The_Admiral

On 6/21/2019 at 2:06 PM, McCarthy said:

Everyone in Tampa younger than 30 is a Lightning fan? What's the difference between them and the Rays? The Lightning play in a nice and accessible building.

Also, the Lightning have successfully gamed hockey players' aversions to media pressure and income taxes to build a team that both retains and further acquires elite talent without exceeding players' market value to do so. The Rays enjoy the same advantages but trade their players away as soon as they even threaten to earn market value -- largely because they don't make any money, which in turn is largely because they don't have a nice and accessible building.

I love Quebec, Montreal, the Expos, and the elb, but this is preposterous. Its inevitable failure will only make people rag on Montreal baseball even more than they already do.

There won't be a future Oakland team -- in the absence of the A's, the entire Bay Area would just be expected to get its American League baseball from interleague visits to the Giants. But I don't think that's very likely, either.

I've argued that you can't retire "Indians" because it's lasted over a century. The Athletics have lasted even longer and haven't even offended anyone. It's there to stay.

Didn't he fail a background check to buy the Atlanta Hawks? Sounds like our kind of guy.

I don't get the whole Sherbrooke Phoenix identity. It's not French; a Phoenix could be anywhere. Was Castors completely off the table as an option? 

What happened to WEEI? They were one of the biggest stations in America for a long time, and then they circled the drain really fast.

I say new-ORlinz, never n'awlins. 

Nil desperandum, BellaSpurs. I still try to get away with saying "Los Angeleez."

The powerful bread lobby keeps stopping their research.

People who screech about how Jess Mendoza doesn't belong there give themselves away. She doesn't say anything embarrassing or incompetent. She barely says anything at all, and what she does say is so anodyne that it's impossible to get mad at. Ungetmadatable. This merely puts her among most mediocre game analysts in sports.

I think Matt Vasgersian was designed in a lab to be the idealized Thom Brennaman. Why, though.

The Cubs have been playing on Sunday Night Baseball quite a bit lately and I can't shake the fundamental weirdness of that booth. It sounds like they're all just talking independently of one another. A-Rod doesn't say as much as you'd expect him to and Jess Mendoza says even less. The only time I felt like anyone was on the same page was when A-Rod and Mendoza both started crapping their pants over Trea Turner being charged with an error because the ball bounced off the edge of his glove and he fell down. (It must have worked, because the scorer reversed course and gave Almora the hit, but it sure looked like an error to me.) 

I think they kinda threw the baby out with the bathwater on the old Jon Miller/Joe Morgan pairing. They could have just Fired Joe Morgan© and kept one of the best play-by-play men in baseball, but that whole broadcasting franchise has been a mess ever since.

25 minutes ago, VDizzle12 said:

The keystone logo is pretty sloppy so it better just stay small on the sleeve.
 

You ain't kiddin'. How did this not get sent back to the drawing board?

You can't do italic in a shape where one line is going the other way! Now you have to put those weird Flyers lines on the E to fill the space. Looks awful.. 

Really? I think the script by itself works well because you have the otter tail going on. But I liked the primary-colors palette for them, now they look like a Bruins farm team.

The winning play may have been for the Ricketts family to buy WGN and go back to that particular model of vertical integration, but they couldn't resist the siren song of $3/month from people who never explicitly consented to buy their product in the first place. The era of the high-carriage-fee RSN is ending, just as they're trying to get in on it. And they couldn't even wrangle the Blackhawks over for winter programming, so now they're selling a channel that for at least four months a year won't really have anything. We can only watch Kerry Wood strike out 20 so many times.

Nope, and I suspect that with a new RSN running against Comcast in a market dominated by Comcast, people might have trouble watching the Cubs on cable, too.

SportsTime Ohio, Fox Sports Oklahoma, Fox Sports New Orleans, and Fox Sports Kansas City all kind of remind us that there are regional sports networks and then there are regional sports networks.

No one let the Sonics leave and no public advocacy groups meaningfully influenced anything. Ownership's proposals were made in bad faith and were designed to be rejected so that Oklahoma City-based interests could move the team to Oklahoma City, following their rejected attempt to buy the Hornets, whose layover in OKC they had been subsidizing. It was all for show; the coffee idiot signed their death sentence the day he sold the team.

18 minutes ago, Digby said:

I’ve never clicked on a deadspin video but once these thumbnails started popping up I learned that their office is basically the men’s room line at a National concert.

They blogged the dull and wicked ordinary way

West side, south side, around the city

11 hours ago, McCarthy said:

I've decided this confirms what I've always suspected about Dave Lozo - he doesn't actually like hockey. I can't say Ryan Lambert is any better, though.

They're both NBA Twitter wannabes who can't stop lamenting that they grew up backing the wrong horse and got left out of the in-crowd. They probably can't even go to brunch without asking why their bacon-avocado strata isn't more like the NBA.

"Vaudeville Grenades"

Deadspin on the NHL and Quebec City: https://deadspin.com/whos-keeping-the-nhl-out-of-quebec-city-1833781497

Nothing new to us in the article -- in fact, the author omitted the role we suspect Jeremy Jacobs to have in keeping the league out -- but what's really interesting is the comment section and how thoroughly public opinion has turned against Quebec. Almost no support for the Nordiques among fans anymore, who either like to be know-it-alls about GDPs and metro populations, or are so in love with the woke/extremely-online Sun Belt teams that they can't see straight.

It's the inverse of Chicago, where the tollways and expressways comprise route numbers that change or get doubled up such that saying "94" is effectively meaningless. They're all 94!

What's wrong with it (other than the general ills of Southern California urban planning)? I like it as the West Coast counterpart to Subway Series.