The_Admiral

"Rebranding" kind of buries the lede that the team moved, doesn't it? 

Joe Tessitore was pathetic because he was earnestly going balls to the wall for, like, the sixth-best game of the week at best. Honestly you may as well just pull Chris Berman off whatever weight-loss commercial he's doing this year so he can sit up there and be like SAM DARNOLD THAT DREAM

5 minutes ago, See Red said:

I'm sure it's only a matter of time before ESPN puts Stephen A. Smith in the booth.

"Big game for the Dolphins and Steelers tonight, Stephen A., and they're talking about expecting rain here in PIttsburgh."
"Oh there will DEFINITELY be some complications of a precipitory character."

3 hours ago, BringBackTheVet said:

If a team needs to reduce their capacity to 22k just to fill it, that's an indication that there shouldn't be a team there.  I'm not advocating for the return of 50k-60k stadiums, but something like what the Pirates have should be the minimum (I think it's 35k).  It's just a minor-league look to have such a small stadium, and it really sucks for fans too, since if the team ever does get any support, the tiny capacity will just freeze too many people out.

Agreed, 35,000-50,000 seems to be the ideal range for baseball (and really, you shouldn't be going above 45,000 unless you're the Yankees or Dodgers, or maybe the Mets). Dip into the 20s, and you're charging major-league prices for a minor-league venue -- in fact, you might even try to get away with charging more for the "intimate experience," which would be highly stupid in Florida for obvious market-saturation reasons.

Big problem with the backs, two layers over three doesn't work. A triple-layer number can take a single-layer name over it or another triple-layer, but not double. Let me try plotting this out:

There it is, the worst visual aid I've ever produced in my life.

2 hours ago, RedSox44 said:

They’re another red team. There is nothing unique or recognizable about their identity, nothing memorable about it, which I think explains some of the A” patches — a way to try to give something that’s dead, life.
 

And they need to put “Los Angeles” or “Anaheim” on their road jerseys.

I'd be more than fine with this:

But I don't know what you can really do with the Angels to give them "life." They shouldn't be too garish, they're still a fairly old team in the grand scheme of things and a major-market one at that. If anything, I'd be inclined to lose the silver shadows and beveling and make them plainer.

1 hour ago, RedSox44 said:

The Angles have some of the worst unis in the MLB.

Can you elaborate? There are details that they really get wrong (at least one Big A too many, the use of "Angels Baseball" on a picture of baseball, the halo should always be yellow/gold), and you can quibble over how much navy blue should be in the set, but overall, I think it's a pretty solid set. The flaws don't drag it down to the bottom tier.

Who was the guy on the board who would get inordinately upset about the Harambe meme?

Big-time passive voice there -- it was believed by whom? I think the real story is that the O'Malleys gouging them on revenues was never gonna work in the long run.

Long Beach would have been interesting. I looked into it further and the stadium would have been where an "El Dorado Park" currently is, which I guessed was a racecourse but is, in fact, an actual park. How pleasant. It's about twelve miles west of Anaheim Stadium, six miles inland from the convention center, and twenty miles south of Dodger Stadium. I think that really would have been an ideal location in terms of keeping one foot in Los Angeles while still reaching out to the growing suburbs to the east. Not that Anaheim was a disaster by any means, but Long Beach probably would have been better. Maybe they even could have bared their teeth on the whole name-change thing and remained an L.A. team forever.

EDIT: here's what the O'Malleys pulled, baseball owners really were just elevated carnies

What didn’t raise the Angels’ ire?

* They were billed for window washing in catacomb offices at Dodger Stadium that had no windows.

* They objected to being charged half of the cost of resurfacing and repainting the parking lot because they received none of the parking revenue.

* They complained when regularly billed for landscape maintenance, arguing that the Dodgers were going to landscape no matter how many tenants they had.

* And, in what they considered the ultimate swipe, they angrily complained when charged for half a season of toilet paper, insisting it should have been prorated on the basis of attendance.

6 hours ago, TrueYankee26 said:

This NBA realignment will have 48 Team

bwah!

Yeah, SB Nation is hurting. Its parent company Vox is straight-up asking for donations from readers. Matthew Yglesias lives in a mansion.

RIP Ed Farmer, who was in way over his head on play-by-play, but, as a South Side Irish blowhard, fit on Sox radio perfectly.

RIP mothership comments

Doing a 1:1 flip of purple and gold feels like the right thing to do, but I'm pretty sure the script and number would be much more legible if they were white outlined in gold.

The U Oilers. Bold. And what an extremely Q logo.

I was thinking more Utica-Vancouver or Springfield-Lauderdale. I don't really have a mental inventory of flights, that's dfwabel stuff, I just know one time I tried to fly from Milwaukee to St. Louis but found out I'd have to connect in Atlanta.

Flying in and out of what's left of AHLLand must kinda suck, layovers ahoy.

Is there a place that would be a better headquarters for the league than Springfield? Maybe somewhere in Fairfield County to be close to New York? Does it even matter?

Not the worst arrangement, ORD-FLL flights are plentiful and manageable (three hours each way, the JetBlue flights are pleasant), and the locals don't dislike the Panthers the way they did the Canucks and Blues.

Glens Falls, man, that place is An AHL Town if ever there were one. Bring it back up.

Road games were always on TV under Bill.

Like I said, I can see them going away if for some reason Rosemont decides to tear down the arena, but I thought about it more and even that's a longshot: the calendar is still booked solid and, if anything, better off without those bomb-scare DePaul games anyway. They'll probably keep renovating it until the roof falls off again.

The AHL isn't kicking one of their more successful organizations out of the league, this is wishcasting

The Wolves will sooner make the league let them field an independent team of everyone just short of the NHL than be "sent to their demise." They might have some pull, you know?

The Wolves being sold and trundled off to play in the Tampa Bay Lightning's practice facility or something would be the dumbest end to the most successful AAA team.

My fear with the Wolves has been the Rosemont Horizon nearing the end of its useful life. With DePaul at McCormick Place, the circus dead, and WWE running the United Center, who's to say how long a 40-year-old oversized secondary arena with an absurdly shallow rake full of uncomfortable seats can last before being torn down for more hotels, parking garages, outlet malls, or urban simulacra? In other words, Philadelphia Phantoms Phpart Phtwo. I suppose they could move to Hoffman Estates, but I'm convinced that that arena is cursed.

What I know best about the Ramps is that they named their press box for a victim of the mass shooting in Aurora. That the memorial press box thus won't exist anymore is kind of a downer.

Not sure about the Etch for San Antonio, the track record for being made to accept third-tier (generous) hockey under the same name is not great. Ask Manchester, NH.