to the NBA. Nowadays, Pat, who’s in his first year with the Bucks—the top team in the NBA—after three seasons with the Portland Trail Blazers, is still a two-sport star of sorts. As he continues to pursue his hoops career, he’s also building a multi-state business in the cutthroat world of real estate development.
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This summer offered an opportunity for former Orioles draft pick Pat Connaughton to revisit his professional baseball career after spending the past two seasons as a reserve guard in the NBA. But on Thursday afternoon, the Portland Trail Blazers guaranteed the third year on the contract Connaughton signed after being drafted out of Notre Dame in 2015.
“Good for Pat,” Orioles executive vice president Dan Duquette said before Thursday’s series opener against the Toronto Blue Jays. “It looks like a pretty good deal for him. I have believed and maintained since the kid was in high school that his future is in Major League Baseball, but he doesn’t see it that way. It’s really his career, right?”
Pat Connaughton remains focused on the NBA, on fighting for a rotation spot in Portland, on growing into a standout player. But his other career -- Major League Baseball -- always seems to beckon from the background, tugging at him in the form of communication from Dan Duquette, the Baltimore Orioles executive vice president.
The Orioles thought so highly of Connaughton, they allowed him to keep his $428,000 signing bonus and encouraged him to chase his NBA dreams. Baltimore controls his baseball rights through 2020 and they reportedly believe he could ascend to the major leagues rapidly if he committed to baseball.
The Orioles’ courtship of their 2014 fourth-round draft pick, pitcher Pat Connaughton, is set to stretch into a third year as the dual-sport athlete considers his future in the NBA. Appearing on MLB Network Radio on Monday, Connaughton, who just finished the second year of a three-year contract with the NBA’s Portland Trail Blazers where only the first two years guaranteed, said he’s “not going to unrealistically chase a dream if it appears that dream is getting farther and farther away.”
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Question has been, though, which dream will Connaughton pursue? “That’s the million-dollar question – literally,” said Connaughton, picked in the fourth round, 38th overall, of the 2014 amateur baseball draft by the Orioles and in the second round, 41st overall, by the Nets in the 2015 NBA draft before being traded to the Trail Blazers. The answer, for now, is basketball. Connaughton signed a three-year, rookie-scale contract with the Trail Blazers last week, with the first two years guaranteed at roughly $1.5 million, according to spotrac.com. He will put his baseball career on hold as he begins his NBA journey. “You kind of have to expect it if you want to succeed,” Connaughton said. “There’s a work ethic you need to keep.”
The Seattle Mariners topped the list with a 51.4-percent decline. The other teams on the list are the Cleveland Indians, Houston Astros, Arizona Diamondbacks, Dallas Stars, Oakland A's, New York Mets, Baltimore Orioles, Columbus Blue Jackets and Miami Dolphins. Entering Monday night's game against the Los Angeles Clippers, the Pistons ranked last in the 30-team NBA with an average attendance of 12,488.
The Rangers’ situation right now is remarkably similar. They were one strike away (twice) from a World Series title but failed to slam the door on the St. Louis Cardinals. They followed that up with one of the worst late-season collapses in baseball history, allowing the Oakland A’s to rally from 13 games back to win the AL West, and then losing the wild-card game to ex-Rangers manager Buck Showalter’s Baltimore Orioles. “It’s painful, incredibly painful,” Cuban said, reflecting on his experience and imagining how Nolan Ryan, Jon Daniels and the rest of folks in the Rangers’ front office feel. “They’re probably still not leaving their houses to go out and see the world. Don’t eat as much pizza delivery as I did.”
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