Maryland Business

Stephen Strasburg made a bit of a media splash Sunday after a double-header at Municipal Stadium in Hagerstown.

The No. 1 overall draft pick in the 2009 MLB First-Year Player Draft returned to the Washington Nationals’ minor league Class-A team, the Hagerstown Suns, after undergoing reconstructive surgery for a ligament in his elbow last fall.

The first rehabilitative game for Strasburg brought the ballpark’s second largest crowd ever, with 6,758 fans, according to the team’s website. So this season will likely be a hopping one for Hagerstown’s residents and fans.

And just for an update, the other Hagerstown star, Bryce Harper, moved to Double-A Harrisburg Senators in July. His most recent game on Aug. 7 against the Erie SeaWolves drew a little more than 3,000 spectators.

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I read this article on Bryce Harper in The Washington Post the other day, and thought it was hilarious. Harper made a trip to the eye doctor and could suddenly see the ball again, after getting a pair of contacts.

When I’d done this story on Harper’s beginnings in Hagerstown for the Hagerstown Suns, the assignment required a couple of trips to the ballpark to watch him play. And honestly, the performance I’d witnessed from him had seemed a little lackluster. The best hit he had was a line drive during a double-header.

But when I had to give updated stats on his performance for when the story later ran, I was shocked at how he’d jumped from .231 to .480.

Now we know.

I wish I could blame my subpar performance on effectively cleaning bathtubs or mowing the lawn on poor eyesight.

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Baltimore Orioles TV ratings are up on MASN, according to Nielsen Research.

Through the team’s first 26 games of the 2011 season, the household audience in the Baltimore market overall is 24 percent larger than it was last year. That means an average of 61,208 area homes tuned to Orioles games this spring.

Viewing is up in all demographics, according to Nielsen, including a 33 percent increase in men 18 to 34 years of age. A year-to-year increase of 25 percent happened among males 25 to 54 years of age. Orioles audience is also more than twice as large in the Washington, D.C., market than it was last year.

The Washington Nationals TV ratings are up 78 percent on MASN over last year.

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The collective mood of Baltimore’s baseball faithful is off-the-charts positive today with the Orioles off to a 3-0 start after a season-opening sweep of the Tampa Bay Rays.

Those 162-0 tweets and Facebook updates never get old to this long-suffering fan.

The O’s host the Detroit Tigers today in its home opener, which means new life for the businesses and vendors in and around Oriole Park at Camden Yards. To that end, our old friend Daraius Irani at Towson University’s Regional Economic Studies Institute examines what Opening Day means in terms of dollars and cents.

One finding: If a team boosts its winning percentage by 10 percent, its home attendance climbs by about 9.6 percent.

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The real estate reporting of Melody Simmons — including the latest development in her work covering the massive $1.8 billion project in East Baltimore — dominates this week’s Top 5 business stories by Daily Record staffers.

Also cracking the list is part of our two-day look back at Oriole Park at Camden Yards as it gets set to open its 20th season. Finally, consider the date when reading the entry that rounds out this list.

1. New lives in future for two former city schools – by Melody Simmons

Baltimore’s Board of Estimates is expected to vote on a proposal to create a new homeless shelter in the former Coppin Elementary School on the Westside. The board is also expected to vote on the sale of the former Columbus School, a historic red-brick building at 2000 E. North Ave. and Washington Street that is vacant and has been vandalized.

2. Little Italy restaurants join State Center suit – by Melody Simmons

Owners of Da Mimmo’s, Sabatino’s, Chiapparelli’s, Caesar’s Den and Vaccaro’s Italian Pastry Shop filed a petition Monday to add their businesses to a list of more than a dozen downtown property owners suing the state to stop the project. The lawsuit, filed Dec. 17, 2010, says the state Department of General Services did not seek competitive bids when it lined up master developers for the project in 2005.

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From horse racing to the NFL’s Tom Brady to the Baltimore Orioles, sports dominated the most popular stories generated by The Daily Record’s business reporters last week. And the latest twist in the city’s quest for a new sports arena cracked the top five after only day on our website.

1. Penn National backs plan to close Laurel, cut racing in Maryland

“From a business perspective, again, these are losing operations that will continue to be in decline without some alternative revenue stream or these types of steep cuts,” said D. Eric Schippers, a Penn National spokesman. The company’s position made public rifts that have developed in the corporate family that runs thoroughbred racing in Maryland.

2. Under Armour signs Tom Brady

For its first NFL quarterback endorser Under Armour aimed high, and the Baltimore-based company didn’t miss, signing three-time Super Bowl winner Tom Brady of the New England Patriots to help it wrest market share from rivals like Nike Inc.

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My heart goes out to Washington Nationals fans. It really does. But more so, it goes out to the Nationals front office — they’re the ones with the $15.1 million contract for a stud rookie pitcher for whom they’ll have to wait until the 2012 season to see returns.

And at this point, those returns are no longer guaranteed.

When the news came crashing down on Nationals Nation last week that phenom Stephen Strasburg would undergo Tommy John surgery for his elbow — a procedure that takes 12 to 18 months from which to recover — the collective groan from D.C. could be heard all the way up here in Baltimore.

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With 15 home games left in the season, the Baltimore Orioles are staring down an abysmal attendance hole they won’t remedy before the end of the year.

Just 1.37 million people have gone to Camden Yards this year through 65 games — a 13.5 percent drop in attendance from this point last year. I doubt it will end that low with the Red Sox and Yankees each due for one more weekend visit here before the end of the season. But a 10 percent drop in overall attendance and a total of just over 1.7 million total fans isn’t out of the question either.

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In case you haven’t seen it, the National Sports Collectors Convention at the Baltimore Convention Center, which I wrote about on Tuesday,  had a little visitor. For the third year in a row FBI investigators used the industry’s largest annual event to further their investigation into claims of fraud, counterfeiting and shill bidding.

I stopped by the convention center Friday afternoon to check out how business was going for dealers and to see if the FBI dampened interest at all.

In a nutshell, the response was “FB-what?” None of the attendees I talked to had heard of the years-long investigation into the hobby industry (I’ll admit, neither had I until I saw the news story) and just about every booth I passed had at least three or four people sifting through products. Bill Huggins, of Huggins & Scott Auctions in Silver Spring, said business has been steady and that he’d bought and sold several select items already that day.

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The Baltimore Orioles are ranked 20th out of the Major League’s 30 baseball teams in popularity, according to a Harris Interactive poll released this week. That’s down from last year’s ranking of 17th. The poll was conducted June 14 to 21.

But hey, at least they beat the Washington Nationals (ranked 27th). At first that was a surprise to me considering the poll was conducted during the Stephen Strasburg Era. After all, you’d think a phenom pitcher would give the Nats, who also came in last year at 27th, a few more points. But baseball in D.C. is still young and the fanbase is fickle. And while Strasburg may be a rock star here, nationwide, he’s just somebody you don’t want pitching against your team.

Meanwhile the New York Yankees are ranked first for the eighth-straight year. The Boston Red Sox are ranked second. If he saw the results before he died this morning, that had to give owner George Steinbrenner one last smile.

Here are some more interesting fun facts from the poll:

Over one-third of Americans (36%) say they follow Major League Baseball, a number that is down from last year when 41% said they followed baseball and 40% said so in 2008. Looking at who follows baseball, men are more likely to do so than women (46% versus 27%). Also African Americans are more likely to be followers of the sport, compared to both Whites and Hispanics (41% versus 36% and 34%). There is also a regional divide, as almost half of Easterners (48%) say they follow baseball, compared to one-third of Westerners (34%) and 29% of Southerners.

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