Peter G. Angelos, who enjoyed enormous success as a lawyer but garnered a more mixed record as the longtime owner of the Baltimore Orioles, died on Saturday. He was 94.
His death was confirmed in a statement from his family that was posted on the team’s social media account. It did not specify where he died.
Mr. Angelos had been dealing with serious heart problems since 2017, which led to infighting in his family about control of his fortune and of the Orioles. In January, the Angelos family agreed to sell their controlling stake in the franchise to a group of investors headed by the financier David Rubenstein and the former Orioles infielder Cal Ripken Jr. Major League Baseball has yet to approve the deal.
Mr. Angelos’s wealth came in large part from a few huge cases that it took him years to win. Over 15 years, he litigated a series of asbestos-poisoning cases on behalf of Baltimore’s laborers in heavy industry, particularly steel, which resulted in a billion-dollar settlement. Mr. Angelos was awarded a third of the total in the early 1990s.
A few years later, he began working on behalf of Maryland to sue tobacco companies for Medicaid funds spent on sick smokers. In 1998, the state reached a settlement worth $4.4 billion, and in 2002, Mr. Angelos came to an agreement with Maryland to accept $150 million for his work on the case.
In 1993, shortly after winning the asbestos case, he became the lead investor in a $173 million purchase of the Orioles. At the time, it was the highest amount ever paid for a professional sports team in the United States, and the Orioles were baseball’s most profitable team.
Mr. Angelos was a local boy, the son of working-class Greek immigrants, who had made his fortune by helping union workers. He got mad at friends who bought foreign-made cars. He drank Wild Turkey on the rocks. In the owner’s box, he was accompanied by tough-looking steelworkers. He pledged to keep the team in Baltimore and spend money to win.
Perhaps nothing he did early on endeared him so much to fans locally and nationally as refusing, during the 1994-95 baseball players’ strike, to use replacements until the owners came to an agreement with the players. Mr. Angelos vowed not to be complicit in preventing Ripken from breaking Lou Gehrig’s record of 2,130 consecutive games played — he was just 122 games away. (Ripken went on to play 2,632 straight games in total.)
“The Baltimore Orioles are America’s Team now,” George Vecsey wrote in a Sports of The Times column in The New York Times. “Go out and buy a Baltimore Orioles baseball cap and wear it, day and night, until further notice. Their black-and-orange insignia has become a symbol of resistance to scab baseball.”
Early on, Mr. Angelos’s investment in the Orioles paid off. In 1997, with baseball’s second-highest payroll (behind the Yankees), the Orioles advanced to the American League Championship Series, where they lost a closely fought series against the Cleveland Indians.
After that season, friction between Mr. Angelos and the Orioles’ popular manager and former player, Davey Johnson, led Johnson to leave the team.
A period of futility unrivaled in franchise history followed — 14 consecutive losing seasons. They lost the star pitcher Mike Mussina to the Yankees, with Mussina’s agent blaming Mr. Angelos for Mussina’s departure. Mr. Angelos gained a reputation among some in baseball for making lowball salary offers, offering contracts with tricky and unfavorable clauses about health and declining to invest in prospects.
In 2009, Sports Illustrated called him the sport’s worst owner. The next year, The Baltimore Sun described him as a “changed figure” — no longer attending most home games and issuing pronouncements to the local press, but instead making rare appearances at Camden Yards, the Orioles’ stadium, and pursuing even philanthropic projects anonymously.
In a 2009 guest essay for The Baltimore Sun responding to the Sports Illustrated piece, the Orioles outfielder Brady Anderson defended Mr. Angelos against charges of “meddling,” particularly in the case of Johnson’s departure as manager, and he praised Mr. Angelos for the beauty of Camden Yards, the affordability of games, the recent signings of star players and his loyalty to Baltimore.
The next few years seemed to bear out Anderson’s argument. Beginning in 2012, the Orioles returned to respectability under the management of Buck Showalter and with the help of a strong season by the outfielder and Orioles draftee Nick Markakis. They once again reached the American League Championship Series.
There have been ups and downs since, but last year, the Orioles went 101-61, and they’re seen as a promising young ball club going into the 2024 season.
George Angelos was born in Pittsburgh on the Fourth of July in 1929 to John and Frances Angelos. After Mr. Angelos recovered from appendicitis at a young age, his mother changed his name to Peter, dedicating his soul to the Virgin Mary. His father owned a tavern, and Peter worked there occasionally as a boy. He attended the University of Baltimore Law School at night and graduated in 1961 as his class valedictorian.
He married Georgia Kousouris in 1966. Information about his survivors was not immediately available.
Mr. Angelos began to make a name for himself in Baltimore as a member of the City Council from 1959-63. He ran for mayor in 1967 and lost in the Democratic primary by a wide margin to the eventual winner of the race (and the older brother of former House speaker Nancy Pelosi), Thomas D’Alesandro III.
Mr. Angelos credited the example set by his father for his own success.
“He never took a vacation, and I’ve taken only a few in my life,” Mr. Angelos told The Los Angeles Times in 1995. “What do I do? I do what my old man did. I work.”
