Sport

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 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.

I actually think the problem is UConn isn't dislikable enough. They're also not lovable. They're nothing. I can't be moved to feel one way or the other about them. The only thing I know about this current team is Hurley is for some reason a lifelong Bengals fan, which is weird because he's from New Jersey. Getting out to big leads or not being tested isn't a knock on them as a basketball team - That's just what good teams do. What a dumb piece of criticism. Another problem is the game started at 9:30 last night. I learned about UConn's victory on my phone this morning when I woke up as I was fast asleep before the second half. I say this every year, but you cannot convince me that starting the national championship game after 9 on the east coast is helpful for ratings.

It's so gimmicky and I hate it. It was novel in 2007, but it looks extremely 2007 now. It's got all the superfluous flourishes, dialed up to 11, completely unrestrained hallmarks that Brandiose became known for. To make this worse is that using the faux 1870's number font means they're not using their perfect block font.

Good catch. I expanded the picture of Spencer Steer and now I see it. I guess that's an improvement because now it matches the numbers, but it feels like it's heavier on the black, which I don't like.

It would be hard to find a Reds fan at this point who disagrees with you. The black drop shadows look even worse with the larger sleeve cuffs. Also, it felt like the drop shadows are slightly larger now. compare previous years and last night. hard to say. Something's different there.

Probably true, but wouldn't that also be true of most cities, even large ones? Like if sports didn't exist I don't think I would need to know anything about Atlanta. Also GE Aerospace where a very handsome, smart, funny guy I know works.

If there's one improvement from the Fanatics hostile takeover it's the sleeves on the Reds road jerseys. This is what it used to look like Now it's an accidental callback to the 1990 uniforms and we're one step closer to my dream of wearing these with belts and buttons. call it a pleasant surprise when I turned the game on last night.

I don't know why this expectation is of Mike Trout that he needs to leave to prove himself exists. I don't know of another player in sports who's been held to that same standard. He's on a major league baseball team and he's compiled these stats against grown ass major league pitchers who don't suddenly get worse when they play the Angels. If he'd grown up in, I don't know, Nebraska, would there be this mandate that he must play in Philadelphia to prove that he can play in Philadelphia? If anything, playing 1/2 of the Akron Groomsmen role means he's been asked to carry a team and exert himself more than he would if he were with a more stacked roster. Now that I've defended him, I must say that I don't like Trout's vibe either. Some players you just don't gel with and he just isn't my guy. I saw him play in person in Seattle and he had an impressive game, but it was so blah. I just think he's kind of a vacant, black hole of charisma, which isn't important for playing good baseball, but it is important for being an entertainment product that I seek out when my team isn't playing the Angels. This is me with the designated hitter and interleague play. Used to have impassioned arguments about both and now I just cannot care. If you asked me now I would argue multiple points about how both are actually good. I've become less of a baseball purist as I've aged and less of a hard-ass sports fan all around. I have some experiences now that I didn't have as a teenager/early 20's person and those have given me a healthy dose of perspective. When the Reds or Bengals lost when I was a kid my dad would laugh and move on instantly and it made me angry that he didn't care. I get it now. It's not that he didn't care, he just knew that it wasn't important enough to spend any time worrying about. His response was correct. It's just sports.

Opening Day is a top 5 day in the baseball season. The day after opening day is easily the worst.

In the late 90’s OSU built a new pro-style basketball and hockey arena while the city/Blue Jackets built Nationwide Arena. They’re not literally on the same street. One is downtown, the other is on OSU’s campus. The problem it caused was two arenas competing for concerts and other events.

The only scare according to my contact with the team was that the original lease agreement made it impossible to compete without losing piles of money (they were also GMed by a moron who made it impossible to compete by doing things like ignoring his scouts' advice and drafting Gilbert Brule instead of Anze Kopitar) That had nothing to do with the market or fanbase, was just a poorly designed agreement structure. Restructuring the lease agreement in 2011 brought them more in line with the rest of the league in terms of operating expenses. They used some standard "we would hate to have to move" tactics to get a new deal done, but it was never seriously considered. This connects back to OSU and the reason an outdoor game at Ohio Stadium hasn't been entertained until this year - Ohio State is a famously terrible partner to work with in Central Ohio. They don't give a honk about the rest of Columbus unless it has something to do with Ohio State. I very much doubt they would've cooperated on an arena in the late 90's if the hockey team had been amenable to it anyway. So, in conclusion, Columbus is fine.

If Josh Anderson doesn't get hurt against Boston the Blues might not have a cup and you'd have a different username. That team had more than a good chance at a championship. Fair and I don't disagree. If I could time travel back to 1997 and name them anything other than Blue Jackets I would. Too late now. But that's a different topic than "Nobody cares about them, they shouldn't even get the B version of the outdoor game, and I'm surprised they haven't relocated".

You don't have to be this guy. Lots of people care about the Blue Jackets. It's in Columbus because they haven't participated in an outdoor game yet and there's a famous outdoor sports venue in the city that would've been used years ago, but the outgoing OSU athletic director was a stubborn wrench that prevented any discussions with the NHL and Ohio State. He's finally retiring and getting out of the way, which is why it's now happening in Columbus. They do. Currently averaging >93% capacity with a reliable season ticket base to watch a team who's going to miss the playoffs for the fourth straight year. That's because they aren't a candidate for relocation. At all.

What was the initial incident that caused them to pull her credential? I can't actually find the inciting issue and can only find the after-the-fact back and forth.

Saw DC United and FC Cincinnati kick it around yesterday. My thoughts: 1. Cold. 40 degrees in March is colder than a 20 degree Bengals game in January. I don't know why. 2. FCC has to work so much harder than they did last year. They miss Vazquez. 3. My first time seeing D.C. United since going to this game as an 8 year old in the first season of MLS. That game was in a mostly empty Ohio Stadium. Yesterday's was in a filled soccer specific stadium. We've come a long way.

Good point. That's what this reminds me of. Templated changes designed to reduce drag across teams in terms of manufacturing are framed as "Innovation". Same thing is how the Jets went from this to this

You guys talked about this BS yet? First of all, the headspoon piping looks like it's off a bootleg that got the proportions incorrect, but the biggest issue here is the piping on the sleeves is no longer piping, as in another layer of fabric sewn on top of the sleeve. Instead it's a cuff with a stripe that's supposed to approximate piping and it's thicker than the headspoon piping. Don't like it! The Reds themselves have a history of striped cuffs, but that was a deliberate choice with their pullover unis from 72-92, but this is the work of the current template cutting corners. Are the other teams with sleeve/headspoon piping doing the same thing?