gosioux76

I agree with you. But if players continue to make a public issue of being against it, forcing it would appear to be doing the teams more harm than good. It ends up shifting the narrative not to LGBTQ+ inclusion but to one of players' rights to have beliefs of their own. You end up making martyrs of them and deflect from the cause. Rather than giving up, the smarter move would be to play up LGBTQ+ inclusion in every other part of the gameday experience other than the players themselves. Show that the organization is investing in the community outside the rink. They're not responsible if their players end up being bigots. But that doesn't mean the organization can't go the extra mile. That's the real issue here. Send the message that your players may not be on board, but we are.

Not to derail the thread but ... The Athletic employs humans who deserve to be paid for their work. If you want it, pay for it.

I've always felt that the biggest reason Arena Football succeeded for as long as it did is because it's a spring football alternative with much lower operating costs than the regular, 11-a-side league would require, that managed to fill the springtime gap for pro football TV programming for a few years. But now that we have two full gridiron spring leagues competing with each other, both on national airways, I'm not sure the demand for it really exists. I still think this is a sport that works best in minor league markets or, like indoor soccer, a low-cost fringe sport that exists largely in metro suburbs.

Reading some of the additional coverage from down there, apparently the idea is that having a stadium as the anchor of a broader development district will make the location more of a draw. So instead of only going their for a ballgame, it would feature restaurants, shops and probably living spaces that would make it more of a destination. Not saying it'll work, just passing along what I gleaned from the reporting. Otherwise, you're 100% right. Part of the debate has been that the team would be better off in the metro area's population center, in Tampa, and that moving there would definitely prove or disprove the notion of whether Tampa can really support Major League Baseball. I'm sure that's why the Rays have yet to fully commit to St. Pete, even as they pursue this development agreement.

Hadn't seen this news posted yet, but the St. Petersburg mayor on Monday selected a development team led by the Rays to redevelop Tropicana Field. The Rays proposal included the construction of a new 30,000-seat ballpark. This isn't a done deal, though. This is just a development agreement -- the city choosing a contractor who responded to a bid. The team still needs to commit to St. Pete, which is a separate agreement. Its owner said it remains in dialogue with Tampa. So it's progress, but not the end.

I grew up in Minnesota and recall really liking it when they began to add touches of black to the uniform. I agree with those of you who said the addition of black pants was unnecessary. If anything, I'd prefer the black be used more subtly. While it might have been a tertiary color, the way the North Stars applied it to the sleeve striping was way too heavy. Like @the admiral said, the black served a purpose to add definition to the look. But a little goes a long way. On the comparisons to the Texans, I brought up a similar question in the NFL uniforms thread where we're talking about the possibility of them adopting light blue. The one thing about the Wild is that, good or bad, the team has been widely embraced in Minnesota, to the point where it's surpassed the Timberwolves and, at times, the Twins in popularity. Do the Texans hold the same stature in Houston? If they're not, then the Texans motivation to tapping into nostalgia would be more about trying to build excitement for a bad team. The Wild have never had trouble building excitement; for them, this is all about the tug of nostalgia being strong.

I can kind of appreciate the way a holding company like Bimbo uses this sponsorship to showcase several of their consumer brands. That said, I'm looking forward to the Union jersey that eventually features this Bimbo brand as the shirt sponsor:

Not having seen Nike's contract with the league, it's impossible to say for sure. But as the contracted supplier, Nike's not likely to arbitrarily set a rule and impose it upon the league without getting some degree of approval from the league itself. And I doubt it was a very hard case to make. Nike is arguably one of the greatest examples of how to wring as much value out of a brand as possible, so if they come to you arguing, for example, that paring down uniforms can reduce the risk of brand dilution, then the league would listen. I'm sure there's also plenty of internal data to show that the return-on-investment for a team's fifth or sixth jersey is probably pretty poor. I wouldn't be surprised if sales peak in the weeks and months after a new jersey release and then taper off to the point that they cost more to make than they return in revenue. Anyway, just trying to apply logic to the situation. The whole thing just makes sense to me. When you're looking at retail costs that range from $130 for replicas to $300+ for authentics, it seems impractical to expect consumers to fork over that kind of money every time something new comes out. At least not in any sort of volume that moves the needle on profit margins.

What is that wordmark on the back collar? I've never seen that before.

I don't buy into any of that. The Padres were mediocre-to-bad for nearly their entire existence as a primarily brown franchise but that didn't stop people from clamoring for the color to return. I find the whole idea of uniforms as symbols of futility to be strange. They're clothes. The teams stunk because the players stunk. They'd have been just as bad had they been wearing Yankee uniforms. Such things can be evaluated separately. Even so, I wouldn't advocate for just returning to that look, and especially those colors. But taking something that blends together the team's various eras, including that excellent and often overlooked '80s look, could be successful.

