FiddySicks

1 hour ago, Gary said:

I’m not defending the Coyotes in anyway. But Veterans Memorial is built for hockey and basketball. Soot is feasible that they play a couple years there

It’s really REALLY not. For a state fair venue, it’s actually pretty well kept up, but it’s still a state fair venue, which are almost universally known as facilities that are dingy, used to the maximum and run into the ground, and about as bare bones as can be. I’ve seen the “guts” of that place too, and it’s not pretty. Trying to play even a season there would be a huge stretch. Knowing how this whole thing has gone? Yikes. It could be a decade before they get a new facility. 

2 hours ago, TBGKon said:

Is that venue even feasible?

Lol, no. Absolutely not. Even temporarily. 

Honestly, Wolves would be fine. I mean, they already play in a conference with relatively generic animal names like Eagles, Lions, Panthers, and a couple couple of birds. It’s generic, sure, but probably no more so than any of those. Also, wolves are basically dogs, and dogs are cool as hell. 

On 7/25/2021 at 12:02 PM, Wings2 said:

The Oakland Roots might literally be the only team left in Oakland..............for now. 

That whole thing has been an absolute DISASTER since they moved up to USL, too. They’ve had multiple games moved or cancelled because of the wacky ass turf they’re trying to use, and the whole thing just looks like they were entirely unprepared for the promotion to USL and are completely in over their heads. 

To be honest, he’s completely right here. The Packers are always so far up their own asses on how they do things as an organization (there’s a few of the older organizations in sports that are like this, to be fair) and they have the same amount of Super Bowl titles in my lifetime as my dumpster fire ass team. I think watching Brady be handed more control last year and him running with it knocked something loose with Rodgers, and he’s either going to get that opportunity himself or move on. I don’t think you can really blame a guy with as strong of a resume as him for wanting that. Any of us in a similar situation would want the same level of control over our careers. It’s actually a pretty reasonable request. 

On 7/19/2021 at 3:52 PM, BBTV said:

Wonder if Tom Brady will go, or have some "previously-scheduled arrangement" or be rehabbing something.

Oh, he went. 
 

15 hours ago, BBTV said:

 

That's an interesting take considering all that's transpired.

It’s also an incorrect take. 

On 7/15/2021 at 10:25 AM, DG_ThenNowForever said:

I once walked from the BART station to the old Oracle Arena. Man, that is not a fun walk, especially when you're doing it without fellow game attendees. You walk across a long, fenced-in ped bridge kind of all alone and you have no idea who or what will be on that bridge with you. And below, as I remember, is just a rail yard or train tracks and not even moving traffic (and eyes on the streets).

 

It felt like Mad Max to me -- the way a lot of Oakland (and yes, Seattle) does -- and I was glad to be safely back on the BART.

 

Is that still the gameday experience?

Yes, and that’s legitimately one of my favorite parts of the experience. I’ve gotten some of the coolest t shirts ever dirt ass cheap on that walkway. It’s not for everyone, but I love the vibe. It’s so Oakland. Gritty, somewhat intimidating, sort of crazy. It feels like a party at an insane asylum. 

On 7/2/2021 at 12:08 PM, bosrs1 said:

 

If not for their 9 World Series wins it might actually be a mercy to erase the A's from MLB and start fresh with an organization no so permeated with penny pinching.  And I say this who grew up a die hard A's fan, whose parents are still A's fans, and who has probably seen more games at the Coliseum than I'd care to admit.  But even someone of my attachment to them couldn't endure the seemingly never ending decades of this nonsense.  

This is exactly how I feel about it. I was born maybe ten minutes from the coliseum, and could see the blimp fly over our house during games we were so close. I love so many things about the A’s. The colors, the goofy mascot, the Bash Bros, etc. They’re the organization that legit got me into baseball. The first game I ever went to as a kid was at the Coliseum (and it was a garbage dump back then, too). I got interested in sports media and sports logos in part because of them as well. But it’s all just been such a joke for so long now. I’m just so fatigued by their whole situation at this point. I just want them to go away. The main reason I even switched to being primarily a Giants fan is because where I grew up, they stopped broadcasting A’s games on basic cable. At that point it was like, these cheap asses aren’t worth listening to on the radio.  Why continue to even care? 
 

