FiddySicks

Pipe dream. Especially the retractable roof part. Why is that necessary?

Yeah I think that’s ultimately the plan. I don’t think it’s going to work, though. Then Sacramento is going to also be stuck with a huge mess.

I’ve thought about this, and while I wish the city could’ve demanded that they changed their name to the Sacramento RiverCats (I get that it’s a crazy and unreasonable idea), them playing a game or two in RiverCats “Throwbacks” would be close enough, and would fulfill one of my oldest sports fantasies.

Gross. We don’t want them. All this is going to do is :censored: up the long term viability of the RiverCats. I can’t see them sticking around during this stretch to try and directly compete with a MLB team who shares their field. I’m not even sure the league would allow that, as the RiverCats not only can but absolutely would outdraw the A’s the vast majority of those three years. They’re using this as a “trial run for a MLB team in Sac” and I’m sorry but lol what? They couldn’t even get the soccer team off of the ground and now that’s completely out of reach because of the $500 million expansion fee. And now they want to try and pivot to MLB expansion? sure, Sacramento. This whole thing is a terribly half baked idea put out by the two dumbest sports ownership groups (Kings and A’s) in the state of California.

Why the would Denver switch to a white helmet? Good Christ is that an infuriatingly bad idea. This has been a blue helmet team for like half a century now, and even before that they never wore a white helmet. They’re about to sacrifice like 50 years of brand consistency for this tacky “icy” 5280/CoLoRaDo PrIdE nonsense. Colorado has a dumbass flag anyway. I legit hate that goofy Cubs logo with a sun in it looking ass logo. “Well, Coloradans love it!” Don’t care. Then you’re all dumb with bad taste.

Closest one I can think of I was involved with, and that was an expansion franchise falling apart.

More than the A’s have. They would probably demand a lot of clauses built in with the phrase “in perpetuity” included.

That happened with the Giants and Dodgers a few years ago. They played either the opening series or the second one, and then not again until end of June or early July. I think it’s one of those quirks with the schedule that happens every so often and there just so happens to be two teams kind of left out of the loop. I think it started happening, or at least more frequently, when they fully integrated the AL/NL schedule.

I think Matt Kemp also did this while playing for the Dodgers. Might have the player wrong, though.

A bit of a sidebar here, but if you’re looking for a lot of crazy old baseball stories like that, check out The Dollop podcast. It’s FANTASTIC. And it really emphasizes how much of a circus baseball was back in those old days. You’re right, it’s miles more interesting than the sterile Ken Burnsificatuon of baseball history we have now.

Yes. Exactly. I fell so hard into ALL of this when I was younger. But then you get older, realize what the world actually is (or, in the very least, what it’s become), and realize that a lot of the mystique around baseball is just their fabrication of their own place and importance within society. They use it as a warm blanket to cover up the warts, and as a screen to avoid dealing with any of the actual problems. It’s as soulless of a money making operation as any other business entity. And I’m not indicting baseball alone on this. There are countless “American institutions” that rest on these laurels and use it to hand wave anything that’s problematic. But people are starting to push back on some of this and baseball certainly isn’t going to be immune from that. Baseball has a choice to either stick to their guns and continue to shrink in popularity, or adapt. For as dumb as some of these guys at the top are, they’re at least trying. I just wish the HoF would start to reflect some of that, too.

I’m not so much talking physical age as I am mindset. There’s always been this antiquated and ridiculous notion that baseball is more culturally important that it ever actually was. The attitude on the steroids era guys reflects that in a really strong way. I think that a lot of baseball fans who don't look at baseball as this major cultural institution, and see it more as the entertainment product that it actually is, are sort of tired of the “outrage”, because it seems so silly.

That’s a good point and a good observation. I think I sort of missed it because it’s buried below a mountain of other terrible ideas.

And this is perfectly fine. Look what the Giants do with Bonds. They have tributes to him, sure. But they’re not planning on erecting any street facing statues or renaming streets after him (even though in all reality, McCovey Cove should probably be Bonds Cove. Rename the field after McCovey like Oakland did with Rickey Henderson. But I digress). They recognize the major contributions he accomplished, but he sure as hell isn’t ever going to be an ambassador to the team like Mays and now the World Series crew is. They recognize what Bonds was, because it’s honest to do so. But at the same time, they keep him at an arms length. That’s his punishment for all of this. He was one of the best players in franchise history, but will never be considered a franchise cornerstone because of his own actions. I don’t really know what else more you can reasonably ask for without making yourselves look foolish in the process.

So, we have to remember that when you break it down, the hall of fame is really nothing more than a glorified museum that sniffs it’s own farts way too hard. Them just leaving the steroid guys/Pete Rose/etc out completely is in essence them practicing a bit of revisionist history, and therefore shouldn’t really be taken seriously by anyone anyway. They could absolutely include these guys in some way, shape, or form, while also doing the work to explain some of the context of that particular era or issue. But the thing is, that would take a little bit of work on their parts, and it would severely diminish the time they have to be old cranky codgers whining about the “sanctity” of a child’s game where you hit a cow skin ball with a wooden stick. Bonds and Rose are the hit kings in Major League Baseball, and that’s not going to change because a bunch of liver spotted octogenarians have covered their eyes and ears and have refused to process it. They could so easily clear up a lot of this controversy by actually putting in the effort to curate the era in which all of this happened. No no, they don’t want to face it. They would rather let all of this bull:censored: drag on for decades out of spite. I almost think they keep the controversy up just to keep themselves in the spotlight. Just grasping at any straw they can to keep what little relevance they have left.

