Grammarvelous #2: The Apostrophe Catastophe

I know what you're thinking: it's the end of April and last month I said I was going to write a monthly grammar blog. Glad we both remembered in the nick of time.

It's finally feeling like spring and in the mid-Atlantic that means two things: allergies and baseball. Assuming we're all properly dosed up on Zyrtec, let's get right to baseball (and grammar).

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Our beloved home team the Baltimore Orioles is ubiquitously known as "the O's". At least to the locals. If you haven't once, in your best Baltimorean accent, uttered "How 'bout dem O's, hon?" you probably didn't eat fries'n gravy down de ocean to celebrate the nuptials of the Utz girl and Natty Boh guy. But that's ok because not speaking in or understanding the Hon dialect is forgivable (and arguably preferable), but improperly using punctuation is whole different bird (black and orange in this case). 

Let's get back to the O's and the purpose of this blog. I offer up for discussion a grammatical conundrum and something that has been gnawing at me for years: is it correct to have the apostrophe in O's? To argue it's grammatically incorrect, we must first agree that O's is a nickname for Orioles. Given that, Orioles in its stand alone form is plural not possessive and would require no apostrophe until the time is becomes a plural possessive. Have I lost you? Look at these examples and then it should all make sense.

• The Os are going to crush the Yankees this year. plural
• The Os' fans were voted best looking in the MLB. plural possessive
• The Orioles play at the beautiful Camden Yards. plural
• The Orioles' Manny Machado is working hard to come back from surgery and rejoin the big leagues. plural possessive

Still with me? 

However, a case can be made if you think O's is not a nickname, but a shortened version of the word Orioles. Is the apostrophe simply acting as a place holder for the remaining letters -- riole? Similarly, we use an apostrophe as a place holder in contractions such is don't, can't, won't, and so forth.  

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When I sat down to write this blog I was planning on venting years of annoyance about the misuse of the possessive apostrophe. But after careful thought and research, and mostly to move forward with my life, I'm going with the second theory: the apostrophe acts a place holder. I feel so much better. Have you been struggling with this too? I didn't think so.

Now that we've got that cleared up, I have a little bomb to drop. And I realize once I detonate it, you might go AWOL. Brace yourself: on pretty much all merchandise sporting the O's logo, the apostrophe is upside down and backwards. I know. I couldn't believe it either, but just look for yourself!

How did this pass through the Orioles' marketing gurus, MLB proofreaders and god knows how many other muckety mucks? After all these years I'm finally willing to accept the apostrophe belongs at all and now this? 

Who wants to start a petition?