I just wonder what the point of the A’s is any longer. They almost feel like a money laundering scheme at this point. 

Very interesting history. Not exactly a fond one a lot of the times though, either. Imagine if any of the other hapless old timey teams had nine titles to their name…

On 7/2/2021 at 11:40 AM, SFGiants58 said:

 

That reminds me of how the A's got kicked out of revenue sharing a few years ago (IIRC). They're a part of Fisher's real estate plans, which is why the "Howard Terminal or Bust" stuff is more about Fisher getting to develop the area. Revenue sharing took some of the "burden" off Fisher, until MLB kicked them off of it. Kaval simply replaced Wolff as the public face.

 

 

Well, we must first put those nine titles (and six additional AL pennants) into context. The Athletics have been a boom-and-bust franchise going back over 100 years, with the 1910s titles followed by Connie Mack getting cheap and losing his core. The Great Depression broke up the 1929-31 teams with Mack's investments taking a hit. The Kansas City years are a black mark for everybody involved. The early-mid '70s A's dynasty met its demise through Charlie O. being incredibly cheap and opposing the arrival of free agency (also, those clubs derived a lot of unity from their mutual dislike of Charlie O. ). The A's of the late-'80s and early-'90s just gradually fell apart over the '90s and turned into the team you see today.

 

A boom-and-bust franchise history, rather than just pure consistency with small bits of downtime (Yankees and Cardinals), is why the A's are where they are now. Honestly, maybe things would've turned out better if Charlie O. sold the team to Ewing Kauffman and Kauffman kept the team in KC. 

It just goes to show that the only truly consistent thing about the A’s is always having cheap ass owners. 

2 hours ago, guest23 said:

 

I heard on reddit they will exclusively go white over bone.

What the hell is wrong with this team?

On 7/6/2021 at 9:40 AM, DNAsports said:

Obviously wishful thinking, but it would be so rad if they had a red shell and could somehow pair it with clear face masks as a shout out to this look. Slap a cabinet drawer handle on the side too, just for fun. 

On 7/3/2021 at 8:22 PM, j'villejags said:

Ravens should go with purple flake helmets. 

 

Yes. This is fantastic. It was cool as hell when the Jaguars did it, but it would work perfectly for the Ravens. 

1 hour ago, spartacat_12 said:

 

The Las Vegas metro area population has doubled in the last 20 years, and is projected to hit 3 million in the next 5 years. It has been one of the world's major entertainment destinations for decades now, and if it weren't for professional sports' puritanical views on gambling, there would have been teams there a long time ago. Whether or not they land a MLB team, I think the NBA is an inevitability.

 

I'd like to see the A's find a solution that keeps them in the Bay Area, but I'm not sure why so many people have issues with Vegas getting professional sports. This isn't that different than LA getting 3 expansion teams & 2 relocated teams in less than 10 years during the late '50s/'60s.

Well, one issue is that, long term, they have no access to water. That’s probably going to be an enormous problem. They’re also centered in one of the most flat broke states in the country. 

Baseball would honestly be better off just contracting the A’s at this point

All of what bosrs1 is true, but I’ll add just a bit more to that, because Oakland’s situation is a bit more unique than most cities. Again, context is very important. 

1). Oakland just doesn’t have much money to spare. Due to several factors over the course of the last half century, the city doesn’t have the revenue coming in like they once did. For any city that’s going to cause problems, but it’s exasperated by the fact that Oakland is absolutely enormous. 

This leads me to my second point, which is a bit more touchy.

2). Oakland is one of the most racially diverse and multicultural cities in the country, and with that comes a unique set of challenges. The way Oakland views it (and this is absolutely the correct viewpoint to take), they simply have more important and pressing issues to deal with than doling out the little public money they have to sports venues. Crime, poverty, and substance abuse are a HUGE issues in the city, and the city has determined that putting its resources towards those issues is worth losing sports teams over. There’s always been quite a bit of dysfunction in Oakland, but it’s hard for me to see that as less than commendable. 

There’s also a bit of a racial component to it, as well. How are you going to both support the vulnerable classes within your city (which Oakland, again, has made their priority), while at the same time cutting huge money deals with billionaires for their toy projects? The optics just aren’t good. 

Real Falkor vibes with that one right there. 

