Baltimore Ravens, Baltimore Orioles, Maryland Terps, and MD Sports 2014
The very best of New Year’s greetings to all of you today! This is our first opportunity to send such greetings to you from the staff of The Baltimore Wire. We began just weeks ago on November 13th and have been pleased to already posted about 160 articles for your reading enjoyment.
As a part of the FanSided Sports Network, we are going to passionately write about these teams and programs we love in Baltimore and the state of Maryland. Fans are, like the word suggests in abbreviated fashion – FANatics! We are fans AND writers, so our tone will be to cover the Ravens, Orioles, Terps, etc. as supporters of the team, while being truthfully objective about the bad as well as the good. We are going to thrill to the victories with you, feel the pain of the defeats, yet speak to both with a reasoned perspective about why either experience occurred.
BALTIMORE RAVENS – We began this blog’s coverage of the Ravens at the midpoint of the season when the team was 3-5. Things looked bad – really bad, but then they won five of the next six games. Here at the WIRE we thought we had something to do with it, but, the last two weeks have crushed that notion!
This should be an interesting and active offseason. We will be writing for a while in review of the season past – the ups and the downs – while turning our focus to the draft, free agents, and all matters relative to rebuilding a team to win that Super Bowl again. That was fun – we want to get there again.
Also, a first glance at the schedule for next year is very encouraging in the sense that it does not look scary at all. The long road trips are merely to New Orleans and Miami. So, the Ravens have a great opportunity to be right back in it very quickly.
BALTIMORE ORIOLES – We have already written quite a bit about the 2013 season in review, as we consider together why the Birds made a step back to 85 wins after gaining 93 just a year ago. The Orioles are an interesting team and organization to cover, even as the offseason (so far) is yet another that frustrates so many in the fanbase. There is a lot yet to be written about this offseason – both metaphorically about what the franchise will do in securing additional players and literally as we write about it and evaluate each move.
Beyond this, the Orioles are great to cover from a writing point of view because of the unique cast of characters – guys like Buck Showalter, Adam Jones, Crush Davis, Matt Wieters, Manny Machado, Tommy Hunter (the personality) and a whole host of others. And it is reasonable to hope and anticipate that the Orioles will once again be playing meaningful baseball in September and hopefully beyond.
So look for something on the Orioles just about every day here at the WIRE, as this is my personal top passion and I always have a lot I want to talk about.
MARYLAND TERPS – The big news for UMD sports in 2014 will be the move to the Big 10. The football program seems to have turned a corner toward better days, but can they sustain it in this new conference? And what about basketball? We were all over the men’s soccer team that made it to the final four in the NCAA, as we will be with any other Terps sports that are national powers.
JHU, NAVY, TOWSON, etc. – We want to cover some of the big sports stories for these collegiate programs, and others in Maryland as well. We wrote several pieces about the Hopkins national championship cross country team, and those individuals will certainly be national contenders in track as well. The Towson football team has a national championship game coming up this week.
And of course, here in Maryland, lacrosse is a big deal. I’ll admit I don’t know anything about it other than that I wish I could have played it as a kid. Any game where it is legal to whack your opponent with a stick is cool with me. But, wanting the WIRE to have better analyses than that, please let me know if any of you out there are aware of anyone who would like to cover college lacrosse for us.
MD PREPS – Having coached in the MPSSAA system, I would like to see us be able to cover some of the top high school sports stories in Maryland. We’ve already written about the fall season playoffs, particularly in football. We’ll look to do the same for the winter and spring sports, and we have a couple of profile stories in the works. Let me know of any unique story ideas you are aware of that are out there in our state.
OTHER MD SPORTS – If you know of any great sports stories in Maryland that kinda fall through the cracks and would make an interesting read on a website like this, send me a note. For example, I wrote a piece about the JFK 50-miler in Washington County, which is the premiere ultra-marathon event in the world.
So there is much to look forward to in 2014. Thank you for being a part of our infancy as a network sports blog, and come along with us by liking us on Facebook, following us on Twitter, and downloading the really fantastic FanSided app.
@BaltimoreWireFS // email r.buchman@myactv.net