Sport

Watched my first hockey game in a couple weeks last night. When did Bally start doing the puck tracker and player labels on power plays? And why only on power plays? I was surprised by how much I didn't hate the puck tail, but the player labels that pop up the instant a player touches the puck were very annoying and unnecessary. I remember the FoxTrax and glow puck being too much 90's, but the little black tail on the puck wasn't bad.

We're seeing a lot more 15's over 2 seeds now when that was incredibly rare when I was a kid and I think this is going to become more common. Thanks to transfer portal and other new rules talent has become much more evenly spread out than it used to be, plus every kid can shoot, which opens up a wide world of variance, but still this is only the second time it's ever happened. You could make a case this is the most shocking upset in college basketball history. Fairleigh Dickinson (hehe funny name) won 4 games last year, only won 20 out of 35 games this season, lost their conference tournament final, and were the smallest team in Division 1 basketball playing the biggest team in D1 basketball. The weird thing about UMBC was they throttled Virginia. The weird thing about tonight was Purdue didn't look interested until it was too late. FDU was playing all out on every possession from start to finish. To be a total dad about it - it looked like they wanted it more. edit: yeah this is nuts

Would you be upset at the WBC or that it occurred at all? I think you can be unhappy the injury happened, but it's silly to blame the tournament that is simply replacing their spring training games. It's not like they wouldn't be playing right now if the WBC wasn't happening.

Injuries happen and that’s always a risk in international tournaments, but lots of players have been injured playing in pointless spring training games already this year. How’s this any different?

I hate it. It's not even like it's sheered more steeply vertical, it's more like it's rotated, which makes it feel like someone just did a sloppy job when sewing it onto the shirt.

Haven’t heard anything that would suggest they’re going back to red pants full time. Feels like the home and away britches are going to continue for the foreseeable future. I think most fans prefer blue pants with the white jersey to the red pants. I know I do.

Appreciation post for what I thought was a tremendous looking hockey game last night between the Sharks and Blue Jackets. This was last year. Not bad, but not as good IMO.

Marlins Park feels like you're watching baseball played inside an airport, which was even more true when they had the giant airport looking sculpture. I think they totally whiffed.

Miami has more to do, though. It’s also a weird shape. Most big cities are round. Miami is a straight line.

Good baseball attendance in any city requires two things: 1. An easy to access stadium that is a pleasant experience, and 2. a team that's worth seeing. Pittsburgh has one of those things. The Rays have the other. I live 5 minutes from a major league baseball stadium and I average about 5 games a year*. If I lived greater than 45 minutes from a major league baseball stadium I would maybe go to one. If the Rays went 162-0 there's still no overcoming the reality that for most of their metro market seeing a game in person is a chore. I've done it myself and wouldn't do it often if I lived there. You can't compare NFL attendance to other sports because games are events and there's so few of them. If baseball only played 8 home games a year you would see more Rays fans at any one game. This is the concept @who do you think is choosing not to understand with regards to his Red Sox playing in The Trop. When FC Cincinnati was looking for a stadium location the number quoted as to why they didn't want to build in the suburbs is you lose ~500 fans a game every game for every mile the stadium is outside a city's population center. The Trop is made even worse than that by being on the opposite side of town from most of Tampa Bay metro's daily comings and goings meaning they live north, northeast, and east of the city and commute to the center for work. St Pete is west of everything and requires a fight with traffic to get to, which means weeknight games are a non-option for most of the metro area. There's also, ya know, the water, which means there aren't alternative routes or neighborhoods to draw from. The Tampa Bay Rays' drawable market is effectively a third of what it should be if you only look at raw population numbers and their nearest neighbors aren't the most affluent communities in the region. It was a really stupid place to put a baseball stadium, but denying the reality that location is a valid factor for the Rays attendance problems is also really stupid. *When the team is trying. I attended zero last year because, like the Pirates, the Reds actively not trying didn't sit right with me.