I think you really have to put into context just how different San Jose was back then compared to now. It’s a tech powerhouse now, but when the Sharks came in it was still sort of a bedroom community for those who couldn’t afford to/didn’t want to live that close San Francisco. And even today, access to the South Bay pales in comparison to the rest of the region. Maybe if those BART plans in the early 90s to move the lines further south had come to fruition (there was no realistic chance of this happening, for MANY reasons. Biggest being that South Bay residents simply didn’t want it.) things would’ve been different. But San Jose wasn’t really the draw in the early 90s that it is today.

On 5/31/2021 at 8:20 PM, bosrs1 said:

 

 

Before. Though SF emptying out into the east bay hasn’t been helping matters. The Giants made major inroads in the Bonds/roids era, sealed the deal with the World Series runs, and stuck the knife in the A’s locally when they killed San Jose. I mean more power to them as it was well played and the A’s owners have been clueless off field for 30 years now. 

This is pretty much it. Sucks for the A’s, but they basically made their own bed on this one. They had a full decade to submit the paperwork returning the rights to them, and just never did

On 5/18/2021 at 4:55 PM, Joke Insurance said:

 

Could Sutter Health Park be upgraded to MLB standards?

They planned on it originally, but the stability of the land (the stadium is right next to a river, hence the RiverCats name) came into question and nixed those plans. Access is pretty poor (everything is here, really), too. It’s also technically in an entirely different city (South Sacramento, CA), and that’s caused more problems for that site than they had originally foreseen. 
 

The feasibility of fully expanding that entire entire area has been done to death already and the answer for pretty much the last century is a pretty resounding no. One of the reasons it’s sat empty for no joke the last 100 years is because it was used as a defacto toxic waste dump site going WAY back. 

Yeah I do, too. I liked the mono blue on the last set even more. 

9 hours ago, Dilbert said:

This got me thinking. Is the Bay Area really big enough to support two teams? They've had the Giants and A's since 1968. They had the 49ers and Raiders from 1960-81 and 1995-19. Sure large metros like New York and LA can handle it but can the Bay Area?

The Bay Area absolutely has the population to support a second team, but it’s lacking one major thing. The land. The main issue is that you have two metro areas right next to each other, less than 15 miles apart, but they’re separated by a giant body of water with somewhat limited access points in between. If you cut out the bridges, BART, and ferries and went around the bay, it’s nearly 100 miles from Oakland to San Francisco. That in itself creates a bit of an interesting culture separation that I haven’t really seen in other areas. 

And pretty much everything around the bay is pretty crammed in with things that would be difficult and expensive to modify. San Francisco itself is only 49 square miles and there really isn’t an inch left to build on. It’s a lot of the same in the East Bay and South Bay, and any of the land left is pretty much in a semi desert climate. If they ever did consider going to go that far out east, they might as well just move to Sacramento at that point. 

3 hours ago, ramsjetsthunder said:

The jerseys aren't great, but this....this is awesome.

 

I’m with you in the color of the helmet and think the base is fantastic. The new logos are absolute garbage, though. Had they used the original green helmet as an inspiration, I’d be way more sold. As it stands now, they look like placeholders for something better. 

1 hour ago, neo_prankster said:

Could the A's just share Oracle Park with the Giants?

So, I mentioned a few pages ago how I agreed with the Giants right to claim San Jose. And I very much do. Also, from a legal sense, they have a very strong case. But lets not fool ourselves here, though. In a not so subtle way, the Giants are trying to starve the A’s out of the market completely. They don’t want the competition. They see the market in San Jose and have found a very successful way to tap into that, and don’t want to have to share. From a business standpoint, I understand that. It’s valuable territory and support has already been somewhat fragile. I don’t really think there’s ever been a time where both teams have drawn really well simultaneously, and if there was a time, it was short lived. The Bay Area on the surface seems like it should be able to support multiple teams, but historically it just hasn’t.

So, tl;dr, there’s no way the Giants are going to share their park with their main competition, even temporarily, when they’re both trying to wrestle control of an area 25-50 miles south from where either of them play. It would take the league forcing them (which I don’t think they can) or an act of absolutely reckless charity (similar to the A’s giving up the rights in the first place) for that to ever happen. 

1 hour ago, neo_prankster said:

But seriously though, where could the Athletics realistically move if it came to that?

I honestly wonder if the league would still consider contraction at any point.