Why would that be? During the interleague series I recall FP & Carp practically singing kumbaya in the booth with Mike Bordick and Jim Hunter when MASN was just one big happy family.
Nice! Cool to see other ties to the Maritimes here. I've been to Saint John a few times, it's about 6 hours from my house (which sounds long but it is a short trip for us in Atlantic Canada. )
Welcome, Brec7!
There is an old baseball and football tradition to hate Baltimore.
That city was a minor league town for about 50 years; then a family that owned a beer company in Baltimore bought the St Louis Browns from Bill Veeck...an owner with imagination but without money. The Nationals / Senators had been a founding team in the American League, but Washington did not grow millionaires...just ordinary people who work for the government. Clark Griffith, owner of the Nats, former manager, and a founding player in the AL, had no money except what came from running the ballclub. In the early days, he'd had a silent partner with money, a banker in Philadelphia, and until about 1940 teams were built by buying players from the independent minor league clubs, and by making trades. The "Old Fox" was a master trader.
By 1950, you needed money, which the Baltimore family had.
Meanwhile, the Redskins' owner, a racist megalomaniac, insisted that his team would never sign a black player. Passed over Jim Brown, the greatest running back ever. The Redskins sank while the Colts won the NFL championship. Very grim: you could receive Baltimore TV if you had a powerful TV antenna, and there were arguments between Redskin loyalists and people who wanted to root for a winner.
That changed when the Skins wanted to move into the new DC Stadium (now RFK), which belonged to the US Department of the Interior, and Interior Secretary Stewart Udall was a Kennedy Democrat who declared that no park -- including DC Stadium -- would rent space to a segregated organization. After George Preston Marshall suffered a sort of stroke, power of attorney gave control of the team to a smart lawyer who noticed that the Redskins were profitable and used the profits to straighten the team.
The lovey-dovey MASN network covers over the fact that Baltimore and Washington fans dislike each other. FP and Carpenter have to play nice with the Oriole announcers, but there is a serious battle to get reasonable TV money from MASN to the Nats ownership. The Orioles owner claimed that DC was his territory, and refused to allow a team to move here; then insisted that only a National League team could move and only if he got 80 or 90% ownership of MASN. The Nats contract says that they change the revenue-sharing rates every few years. The Nats want something close to 50%, and would probably prefer to negotiate their own TV deal.
Incidentally, we wanted a ball club but hate what MLB and Loria did with the Expos. We lost two Nats teams, one to Minneapolis and a second team to some spot between Dallas and Fort Worth. During the hoo-ha, MLB suggested it might contract a couple of team; one would have been the Minnesota Twins...our old Nats/Senators. I wanted to see the Twins come home.
The Nationals organization, and many people here, feel protectuve about the teams Expos history. We try to accept both Washington baseball history and the Expos history. Both cities got mistreated by MLB. We need to stick together.