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pmoehrin

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pmoehrin last won the day on September 25 2016

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  1. I think the NIMBY groups in Arlington Heights were gearing up to pitch the hissy fit to end all hissy fits, and the Bears simply noped out before it got to that point. So, after all that, they're content to move across the street.
  2. I'd just like to know the names of the people behind the group. I want to call amateur hour on some of the data and wording they've used, but I've seen well that stuff plays when you're telling people what they want to hear. But I would have zero faith in any nameless group. There's a reason they don't want you to know who they are.
  3. The odd thing is I would actually agree with viewing potential market data for a low-level minor league team on a local level because you're not going to get more than a few dozen people a night traveling an hour to see ECHL hockey. But if you want to know why nobody up until now has had the bright idea to build a 6-8k arena outside of the capital district in suburban Maryland, these figures start getting into why. There's a reason why arenas outside of college venues tend to be built almost exclusively in population centers. People generally don't like getting in a car and driving 45 minutes at night to get to or from wherever they're going. And that's about how far you have to drive from Frederick to reach another significant population base. Frederick County ranks around 260th among the most populated counties in the US, and it ranks about the same by population density. What other areas are like that? Asheville, Poughkeepsie, Green Bay, Southeastern Connecticut, Tallahassee. And it's a mixed bag when it comes to arena quality or even existence in those areas. But you don't preach caution when you want something. If it were me, I would be looking to go in and around Rockville before Frederick, but that would also be a lot more expensive, and maybe outside the budget range of whoever these people are.
  4. For “market data” they’re clearly using city population data for the top four. And by that metric El Paso is just as good of a market as Boston. However, Worcester’s population is around 200k, and they have an ECHL team, so I don’t know why they’re not listed. But for Frederick, they’re using their county population, so it’s not even an apples-to-apples comparison. Just blatantly using different metrics here.
  5. There is a clear difference between what the two regions do. Raleigh is a traditional, modern American city. Office-centric and with numerous research hubs in the surrounding area, just like Charlotte. Durham is a clear manufacturing hub that also specializes in pharmaceuticals and healthcare. Duke has a medical school, NC State does not. But even these tend to bring in a lot of blue-collar jobs. You still need people to mop the floors of the hospitals and labs and provide cafeteria food. There is a clear difference there, but the same dynamic exists in many other places where the metro areas aren't split. That's why I'm curious as to why here but not there. They're in the same state, share the same airport, and I don't see a natural geographic border. 540 appears to be the effective border between the two cities.
  6. I could understand splitting San Jose off from San Francisco because it's served by its own airport, and it's almost 60 miles between San Francisco and San Jose. That's not really that close, but there's definitely a connection between the two cities, hence the CSA designation, which I 100% agree with. In the Northeast, it's pretty much like pulling teeth to get people to travel more than 25 miles from their home. Obviously, I'm generalizing here. But once you get west of the Mississippi, people won't give a second thought to driving 70 minutes to the grocery store. So, I can 100% believe that in a state like Louisiana, a two-hour drive from Acadiana to New Orleans is seen as nothing. How willing people are to commute is usually inversely correlated to how much money they make, and once you get north of I-10, you go from below-average incomes to some of the dirt poorest regions in the country.
  7. I agree with most of what the Census Bureau does, but I don't know why Raleigh and Durham would be considered two separate metro areas. They share an airport, it's less than 30 miles between the two cities, and there's no natural or state border diving the two cities. Chatman County is considered part of the Durham metro area, but it's no further to get to Durham than to get to Raleigh from there. They don't separate Tacoma from Seattle on a metro level, and they're just as far apart from each other. Maybe someone from the area can explain because I don't get it.
  8. Utah is an odd case because even though Salt Lake City is barely a top 50 US metro area, the Salt Lake City media market covers the entire state and bleeds into parts of Nevada and Wyoming. So even though it would be the smallest metro area with an MLB team, in terms of media market, they would be ahead of several MLB clubs, whereas Vegas would be ahead of several MLB clubs when it came to metro size but dead last when it came to media market size. It's also a state that's experienced 20% percentage growth in population almost every decade since the first census data was taken in 1850. The population of the state and the SLC metro area have both doubled since the Jazz moved there in '79, so I think its far more of a matter of when not if Utah gets an MLB team now that the financing aspect is set. It's just too big of a TV market for MLB to refuse.
  9. I would assume none outside of football. The A10 regularly sends two teams to the tourney. Usually three. The MAC has never sent more than two teams to the tourney, and even that feat hasn't been accomplished in over 20 years. They've only had one team finish in the top 25 since 1990. I don't think it will do anything to help the football team out, but it sure will hurt the basketball team by sending them from one of the best conferences in D1 to one of the worst. Might as well drop down to America East. At least Albany, Maine, and UNH are fairly close by. But again, every sport has to suffer because nothing gets in the way of giving the football program what it wants.
