FiddySicks

I think that’s been the most frustrating part of getting older as a sports fan. All of these leagues have serious issues that they either don’t handle, or handle very poorly. We should be focusing more on this (and it stands out to me more and more all the time), but every time one of these leagues throws out something new and bright, we forget about all of that (I wouldn’t have spent two decades of my life posting here if I wasn’t one of them, either). It’s a conflicting feeling, and I have no idea how to fix any of this. Go Giants? I guess?

No, that particular part of it unfortunately I can’t be mad at the Dodgers about. They’re only doing what they can. Hard to fault them for that, as much as I’d like to. My lament is precisely with everyone else. And I do think it’s relevant in the grander scale of things because it’s following the same pattern. It’s taking some of the other, seedy aspects of our society and throws it into the same circle with something that’s supposed to be an escape from all of that. And in an era where people are whining about rainbow armbands (somewhat similar complaint, but much dumber and lacking any actual relevance), I think I have the room to complain about that. Because that’s the actual problem! Sigh. Go Giants. I guess.

With how expensive everything is in my area lately? It’s more tempting than it should be.

It’s like basically everything else in our society. It’s not technically illegal, but it absolutely contributes to a further splitting of the haves and have nots and makes the entire situation worse for everyone else. The Dodgers started spending stupidly about 12 years ago, and it seems like every year it just gets more and more egregious. Like, nice little loophole you have there to go along with an ocean of available cash, but it comes at a time when like half of the league is seemingly spending as little as possible and hoarding all of the profits for their own pockets. Baseball really seems keen to speed up the drain spiraling they’re doing by making the on field product as uncompelling as possible. I also say that as a fan of a team who does that (despite promising everyone else they won’t), while having the richest owner in the sport. God, it’s infuriating.

Nothing that’s happened in the Manfred era has been “good for the game”. Good for big business, but awful for the fans. Oh, also, Dodgers fans can :censored: off forever about the Astros. This is even worse.

That’s :censored:ing bull:censored:. Baseball is broken.

Wal Mart brand Patriots, at best.

Lol things really couldn’t be going any better for Sun Devils football. Lol, nope. No siree.

Both of these are true simultaneously. Speaking of that, @Sport instituted a ten year moratorium on complaining about your team after winning a title (good rule). Giants are in year nine, and boy do I have some bitching to do. Can’t wait.

I love how you edited it to throw an even larger number out. Very Dodgers of you.

Now watch them still struggle to get out of the NLDS.

Yeah, I’m think I’m out on baseball.

I really miss the days when these guys would sign relatively quickly and this whole free agency period was actually fun. The last few years of these guys waiting until the last possible minute to sign while half of these sports writers twist themselves into knots trying to be the first to break the news is just tiresome. It’s taken one of the most fun parts of the sport and made it more annoying than fun. Of all of the recent changes, most of which I’m mixed on anyway, this is by far the my least favorite.

Yeah I’ve had some hesitations about the Ohtani move in general, but it sounds like he may have actually taken less to go to the Jays? He’s been great so far, don’t get me wrong. But I dunno, $500-600 million for a dude who already has injury issues and a seeming reluctance to really jump fully into the spotlight feels like a risk I wouldn’t want my team to take. I hope this works out for Toronto, but it feels like closer to a lateral move from the Angels. Jays look good right now, but they also looked pretty good when they were making moves for guys like David Price and Josh Donaldson, and ended up falling on their faces.

Lol, the a Blue Jays. Ok. Ohtani to the Blue Jays

Lol, no. It’s probably better than Glendale because you basically have to drive straight through the entire city to get there from Mesa/Tempe, but it’s further away and pretty far out there and up to the north. It doesn’t have the kinda of problems the Glendale thing has, yet anyway. Give it another decade. I went back for the first time in almost a decade and was blown away by how much bigger it had already gotten. The roads used to kinda feel overkill for how little traffic they had. Now, though? It feels like a hotter So Cal. This is basically trading one problem for a very similar, even weirder, even riskier, even further away problem. Typical Coyotes.

Tahoe has always been a popular tourist attraction, and has always had stretches where the infrastructure is stretched to the max (4th of July and New Years Eve being the worst times). But ever since COVID things have been completely out of hand. It’s maxed out every single week. And the rental market took a catastrophic hit when everyone from the Bay Area went to telework and bought everything up. Now a lot of them have fled back to the bay because our winters are BRUTAL (look up the Donner party. I’m on the other side of the lake in a pocket that gets hit even harder). But they’ve kept their houses, use them sparingly, and just list them on Air BnB at jacked up rated for all of the other tech workers who want to come up and injure themselves skiing. There’s basically nothing left and the local permanent population, most of which have been barely clinging on for years now, are fleeing. And due to being surrounded by several national forest preserves, right on the state line, and having already suffered a quarter of a million acre forest fire that nearly took out the entire town and left us all evacuated for a month, there just isn’t anywhere left to build. They want so desperately to capitalize on this big money that Vegas has, but we have a million more challenges that make it basically impossible. Dangerous, even. More on the winter part of that. Reno is almost 50 miles to the northeast of south lake, and the particular pass they would have to travel gets buried in ungodly amounts of snow. My mom died in January and just prior had to be airlifted out because the snow was so bad. We got 60 feet of snow last year in the Lake Tahoe basin. Not inches. FEET. It was above my back fence almost the entire winter and the last pile I broke up and melted was on June 2nd. And tying this to the job market, we don’t have the bodies available to work to keep the roads clear and safe, because nobody can afford to live in the area on a city/county workers salary. The idea that they’re going to pull this off in any way that’s financially feasible is ludicrous. I have no earthly idea what they’re thinking, and as much as I love sports, I think it’s outrageous that they’re even attempting this. We don’t want them here. Some of that is logistics, some of it is the culture. It feels like a really unnecessary invasion that’s bound to have a bad result.

