Sport

Wasn't personal until this. The only thing this has to do with the Reds is because I happened to watch the moment in question live and knew the tweet was misleading and wrong. Happy to dump on umpires whenever they deserve it, but that wasn't it. If you're going to say something like this at least quote me so I get the notification.

The hell it didn't. That picture is deliberately deceiving. He wasn't "out by a full foot" because Sosa missed the tag. Sorry, but it was the correct call. Here's a picture of Sosa missing the tag and De La Cruz's hand running into his knee. From the other angle you can see De La Cruz's hand touch the base under Sosa's knee before the tag anyway. He was safe with or without the obstruction call. But this play is exactly why the rule exists. The batter went on to strike out and the following batter grounded out to first for the last out of the inning so De La Cruz didn't even score from third anyway. I officially declare this grievance from Philadelphia Stupid.

I was surprised by this for both cities the first times I went there. Entire drive into Denver I kept waiting to scale a mountain and then I was in Denver while the mountains were still well in the distance. Then in Salt Lake City you fly over and then down a mountain to get to the airport. The mountain is like RIGHT THERE the entire time you're in the city. Not sure why Denver became known as THE mountain city when SLC is more mountainous.

But you’d rather have more than less, right? My point was to show that in addition to having a small metro area (47th last I checked) they’re also kind of geographically isolated.

NHL Hitz ass arena. Can't believe they let this happen for even one home game, let alone two full seasons.

Me, people who live in a city that doesn't have an NHL team.

I'm kind of nervous about SLC for this reason. Found this website where you can find population inside of a certain radius. https://www.statsamerica.org/radius/big.aspx I set Salt Lake City and drew a 200 mile radius, which I figure to be about the edge of where a normal person would drive to attend a game. The tool says about 3.7 million people live in that circle. Sounds like a lot of people, but consider that little small market Columbus, Ohio using the same radius is over 28 million (that doesn't even include Chicago) and it feels like trouble. Here's some other markets not clustered in the Northeast using this same metric: Nashville - 17 million Raleigh - 16 St. Paul - almost 8 St. Louis - 9.5 "well the West is big and people are spread out" Yeah, still. There's 7.8 million people within 200 miles of Las Vegas. Denver, Colorado - 6 million. Seattle - over 9, etc. All way more than SLC. Phoenix's is 7.3, for the record. They're moving the team to a place on the map where there just aren't that many people, the closest NHL team to pull in visiting fans from is in Denver 500 miles away so they're not going to get the natural visitors gates like Columbus does from Penguins, Red Wings and Blackhawks fans. Plus they already have the NBA, College sports, and MLS teams. They're probably over-extended as it is. I wish them luck.

Good! Maybe the new guy can come up with a less annoying/stupid victory call.

Tonight is Jeff Rimer's last game on the call before he retires. He's been the TV play-by-play guy for the Blue Jackets since the 05 lockout, but also called games for the Panthers, Capitals, and Candiens before that. Once famously got in a clubhouse fight with Pete Rose during the 1984 Expos season. I hated Rimer at first because I didn't get him. He was unpolished, messed up names, never seemed to know what team the penalty was against, but I've grown attached to him over the last 20 seasons. Really loved all his little character moments, his genuine love for hockey, his small thesaurus of favorite phrases, and I get what he is now. He's a character. And as his time with the Blue Jackets got longer his homerism for the team got bigger and it came through over the air. A newer franchise without any success, it's nice and novel to have a homer in your corner. Also developed a great ham and egg rapport with Jody Shelley. I'll miss him a lot. Wish he got to cover better teams in Columbus. Hope the new person doesn't suck.

I think their ceiling if they'd built an arena on the east side of downtown would be Dallas' floor. It wouldn't have been a smashing success, but they'd still be around. The Westgate Entertainment District was like intentionally walking into quicksand and they've only lasted this long because the league dragged them along. But I believe if you took any hockey market in the league and plopped the team on the other side of the city away from the bulk of the money then they would also struggle. It was suicide doing it with a team with no roots established in the city. There's been so many bad moves with them it makes the Blue Jackets look like the Lightning. Remember when they hired a math-whiz middle schooler to be GM who thought he could moneyball the Coyotes to success and then threw a diaper tantrum and quit? Probably best known now as the guy with the hot sister.

I have no excitement for Utah either and I think we're all kind of blindsided by that being the location that ultimately landed the Coyotes after the dozen other markets that got close in the last decade. It reminds me of Jacksonville getting the Jags because the NFL needed to expand by two teams, but the bids in better markets all tripped over their own butts so the Jacksonville bid was picked by default. I was just correcting our guy up there who said that people were hypocritically celebrating the Utah Hockey Pucks using public funds to build an arena when A. nobody is doing that because B. that would require that anyone be fired up for Utah at all. A thing I think is interesting is most people's response has been "ahh yeah well probably for the best" Very few people defending Phoenix. At least now we get to stop following their endless relocation saga. It's a bit of a relief.

I don't think that's happening. People don't seem that excited for Utah (I know I'm not). Utah might as well just be NOT PHOENIX right now. I've seen excitement from some people that the Phoenix experiment is finally coming to an end, but the where and the how isn't what people are worried about at the moment.

That logo is trash though.

Always thought "Coyotes" as a team name is really cool. You can abbreviate it to Yotes or Dogs, comes with a fun howl cheer the fans can do. Plus it's got good logo potential. I wouldn't mind if they kept it for Utah. The kachina logo doesn't make much sense there, but neither does Jazz.