The_Admiral

I sorta miss the days of the middle-inning booth switch. Having the same two guys call all nine innings of a telecast wasn't really commonplace until maybe the turn of the millennium? If you go back and watch David Wells's perfect game from '98, it goes from Jim Kaat and Ken Singleton to Al Trautwig and Jim Kaat to Al Trautwig and Ken Singleton to Singleton and Kaat in reversed roles and then finally back to where they started. I think that's a little excessive, but I do like flipping the pbp guys between booths. I get tired of Len Kasper's Kermit voice sometimes.

The way TBS did it where they flipped the entire booth at the middle of the 5th inning was weird, even if it was an equitable 50-50 split, because you'd have [whichever pair of Skip, Pete, and two guys who were not Skip nor Pete] start the game on national TV but not be there to finish it. No continuity!

8 hours ago, Still MIGHTY said:

He has a $7-million+ home in Key West, a nearly $11-million penthouse in New York City and also bought an island off of Spain.

Well, when it comes to guys who own homes in New York, South Florida, and a private island, the NHL could do significantly worse.

On 7/23/2019 at 8:08 PM, Dilbert said:

Battle Creek Rumble Bees

Can't stop singing this to the tune of "Summer Samba." Bat-tle-creek, rum-ble-bees, baaaaattle-creek ruuuumble-bees

Yeah, well, it's the one they have now, which is close to the one they had when they were good. At least there's some sense of organizational continuity. I appreciate that the banner made me forget Halladay mostly wore those dumb grey Crillee numbers.

World Cup in England feels right, hope they do it.

Yeah, there just aren't a lot of other places to plunk down a park, are there? As a good populist I hate to see parks getting smaller and smaller in terms of seating capacity but that's the way it's going, and I'm guessing even nosebleeds for an Angels game were still a little steep.

More and more I think they're just going to build a new 40,000-seat park in the existing parking lot and that'll be that.

In basketball, where radio play-by-play is generally an afterthought, I would say so. In baseball, they're closer to equals. Pat Hughes is as much the voice of the Cubs as Len Kasper is, if not more so.

19 hours ago, Mockba said:

Really, it's only the weirdly-prudish places like Minnesota that obsess over when/where booze can be sold.

14 hours ago, LMU said:

Also Washington.

Scandinavians are torn between two lovers: drinking lots of alcohol, and following intricate sets of rules.

Yeah, Binny's Beverage Depot is our big one; they've killed just about every old-fashioned strip-mall liquor store within each respective blast radius.

Isn't it also cool how Wisconsin doesn't trifle with arcane liquor laws and just loads up the grocery stores with alcohol? People from other parts of the country are surprised sometimes, but they shouldn't be, because, well, Wisconsin.

I always liked the colonial flag better (and the idea of Hong Kong not belonging to China). The black version of the flag is a nice message.

There are relocation fees when the league says there are. Moving the Thrashers to Winnipeg cost $60 million. Moving the Jets from Winnipeg cost nothing.

1 minute ago, BringBackTheVet said:

I don't see any way in which St. Louis and Chicago are rivals outside the context of sports.

Well, Chicago overtook St. Louis as the preeminent midwestern city by re-engineering a river to send its sewage down there. That must count for something. 

I don't know if Patriots-Jets is an all-timer, but it's something with the way Belichick and Parcells weave through both of them. I don't think there was ever much to it before then because the Patriots' only rivalry had been with its own obsolescence.

There are lots of city rivalries that in the grand scheme don't mean anything. Montreal and Toronto is not among them at all.

2 hours ago, Red Comet said:

>Some 4channer as of the end of his freshman year of high school one month ago decides to modsass the head custodian and spills his spaghetti as a result.

 

Now let's talk about something relevant:

The Rays players aren't too thrilled about this time and place split either.

“This is some stressful stuff that Blake doesn’t like thinking about,’’ he said. “Blake just wants to throw the baseball.’’

Yes, that's precisely what this tedious CCSLC hobbyhorse needed, LeBron James wearing a shirt about himself

Salary and average annual value is not an apples-to-apples comparison but it's still fairly interesting.

22 hours ago, McCarthy said:

Why do people in Winnipeg have to think about Laine breaking Ilya Kovalchuk's Thrashers records and how is that a better system? 

Because bloggers who hate that Winnipeg is in the NHL tell them they have to!

God, just involving Montreal seems to bring NHL-calibre incompetence into the fold.

The old Progressive Boink had a fantastic write-up of Tropicana Field's weirdness (your mention of the Joe DiMaggio comic book hero jogged my memory), but I think you need to scrape through the Wayback Machine to find it now.

EDIT: so I did

Philadelphia, you can argue, but the Charlie Finley green-and-gold Swingin' A's got their start in Kansas City, and that cements the continuity between those two stops. But I don't think the A's are ever leaving the Bay Area, so this is a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing to me.

To synthesize Angel Stadium and Black Athena here, I want to say that I am a hotep but only regarding the origins of Anaheim Stadium. The parking lot A originally stood for "Africa." Most people won't tell you this.

You'd have an easier time determining which sports team inheritors aren't failsons.