Welp, my town got an ECHL team and the entire venture is already an enormous disaster. They announced the new name yesterday and it’s a travesty. They picked Knight Monsters Dog:censored: name and people are furious. I live about a mile from the new arena and I won’t go to a single game even if offered free tickets. We’re in Sharks territory, this town HATES Vegas, and a group of outsiders with zero connection to the area (including Tim Tebow who’s one of my least favorite people on the planet) picked something that sucks the d**ks of our biggest rival city. Oh, and tickets are like three times the price of most other teams in the league and the new venue has zero parking. What a half brained mess concocted by a group of huge morons. Thankfully this thing will fold mid season because the logistics of housing everyone in Reno and trying to drive to South Lake just for games is lunacy.

I still can’t figure out why they didn’t solve this problem and go to the FCS style playoff years ago. “It’s more games on the players bodies!” Yeah, it is for the FCS schools, too. Nobody tries to advocate for a “bowl system” for them because of it. I know why they do it (more $$$ in the right hands, like everything else in our society), but it’s always felt like college football was kneecapping itself by keeping this dumb bowl system rather than have a big playoff. People love football. And people LOVE playoff/tournament setups (college basketball would be nothing without the tournament). I dunno, seems like a way to straight up print money to me.

As someone who grew up in Nevada, I couldn’t agree more.

Been out of the country all week so haven’t had the ability to respond, but college football is a joke. The BCS was a bad system, but this is immeasurably worse. At least with the BCS you could blame the computers. But with this, there were actual people who sat down and made this choice. Putting a one loss Bama or Texas over FSU would be pretty bad, but to put BOTH of them in over FSU and leaving them out just feels like a shameless cash grab where they decided the TV money was better and that was more important than the actual results. That’s downright shameful. College football has a fundamental problem with how they finish their season, and it’s so bad that I can’t take any of this seriously and have basically lost interest in the sport. I know they’re expanding the playoff next season, but if they keep this round table of “experts” around to make the choices I certainly don’t have any faith in them getting that right, either. This is a very bad time for college sports for anyone who doesn’t have a financial stake in it. Which is basically all of us.

Yeah that was a product of the time as well as Bay Area politics. One thing to keep in mind about San Jose is even though it’s been the largest city in the Bay Area for decades, it wasn’t much more than a bedroom community for the larger cities to the north for most of that time. There wasn’t much of a need to really push for that population, because you were already getting them anyway. The tech industry has of course changed all that. Now being the biggest city in the Bay Area actually has some heft behind it. Kind of amazing that three separate A’s ownership groups couldn’t see that.

It’s been a real wild experience seeing A’s fans get so mad at the Giants like this whole mess was their fault. I’ve gone over it about a thousand times (a hundred or so just in this thread), but the territory the A’s “gifted” the Giants could’ve been claimed back at any point for two decades, and the A’s just never filed the paperwork. They never saw the value in San Jose, while the Giants did. That’s the whole reason they gave it away in the first place! Lol yeah sure, Giants. You can go play in cow town San Jose, and we’ll corner your old SF market since it’s closer! Then SJ blew up, and the A’s figured out what the Giants already knew about SJ, but it was too late in the process to claim it back. Giants current ownership group had already paid specifically for SJ (which the league assumed the A’s didn’t want because they never claimed it back). I honestly cannot believe that A’s fans are STILL falling for this bull:censored: coming out of this ownership group’s side. They’re trying to blame anyone else for this mess other than themselves, and the few dopey ass A’s fans left are eating it up. The most annoying thing about this is that’s gonna ultimately be the A’s story about the Bay Area, and I’m going to have to spend years dispelling this myth these bitter dummies have concocted in their heads.

Same. They felt kinda stale by the time they changed, but I think it was mostly stale because they were terribad most of those years. Had they played better I think those would’ve stuck around a lot longer. Also, the change wasn’t really an improvement, and for the first few seasons was a mess. And even when they toned it down, it was still really disjointed I remember really liking the initial change to brick, black, and sand. It was less flashy and a lot more understated than the previous set, which was a good thing (not to mention that the color palette was PERFECT for a Phoenix Area team), but it still kept a lot of the cool elements from the former branding. The only thing I didn’t like about it is the same thing you didn’t like. The home D backs wordmark. I know there’s a love for the 90s style purple and teal, but the 07-15 set is probably what they should’ve started with coming out of the gate, and I still think think it’s their best ever look. I’m kind of sad that the sand is being replaced, but I’m cool with it being for turquoise/teal. That’s a really unique color in the league, a throwback to the original set, and a nod to the local culture. It was basically going to be impossible to merge the two color schemes together fully, but this is a decent solution.

Yeah I guess. I still think it’s inferior to the updated version enough to be a poor choice.