The_Admiral

On 2/26/2024 at 11:04 AM, FiddySicks said:

Considering we’re at the tail end of the “message board internet” era, I swear some weirdo is gonna eventually make a documentary about this place for Netflix or something. 

I would watch the hell out of a documentary about board culture in general. If you spent 2005-2006 arguing with a guy from Kitchener, Ontario eight years your senior whose avatar was the cover of If You're Feeling Sinister subtitled "turning down sex like my name's Al Bundy," you have lay awake wondering what possibly could have become of that guy. Maybe such a movie would find the answer.

Maybe organizations don't win championships. It didn't escape me that the Patriot Way without winning has them ranked second to last for their spartan facilities and uninterested ownership--sounds a lot like the 1960-1992 league laughingstock Patriots.

21 hours ago, Red Comet said:

NFLPA report cards are in

 

The impression I get reading about my team's facilities is that they've been in the 2nd act of Major League for the past 5 years all the way down to the Native mascot. 

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Though the players received actual chairs with backs to sit in at their lockers in response to last year’s feedback

lol here you are, your majesty

2 hours ago, throwuascenario said:

If a team provides a crucial piece of the city's identity, I think it makes sense to pay to keep them. The StL Cardinals.

Busch Stadium was privately financed, in a rare case of the Cardinals occupying the moral high ground while actually having earned it.

What I can't get over is that it's the same guy! It's the same guy who did it last time. "If you don't give me a free stadium, I'm moving the team!" 35 years go by, "hey, me again. You're not gonna believe this."

3 hours ago, Digby said:

I'm choosing to consider this an NHL bad decision becuase I assume it's the Jacobs' fault. The Bruins have a new bag policy for home games that bans any bags larger than 6 x 4 x 1.5 inches. Even if they're clear. Only exception is, conveniently, shopping bags for any purchased items from the Garden pro shop in the train station. (I assume this is also in effect for Celtics games and concerts, but I ran into it first via the Bruins.)

 

6 x 4 is absolutely tiny for a bag! I get banning huge backpacks or whatever but come on, this is a nuisance.

I thought you were complaining about feet, not inches. I did a reverse Stonehenge. My spatial reasoning, it's not so great.

There's a lot to like here, for sure, but I would have preferred royal blue, and I don't think the clipper ship (that is also a basketball) reads much like any kind of ship. To me, it looks a little like a beehive.

2 hours ago, BBTV said:

As for MLB doing it for "visibility" purposes, while that may be their reasoning, I don't get it. The MLB "brand" isn't really a thing, and it's not like you don't see it on 80% of players, so I don't see any benefit to moving it.  There's no benefit to trying to make the MLB brand equal to the players' or clubs.  In fact, I think it could only hurt.

The NBA is a popular television show and social-media content mill that is basically the Kardashians for men. Major League Baseball is just some abstract concept that won't let you do stuff without express written consent. It's about the teams, the teams, the teams. The NL/AL logos deserve more play than the MLB logo.

I would have put the MLB logo above the cuff on the non-logo sleeve. I don't understand why it needs to be that prominent. MLB isn't really A Brand the way other leagues or its own teams are. NHL, same deal.

On 2/18/2024 at 9:39 PM, Germanshepherd said:

Agreed wholeheartedly on them needing to have separate logo and team colors. 
 

Pick one of the blues and one of purple/pink and I think it’d be much cleaners. 

Purple and light blue seems like the best way to be distinct but mass-appeal: navy is overdone, and prioritizing pink might get accusation of trying too hard to be girly.

On 2/18/2024 at 11:09 PM, monkeypower said:

The Charlotte Checkers did a Florida Panthers night, because that's the current affiliation, on Saturday and instead of having a themed Checkers jersey, they just dressed up as the Panthers.

 

This feels weird and almost patronizing to me.

Not to mention dishonest. I agree, what an odd move.

I wonder if Billings will ever get another whack at the WHL.

I think homelessness has become a bigger problem in the major cities than it had before, especially in Vancouver, but the issues are with cost of living, not quality of life. Every house in Brampton is like 30 guys named Padjit living cheek-by-jowl, their quality of life probably isn't exceptional, but mostly it's just that everything is prohibitively expensive. Canada has a reputation of crapping out publicly funded sitcoms about handicapped Muslim lesbians but underneath that veneer is capitalism as ruthless as any we have here.

45 minutes ago, BBTV said:

 

Yeah, Canadians are basically living in igloos and yurts, killing their food with their bare hands, and praying to various gods that their diseased children heal quickly before reaching the estimated Canadian life expectancy of 30 (since nobody can afford health care, unlike in the States where everything is affordable and everyone has access to care, nobody's defaulting on loans or living on streets or in subway stations, etc.)  Add in the wars, and yeah - the standard of living all the way up there is awful.

Good stuff, but there is a cost-of-living crisis going on in Canada even worse than ours. They're dealing with the same price-gouging at the grocery stores and gas stations plus a massive real estate bubble. You can't buy a house, you can't pay the mortgage, you can barely pay rent, it's insane what's going on up there. It's going to hurt a lot of Canadian cities, and the solution won't be to move the Calgary Flames to an office park in Alpharetta.