Yes, it was. In 1997. Two years after the Coliseum in Oakland was. For basically the same reason, but in reverse. Both stadiums are almost 60 years old, so a lot of the structural/foundational issues are going to be similar.

One of the problems is that Southern California politics (specifically, Orange County politics) are just as much of a snake pit as Bay Area politics. Something is going to eventually have to give with Angels Stadium, as it’s the same age as the Oakland Coliseum. When that time comes, then what? Do they think it’s going to be any easier to find the land and bilk the tax payers for a new park? And you can talk about how So Cal potentially has more of a pool of big money to pull from when the time comes (I find that claim to be dubious at best), but… Why? Like, for what reason would anyone want to fund a project with the Angels at the main tenant? Who does that work for other than whoever owns the Angels? I’m just starting to see a future where both parts of the state give off the shocked pikachu meme look as both of their AL teams set up shop somewhere dumb because they couldn’t extort more taxpayer money from here.

Whatever frustration I may have with Mike Trout and his career (because I think baseball fans generally should feel this way) isn’t really directed at him, but at the goddamn useless ass Angels. For how bad some teams have been forever, really nobody has been more inept in the last half century than they have. Like, they’re an absolutely USELESS franchise, and outside of one miracle run, have basically nothing to show for their time in the bigs Actually, I think the Angels winning in 02 was one of the worst things that’s happened since the turn of the century. Not only did they beat my team (which is mostly irrelevant, but so damn annoying), but it seemed to wipe away so many years of ineptitude from everyone’s minds. Like, this team was so dog worthless that Disney bought them on a short sale and made a movie about how they could only win with the help of God’s direct servants. Then they back into that title, sell to a moron, and he gets to do the same inept dance everyone else did with this team yet had like a two decade buffer because of that stupid trophy. I’ve NEVER seen an organization coast on the accomplishments of one single fluke run quite the way they have. It probably saved that stupid franchise from being where the A’s are right now. That’s so frustrating. The Angels and A’s are in a surprisingly similar situation when it comes to being the secondary AL team with a decomposing stadium. Maybe I’m being hopelessly optimistic, but I feel like had the A’s picked up a win somewhere along the lines instead of the Angels, that may have forced the hand of some of this Bay Area money when it came to funding a stadium. Instead the Angels get that buffer instead of the A’s and don’t do with it.

That’s been there for quite awhile now. They lose the button there so there’s less of an issue with the jersey script. A lot of authentics have a hidden velcro strip there to keep that spot closed.

Get a bucket and a mop, that’s a wet ass Yankee

Well, the Kim Mulkey “hit piece” came out today and it revealed… Basically nothing new. All it showed was that Mulkey is a vaguely homophobic :censored: who tends to freak WAY out about things that really aren’t that big of a deal because she’s a psychotic control freak. What a revelation about the woman who filed a lawsuit and went nuts at even the mention of someone writing an article about her. All it really does is make her look like even more of a nutbag, and also makes me wonder what the hell she’s actually hiding if she’s this paranoid about it.

Yeah I agree with you on the first point. That’s how I feel about Patrick Mahomes. I keep telling myself to not have the same kind of dislike for him that I had for Brady, and just enjoy his talent. But damn is it hard. I just flat out don’t like the dude and there isn’t a great reason why. I just do. Ooh, couldn’t disagree with you more about Goldy. I felt kind of off put by the guy, because he was a D Back and always killed the Giants. But then I got D Backs season tickets in 2013 and he was legit the ONLY bright light on that sorry ass team. God, he was just SO good, and getting to see him play up close for close to 90+ games turned him into one of my top 5 favorite players ever.

This immediately made me think of the original Wonder Years.

Im not so sure about these. I’m never really a fan of a cap where the bill is the darker part of the uniform, especially at home. That and the cream color just looks out of place to me. It’s going to take some getting used to, in the very least. It’s more subtle and smarter this time around, but it still ultimately feels like the D Backs are trying to split the difference between the mid 2000s set and their original look. They should probably just do what they used to/what the Buccaneers do with their throwbacks. Go with the more fitting theme, and only bust out the colorful throwbacks somewhat sparingly. I know there are uniform “rules” (blah blah) in place now, but if I was the king of sports uniforms, I would say the D Backs can wear their throwbacks once every ten games, and whatever game that landed on would determine what uniform they would wear. For example, the D Backs used to wear the sleeveless cream pinstripe purple set on Sundays at home. If the tenth game fell there, that’s what they would wear. If it fell on a Wednesday road game, they would wear the regular road throwbacks. And so on and so forth.

Well, part of where it got started has to do with a large part of my dad’s family being U of Tennessee alum. That was the first sports team I was ever introduced to, and even though I’m more tepid on it today, I’ll always have a love for the Vols. The Bucs looked a lot like them as a kid and I thought that was so cool. It’s just something that always stuck with me even though my reasoning was all backwards lol. I still do have the softest of soft spots for the Niners. My mom was a SF Giants and Niners fan her entire life, my dad used to have season tickets all the way back when they were in Kezar and took me to a TON of games (including the final game at Candlestick), and my wife and her entire family are huge Niners fans who also have season tickets. I too am hoping they one day can do it, because even if it won’t be mine to celebrate, I’ll be happy seeing them happy.