  10. The Meadowlands is just an undeveloped piece of land north of Newark. You could easily build 3-4 MLB ballparks there, no problem if you wanted to. That's not the issue. The issue with putting a ballpark in the Meadowlands is that there's nothing to do around there. You'd be coming for the game and going straight home as soon as it's over unless you want to check out that overpriced white elephant of a mall that finally opened after a decade. I wouldn't view that as a dealbreaker, but it's not what MLB teams want anymore. They want the ballpark to be connected to the surrounding area in some way. Not a standalone in a sea of parking like Kauffman Stadium, or Citi Field. The problem is there's nothing on the North Jersey map that screams BUILD HERE!!!! There's always some kind of tradeoff between accessibility, the quality of the surrounding neighborhood, and the inherent issue of there being no geographic population center for that part of the state. I don't expect ever to see a Jersey-based MLB team in my lifetime, but if they ever came, my advice for a ballpark location would be to build wherever you can.
  11. You could 100% put an MLB team in New Jersey, but it would never go in Trenton. Besides being the effective northeast border of the Philly metro area, Trenton is very isolated from the rest of the state. No major highway goes through the city. You have to take 95 and get off onto either 195 or 295. There's no other way of getting there by car unless you're already on 195, which means you're coming from the shore. You're an hour's drive from any international airport, and train service is limited to one station. Any Jersey team would have to be based in or around Newark. You couldn't go any further west or south than where 287 runs.
  12. The White Sox had a historic ballpark that Jerry couldn't tear down fast enough, and they also had a deal with WGN to carry all the games that Reisndorf couldn't get out of fast enough because he wanted his games to be exclusively on cable. The Cubs thought big; he thought small. That's always been the difference.
  13. What I find interesting about Jerry Reinsdorf trying to move to the Loop in a clear effort to get the White Sox out of stepchild status is that the whole dynamic with the Cubs being the clear-cut number-one baseball team in Chicago didn't start until Reinsdorf bought the team. All through the 50s and 60s, the White Sox outdrew the Cubs virtually every year, and even into the early/mid-80s, the teams were pretty much neck and neck with attendance figures. The last year the White Sox outdrew the Cubs at the gate was 1992, and it's not even close most years. The Cubs outdrew the White Sox by over a million fans yearly from 2014 to 2019. In 2017 and 2018, the difference was almost 1.6 million. And it's not like the Cubs have had fantastic ownership at this timespan, either. Just one World Series appearance and win. Same as the White Sox. That shows how much people dislike what Reisndorf has done with the franchise since taking from Bill Veeck before the '81 season for the paltry sum of $19 million, or about $65 million in today's money. Don't let anyone tell you money doesn't grow on trees. It absolutely does.
  14. It's basically four metro areas in one. San Francisco, Oakland, and Silicon Valley/San Jose are the big three, but even wine country, aka the North Bay, has multiple cities with over 100k+ people living there, and as a whole, the region is home to around 1.5 million people. That area is not considered part of the San Francisco metro, but it definitely falls within the Bay Area ticket base. That's why you can't look at the metro area as the be-all-end-all when it comes to evaluating markets. The simple answer would be to have the A's move to San Jose/Silicon Valley and call it a day, but nothing can be that simple. The original sin of the Oakland A's was Charles Finley agreeing to be the stepchild franchise because he was that desperate to get out of Kansas City. Every issue the A's have ever had with trying to leave the Coliseum stems from the original agreement that said the A's would never consider moving to Santa Clara County.
  15. Pat lost some capital with me with how he handled this. Not that I had a strong opinion of him either way before any of this went down, but he could and should have shut this before effectively being told to. I still don't hate him, but I did lose some respect for him. If you want Aaron Rodgers to talk sports on the show, that's fine. ESPN is a sports network, and that's what they should be focused on. They shouldn't be discriminating against who they have on their network based on political beliefs. But when you start moving outside that lane, and it's not contributing to any meaningful conversation in a constructive way. And you're a national television network? Regardless of whether I'm watching that show or not, I got a problem with that. I'm not saying ESPN couldn't or shouldn't ever talk about social issues. It's inherently engrained into everything. But it should be through the lens of sports. Jimmy Kimmel and what's going on with the fallout over Jeffrey Epstein has nothing to do with anything sports-related. At all. And that's not the only issue at play here. I have family members who took demonstrably false information at face value, and it cost them their lives. That's why it's personal for me. That's where my anger over this comes from, and I direct as much of it as I can at the people I hold responsible for spreading that garbage. Aaron Rodgers is one of the names on that list. He ain't at the top, but he's there. With McAfee, I hope that he learned some lessons here and that this is the worst thing that ever comes out of his show during his tenure at ESPN. I still don't have any ill will towards him. I'm just disappointed because I thought he was better than this.
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