That being said, the Jets aren't off the hook for all this. By their own admission, they took advantage of ridiculous demand at the outset and did f-ck-all with it for the better part of a decade, and now that their sales reps have to be more than just passive order-takers, they realized no one knows how to sell a product. And what product? Kevin Cheveldayoff has been overseeing a rebuild that's been going on since the release of the iPad and has failed to build a team that's reliably in the conversation every single year nor a team that picks a few years to go all-in. I don't think that's because Winnipeg is scary, it's just years' worth of insufficient drafting/development, which, under guaranteed payouts and a hard cap, any organization anywhere needs to get right.

I don't think this means Winnipeg fans are bad. Frankly, that they went this long with TNSE running on autopilot is impressive. Loosening up on shared season tickets and getting more corporate sales can help. More than that, so will lowering prices. TNSE has basically captured most of downtown Winnipeg at this point; they're sucking up everyone's money one way or the other. 

I don't know, I just don't see the support at the city or state level for giving Jerry everything he wants. I can't imagine Brandon Johnson speaking in favor of this plan, but then he's drowning so badly already that he may grab onto any life preserver he can.

Aren't all the other Sox owners a bunch of octogenarian Jews from the Old Neighborhood? They're not gonna kill their team. 

I think back to when he and Einhorn first bought the team in the '80s and looked on in abject horror at Andy the Clown and shirtless Harry in the bleachers and cheap seats and cheap beer and all the general weirdness of the Sox back then and immediately went about getting rid of all of it. This is a guy who for 40 years has hated the fans of his team. I wouldn't be scared of his partners buying him out because to move the team to Nashville would be the one final screw-you only Jerry could give.

It's time to realize the third jersey Mike Keenan scrapped on sight. It's just another Chicago Winter Classic, it's an automatic win for the road team, have fun with it.

I've given Reinsdorf credit for knowing how to work the government better than the McCaskeys--the bar is the floor on that one--but JB Pritzker and his quiet-but-not-that-quiet presidential aspirations may make him a worthier adversary than Madigan or Big Gay Jim or whoever else Jerry could buy off.

On 2/19/2024 at 6:53 PM, Walk-Off said:

Ballpark Digest: Report: Reinsdorf to seek $1B in state money for new Chicago White Sox ballpark

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Using hotel/motel taxes to fund sports facilities has a long history in the sports-facility world across the country: because the overwhelming amount is paid by out of towners, the impact on local taxpayers is minimal. 

WE DON'T GET CONVENTIONS ANYMORE. NO ONE TRAVELS FOR BUSINESS ANYMORE. The hotel tax is not some pot of infinite money. We're not even done using hotel taxes to pay for New Comiskey, which is 34 years old and in fine condition. There's not a billion dollars lying around to let 12,000 people look at the Sears Tower while complaining that A.J. Pierzynski should be the manager.

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Also part of the mix: a TIF district–also known as tax-overlay districts in Illinois–would divert sales-tax revenue generated by the development, up to $400 million. The Illinois Sports Facilities Authority would then issue bonds to back the ballpark construction. Again, TIF districts are a popular tool for financing sports facilities: the rationale is that the increased tax payment wouldn’t exist without the sports facilities.

There's our old friend, the TIF district. Longtime readers of the NHL Anti-Thread remember that Jerry Reinsdorf's plan to buy the Coyotes was to pay for it in installments from TIF district revenues, thereby making the taxpayers buy the team for him. Good thing Chicago doesn't need money for literally anything else right now [next Blue Line train to O'Hare departs in 35 minutes]

To what extent was the players' union consulted on these new uniforms? They're the ones who have to wear them. We're not talking about player input for aesthetic purposes, but more like "will your pants split."

On 2/16/2024 at 7:07 AM, WSU151 said:

They always say "the Angels" or something like "he'd be a good fit in Anaheim". Anaheim is usually the locator. They rarely, if ever, use the term "LA" when talking about the Angels...and mainly because have been around the game forever and know that LA = Dodgers and "LA Angels" just doesn't fit. 

I don't think there's that much conviction behind it. The Islanders are often "Long Island" instead of "New York" in similar situations. You hear it a little with the Texas Rangers and Arlington. I think it's useful to refer to them as Anaheim casually (I'm a firm believer that the park name should have reverted to "Anaheim Stadium") while still being the Los Angeles Angels. 

The NHL was used to get a new arena for the third-best basketball program in Raleigh-Durham, why not volleyball, too.

The Bay Area has to have some of the weirdest, clunkiest geography in America. It's probably a big reason why San Francisco became an urban theme park: it had to become an attraction for people reverse-commuting to all the tech campuses 40 miles south. Nothing can make sense when the population horseshoes a giant bay.

3 hours ago, Digby said:

The other three multi-team markets are also the biggest MSAs in the United States; SF/Oakland is something like 12th. Granted SF/Oakland punches above its weight economically and culturally, but by that token so does Boston.

Do you remember the brief but intriguing noise about the Expos moving to Boston? I think it got the same cursory attention as Norfolk did.

If the Nashville Predators fanbase could successfully mount a "don't take our toy away" push and get serious about the team after an existential crisis, so too can the fans of the Oakland A's, one would hope.

3 hours ago, Klondyke said:

We've also seen this a few times in some soccer kits, where they accidentally put something resembling to a Swastika in the design pattern.

I'm sure it was an easy mistake for FC Vilnius to make.