I saw these pictures over the weekend and as much as I like the idea of that stripe, i don't think it looks good. There's something -- plain -- about it, as if it was the result of an errant paint brush stroke.

Maybe it's just me, but I think the Mariners' look from the '80s was under-appreciated. The use of lower-case letters, the Expos-like sleeve and shoulder striping, the trident M were all unique. I could see some of those ideas reapplied in a Padres/Twins-esque update. The trident and nautical star symbols can easily work together as part of a branding package. And I like @the admiral's idea of pairing Navy with a more attractive green.

The North Stars seem like a fair comparison to the Texans in this case. Metro area loses beloved team, gets an expansion franchise, but fanbase still pines for the old look. I don't know much about the Houston market: in terms of local popularity, are the Texans the most popular? Like, have the people of Houston over the past 20 years fully embraced the franchise? I ask because teams seem to make these rebranding moves as a means of re-energizing a fanbase. If the community isn't fully engaged with the Texans as-is — and it wouldn't be surprising considering the on-field performance of late — then returning to a color scheme steeped in nostalgia would seem like a low-risk/high-reward move, the benefits of which could carry forward for decades. It's a much more controversial topic in Minnesota, where the community has enthusiastically embraced the Wild, but the tug of nostalgia remains strong.

I don't know man, I see no reason why rules can't be broken now and then. I like that this harkens back to the '70s and to Joe Mauer's habit of wearing that with catching gear in 2000s. To me, it's just like when people were bent out of shape about the Twins using gold at home but not on the road with their prior set. I thought it worked just fine to add a color to the uniform that tied into the home stadium. It's not the norm, but it worked. The Twins should be given credit for trying things like this.

This a surprising development and I absolutely love it. The more I look at this whole new set, the more it grows on me.

Nobody said "attendance isn't important." What was said is that the USFL, as initially structured, didn't need to rely on gate receipts to be successful, that it's value came from being a made-for-TV product that generates a larger audience for Fox than whatever other programming it might air during that time of year. That doesn't mean the league doesn't care about attendance. It just means, for its first year at least, it had a business model that wasn't destroyed by having empty stadiums because it wasn't relying on that revenue for survival. So why not keep the whole league in Birmingham? It seems pretty clear that the league eventually wants gate receipts to play a bigger role in its business over time. And if that ticket revenue isn't make or break for the league, then it gets the luxury of building that side of the business gradually.

I see these examples, but for the life of me I can't really see what makes anyone think one works while the other doesn't. Why exactly do you need more color contrast than what's already on the example without college lines? And even it's only about aesthetics, and not about functionality, what would stop a team from using the wider space without college lines to do something more creative with the design?

This is it. It's exactly that simple. I'm still kind of flummoxed how people still make a big deal out of the league's poor in-game attendance in its first year. Its business model was never predicated on putting butts in seats. It was a made-for-TV league whose entire value proposition, as @Sykotyk pointed out so clearly, was to provide pro football programming to FOX. That will likely change in coming years as the league makes its gradual shift into its home markets, but it would be doing so under a more stable foundation as a TV league. In a way, it's no different than what NBC does with the barnstorming pro Lacrosse league. It's harder to see the comparison, though, because people get so tripped over the fact that the USFL teams represent cities, where the lacrosse ones don't.

The people who do that are the ones who give a damn, which is kind of the point. It stirs up debate, which keeps the game front and center at a time when it otherwise might not be. You might think it's dumb, but here you are engaging on the topic.

Yeah, but mostly just in parking lots when they throw things at opposing fans.

But in a way, this current system could be viewed as healthy for the game. It's the offseason, we're a month away from spring training beginning, yet every year the HOF issue elicits deeply argued conversations about the validity of whoever got voted in, breaking down that players credentials in comparison with others who were overlooked. I saw a guy on my Facebook feed write damn near 1,000 words on why Rolen isn't nearly as deserving as the long-overlooked Dave Parker. Personally, I don't care that much about it. But the veracity of the debate has people talking baseball in the middle of winter. The sport would be missing out if everybody agreed on the process instead of obsessing over how wrong they got it.

I agree. The only logical reason to include college lines would be if this were an issue of cost, which I'm sure it isn't. At one point in time, I'm sure including the college lines was a practical decision in the off chance an NBA arena hosted a college game and it didn't want the expense of creating an additional court design. But today, NBA teams make new courts to match alternate uniforms, so I have a feeling investing in a floor for college games -- or even just the panels around the key — isn't an onerous expense.

It's a fair point, but there's also nothing stopping them from doing that same design even if the college lanes weren't there. They could've just been black strips on the long sides of a rectangle and it would have still been a creative design.

I don't care to watch the video of someone peeing themselves, but was this before or after the Eagles fans threw batteries at him?