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Waffles

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Posts posted by Waffles

  1. The Wall Street Journal has a good piece (paywalled) summarizing where things stand right now with the Montreal/Tampa snowbird scenario. It even has a logo mashup as awkward as the arraignment it describes:

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    And here's are the key paragraphs:

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    Now the Rays are approaching a crossroads. Their lease at Tropicana Field expires after 2027, meaning they are running out of time to set a course for their future. It has led to a bizarre juxtaposition: a juggernaut baseball team dominating the competition, while its executives desperately try to convince the community to let it spend its summers in Canada.

    “We’re not missing by a few thousand people a night. We’re less than half from where we need to be with an absolutely incredible team,” Auld said in his speech. “The sister city plan deserves a chance to be heard by open minds.”

    The idea, as the Rays envision it, would require the construction of two relatively small open-air stadiums, one in Montreal and the other either in Tampa or St. Petersburg. Combined, they would cost less than the $1 billion-plus a retractable roof stadium in Florida would run.

    The Rays would spend spring training and the first few months of the season in the Tampa Bay area, before jetting up to Montreal when the Florida weather becomes unmanageable, like classic snowbirds. The two cities would alternate hosting postseason appearances. Montreal’s former MLB franchise, the Expos, relocated to Washington and became the Nationals in 2005 after years of dismal attendance. (No word on whether a Tampa Bay/Montreal team would be called the ExRays.)

     

     

    And SportsNet has this interesting speculation:

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    My gut reaction? The Rays will be a Montreal-based team — full-time, not shared — by 2027 after extricating themselves from their lease at the Trop. They won’t play in the American League East, though: rather, the Rays will be a National League team as a peace offering to the Blue Jays.

  2. 5 hours ago, officeglenn said:

    The Daily Mail is reporting that a review of gambling legislation in the UK may include a ban on front-of-shirt advertising for football clubs starting in 2023. This would currently affect nine Premier League clubs and six Championship clubs, as well as teams in the Scottish Premiership.

     

    Here's my writeup on it for the mothership.

     

    This as American leagues, teams, media outlets, and seemingly everyone else involved with sports is rushing to make deals with sports gambling companies.

     

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    "We’re bombarded by gambling adverts and that has to stop."

     

    Maybe we should pay attention to the country that tried all of this a few decades before us?

    • Like 2
  3. 12 hours ago, Buc said:

    That is the same dude who had the new Tappan Zee Bridge renamed, is it not?

     

    He replaced the Tappan Zee with a new bridge that improves on the old one by not being in imminent danger of falling into the Hudson River, rammed it through while ignoring recommendations that it include much-needed tracks for Metro North that would have actually alleviated traffic, and named it after his dad.

     

    So this is basically the vexillological equivalent of that.

    • Like 5
  4. 2 hours ago, dawgfan said:

    Forgive me if this has been discussed already/elsewhere, but it looks as though CSU Northridge is breaking in a new logo and wordmark:

     

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    However I can't locate any news acknowledging this change/update. Does anyone have any more information about it?

     

    Aesthetics aside, it bothers me that the C is emphasized and not the N. Unless it's the main, central campus (i.e. UNC, tOSU), schools that are part of a statewide university system usually (and, in my opinion, should) emphasize their city in their athletic identities, not the state name.

    • Like 2
  5.  

    1 hour ago, McCarthy said:

    In the case of the A's or other franchises who've relocated, yeah trace that lineage all the way back, baby. The Sacramento Kings are the Rochester Royals. Cool with me. On the other side, if you're the hornets-Pelicans-Bobcats, go f*** yourselves you revisionist pricks. Preemptive f*** you for when they inevitably reappropriate the Thunder's Sonics records to the new expansion Seattle Sonics. But the Browns, though, the Browns are different. I think the fact that they all agreed to shelving the franchise/start a new one in Baltimore in 1996 is everything. If the Sonics had done that when the team moved to OKC I'd say the same thing about them too. It's a shame they didn't. 

     

    It seems like Seattle might have some kind of deal with OKC to retain their identity and history.

     

    And perhaps we can all agree that the their approach to "sharing" their history, as described in that article, is completely effed. Like, what would that even look like if the Sonics come back?

     

  6. 9 minutes ago, Ferdinand Cesarano said:

    Fans' loyalties and the record books are two different things.  Obviously fans are going support their new home team, and see it as a continuation of the old team.  But that is a separate issue from the official records.

     

    I should clarify that I also think records should also reside with the team's lineage, and not the franchise's. I don't think George Shinn's scumbaggery should determine who the Charlotte Hornets' all-time leading scorer is - it should be the guy who scored the most points as Charlotte Hornet, regardless of which iteration of the team it was. It's part of the team culture that should belong to the fans, not the rich guy who owns the team.

    • Like 1
  7. 46 minutes ago, Ferdinand Cesarano said:

    That is, in a sense, exactly what they did.  The Browns situation created the fantasy that the Browns went on hiatus for a few years, and that the Ravens were a new expansion team.  And the San Jose Earthquakes copied that exact pattern when they moved to Houston, but somehow metaphysically "left their history" (which is emphatically not a thing) in San Jose.  And we all know about the fiasco involving the 1988 Hornets/Pelicans franchise and the 2004 Bobcats/Hornets franchise, whereby the history books now show a continuous Hornets franchise dating back to 1988 (with a few years under the nickname Bobcats), and date the origin of the Hornets/Pelicans franchise to 2002 (when the original Hornets moved to New Orleans). 

     

    In all of these cases, the history books literally contain fiction.  This practice amounts to a cultural crime. 

     

    I don't see it as ahistorical to separate the history of the team (players, culture, memories, records, identity) from the history of the franchise (the business entity). The franchise is fundamentally a license from the league to own a team. Art Modell used his license to own the Cleveland Browns team, then he used it to own the Baltimore Ravens, and someone else bought a license and used it to own the Cleveland Browns. The history and culture of the team stayed with the city and the fans who valued it instead of being grafted to a city and fanbase that had no connection to it. This isn't defacing history; it's keeping it where it's relevant.

    • Like 5
  8. 1 minute ago, SFGiants58 said:

    The Browns, Hornets/Pelicans, the Quakes, and maybe the Thunder (if Seattle gets a new team) did, but they are outliers.

     

    I mean, they didn't burn all evidence of their previous iterations moving. They didn't fanfic alternate histories for the missing seasons. They just adopted historical identities for their teams, ones that fans in these cities felt an attachment to. Which, to me, is better than having Muggsy Bouges Bobblehead Night in New Orleans.

  9. 12 hours ago, BringBackTheVet said:

    If I lived in Oklahoma City and the A’s moved there, I wouldn’t give a damn about Jimmy’s foxx or Reggie Jackson or Mark McGwire. That wasn’t my team, despite what the record books say. 

     

    Sports isnt real. It’s for fun and enjoyment. The marketers would have a better chance selling the OKC Baseball Thunder than the “Athletics”. 

     

    This is where I come down on it too. Each team has its own history and can decide what parts of it are relevant to its current iteration and to its fanbase. Some teams have maintained a connection to former cities and some have prefered to emphasize their current home. Some have even embraced the history of other franchises that preceded them in that city. All of these things are fine. Nobody's taking a sharpie to the history books.

    • Like 3
  10. I'm usually a stickler for consistency of design elements across all of a university's sports, but I love the idea of having a crest design for use on the school's soccer kits (I only noticed this as part of the photo set from this unveiling, but it looks like it was unveiled last summer):

     

     

    • Like 1
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