Manager Mike Rizzo responded that the weather forecast for May 11 had called — incorrectly, as it turned out — for rain to persist well into the evening and that Showalter had been in full agreement on May 11 that the game should be postponed. Rizzo added that the Orioles had refused to play on the teams′ next mutual off date, May 15 (which would have forced the Orioles to go 27 straight days without a full day off, which is more than the maximum of 20 allowed by the Collective Bargaining Agreement), necessitating that they play on June 8, and that the June 8 date actually was less favorable to the Nationals, who gave up an off-day after a 10-day, three-city trip to the United States West Coast, than to the Orioles, who were just completing a nine-game homestand in nearby Baltimore. Given all of this, Rizzo said that the Orioles should "quit whining." No trades The Orioles and the Nationals have never agreed to a trade, which as Barry Svrluga writes "The groups that own the two teams have a deep and abiding loathing for each other. Oh, and they have been embroiled in a legal case regarding tens of millions of dollars from their shared regional sports network." Questioning whether a rivalry exists The idea that a rivalry exists between the Nationals and Orioles is itself controversial. Despite the marketing of the Beltway Series as a "Battle of the Beltways" and the animosity some Baltimore and Washington baseball fans feel toward one another's teams and cities, some observers – both sports journalists and fans – question whether a Nationals-Orioles rivalry truly exists, arguing that it is a "manufactured" rivalry born of the media, marketing, interleague play, and coincidental geographical proximity rather than history or the significance of the games, and that the Beltway Series lacks the meaning of true rivalries found elsewhere in MLB. Non-competitive history Sports rivalries generally arise between teams that are familiar with one another, play one another frequently, and have a history of parity and of meeting one another in significant games, but this has rarely, if ever, occurred between Baltimore and Washington MLB teams. During the years from 1954 to 1971, when the Orioles played the original Senators and then the expansion Senators regularly in the American League, the Orioles enjoyed great success, while the two Senators teams between them managed only