Maryland/Baltimore Democrats Spent Half a Billion Dollars to Get Laughed Out of the Room
Ask anybody in Baltimore over the age of 50 about a snowy night in March of 1984, and watch their face change.
They don't even need the year. Just say “the Mayflower vans,” and they know exactly what you mean.
The Baltimore Colts, sneaking out of Owings Mills in the dark while the city slept, hauled off to Indianapolis on a fleet of moving trucks while the snow came down.
That wound has never closed.
Baltimore has two Super Bowl banners hanging with the Ravens now, and it still doesn't matter. Grown men still can't talk about it without their voice changing.
That's what happens when a city's government lets something irreplaceable slip through its fingers. It doesn't heal. It just scars over.
I bring that up because Maryland is about to learn that lesson all over again, and this time the state didn't even have the excuse of getting outrun by a moving van.
As a teenager, I was at Pimlico for every Triple Crown coronation in the 1970s.
Secretariat's ghost still lives on that backstretch.
Affirmed. Seattle Slew. I watched history get made from the infield on that dirt.
Now Maryland's Democrat governor and Baltimore's Democrat mayor have managed something no jockey, no track condition, no rainstorm ever could.
They've made the Preakness irrelevant.
Let's do the math on this disaster
Wes Moore's administration spent $85 million of Marylanders' money to “win” the intellectual property rights to the Preakness.
That's on top of the $400 million taxpayers are pouring into rebuilding Pimlico.
That's on top of the nearly $50 million spent buying Laurel Park.
Call it half a billion dollars, give or take, spent to keep the Preakness “in the family.”
And what did that half a billion dollars buy Maryland?
A courtside seat to watching Churchill Downs and the New York Racing Association build a brand-new six-race, $5 million bonus series for 2027 – and leave the Preakness sitting in the parking lot.
Not invited.
Not consulted.
Frozen out.
An industry insider told Yahoo Sports the quiet part out loud:
Maryland is “on an island.” They run “one big race a year.” The sport, in his words, can't let Maryland be “an anchor” any longer.
That's not an opposing owner talking trash.
That's how the entire industry now sees the state that just spent half a billion dollars trying to buy relevance.
History doesn't repeat. It rhymes, and this rhyme is worse
Back in 1984, at least Maryland had an excuse.
The legislature was scrambling to pass an eminent domain bill to seize the Colts and keep them in Baltimore.
Robert Irsay heard about it and got the trucks out before the ink could dry.
Government moved too slow. Baltimore paid for it for twelve years – and honestly, is still paying for it every time somebody brings up that snowstorm or the Colts Marching Band.
This time, Maryland didn't get beat by a slow legislature. They got beat with half a billion dollars already spent.
Irsay snuck a football team out under cover of darkness because Maryland was too slow to stop him.
Churchill Downs and NYRA didn't even need the cover of darkness.
They built an entire new championship series in broad daylight, with Maryland's own $85 million check already cashed, and nobody in Annapolis or Baltimore saw it coming.
This is what incompetence looks like
You don't get frozen out of your own sport by accident.
You get frozen out because the people running your state treated a 150-year-old American institution like just another line item to brag about at a press conference.
Wes Moore stood up and bragged about “leveraging the Preakness's iconic status.”
Leveraging it right into the wilderness, Governor.
Brandon Scott has spent years managing Baltimore's decline while insisting everything is a “Renaissance.”
Here's your Renaissance, Mr. Mayor: the signature event that put your city on network television every May for over a century is now a scheduling inconvenience for the sport it belongs to.
Picture Williamsport losing the Little League World Series
That's the scale of what's already happening here, in slow motion, right now.
Imagine Pennsylvania politicians spending half a billion tax dollars “protecting” the World Series, then watching ESPN and Little League International quietly build a new championship structure that doesn't need Williamsport anymore.
Imagine the outrage.
Imagine the hearings.
Imagine the calls for resignations.
Now ask yourself why Annapolis and Baltimore City Hall are getting a pass.
Somebody has to answer for this
Maryland Republicans in the General Assembly should be demanding hearings on where that $85 million went and why the state got outmaneuvered by two private companies working a phone line Maryland wasn't even on.
Every Marylander who's ever put on a seersucker suit and a big hat for the third Saturday in May deserves to know how the people entrusted with protecting their signature event let it get reduced to an also-ran.
The Preakness still exists.
For now.
But “exists” and “matters” are two very different things, and one-party Democrat rule in Annapolis and Baltimore just proved they don't know the difference.
Fifty years from now, somebody my age is going to tell their grandkids they used to watch a Triple Crown get decided at Pimlico.
And the grandkids are going to ask what that even was.
That's the legacy Wes Moore and Brandon Scott are building.
One half-billion-dollar mistake at a time.
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