Correct, but those people weren’t in the soccer stadium last night. Kooky doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

Twists the argument again, resorts to condescension. We're not changing the point - You said "it doesn't seem like fans of popular teams have any problems coming out". The reason it appears like there's a lot of Red Sox fans at any one Red Sox game at the Trop is because they have fewer games at the trop. Your population of fans have fewer games to fill. You're not spread as thin. That's so obvious I can't believe I'm still explaining it. It is math, sweetie. Basic math. It's not my fault you don't get it. You're projecting HARD. Hit me with a meme because memes are always a sign of a curious, not extremely online person. All the healthiest online minds use memes. Find a good one. Like something that's really reductive and dumb. Bonus points if it's anime again.

I was there. I don't know what that was about and I didn't like it, but I don't think it was personal. ":censored: Seattle" seemed to happen whenever the refs made an iffy call. (And that guy lost control of that one in the second half.) If we were playing St. Louis or Charlotte or whoever it would've been that city instead. I do wish the fans would find another way to express themselves. Cincinnati the city, like most cities, isn't as far off politically from Seattle as people think. The average FC Cincinnati fan is a college educated, white collar, hipster. The soccer crowd here is the farthest thing from "redneck".

I’ve lived in both cities. If you don’t know what you’re talking about then stay quiet.

All I needed to see. Knows he got caught making a dumb point, can't argue with math, so he resorts to memery.

Even if that's true you're comparing fan support in a 9 game sample size versus Rays' fan support over an 81 game sample size. The fans of popular teams don't have "no problem" coming out, they just have far fewer games to choose from. If the Rays fans only had 9 games to choose from in a season it would also look like they have no problem coming out. You know that, though, because you removed that point from my post.

Some good early returns on the results of the pitch clock, shift ban, and Big Bases so far in spring training.

The teams I always forget about are the Dbacks and up until recently when they landed deGrom, the Rangers. I'd have a tough time naming any players from those two teams. If I'm being honest, if I wasn't a Reds fan it would probably be the Reds for me. In fact, I remember listening to The Ringer MLB podcast when they did their season preview episode around this time five or six years ago and they did five to ten minutes on every team's outlook heading into that season. Except they straight up forgot to discuss the Reds. I felt like that was about right for where the franchise was and is again.

In Oakland? Yeah kind of. That's an illusion created by discrepancies in inventory. The visiting fans have the same problems coming out, they're just clustered into fewer games. Red Sox fans that live in Tampa aren't some magical breed of human better at driving to St Pete than Rays fans, they're just asked to do it fewer times each baseball season. If they had to fill 81 dates they would have the same problem "coming out".

If these had actually made it onto the field I bet they would've lasted two seasons at most before dialing things down. It reminds me of mid-90's NBA design. The sleeve stripe turning into a cat and spanning the neck hole is a weird idea made worse by being so clunkily executed.

Going to a sporting event is a non-essential expense for an entertainment product, which means you have to win people to your park with the experience. If your experience is a dump of a venue that isn't fun to visit and/or difficult get to (Tampa Bay) then you're not going to attract as many fans as you would in a nice, more easily accessible park. That's just math. Additionally, the A's on-field product has been often good through sheer Billy Beane shrewdness, but that churn and burn style of roster management asks a lot of a fanbase. You're constantly meeting and then quickly saying goodbye to favorite players. *Cries in Reds* It's not great for sustaining reliable fan support. That and every time they do manage to cobble together a playoff team they seem to lose in 5 in the ALDS - After a while people check out because you can only go on the merry-go-round so many times before you lose interest and don't want to do another spin on the rebuild ride. Now, combine all of that with last season being the low point of a tank and, oh yeah, they still play in the worst stadium in all of North American sports, a title it's held since I was a kid in the 19 hundred and 90's, and you have a recipe for constantly sparse crowds. I don't know why some people want to deny these very valid factors and instead pretend an entire region of Americans are allergic to baseball. A ton of people live in the East Bay region. Either they all hate baseball or there's big obvious, human reasons for the A's poor attendance. If John Fisher moves the A's to Las Vegas, they might do okay for a little while, but he's still John Fisher.

They also have a couple rough alternate logos that look like someone doing an impression of Brandiose, but doesn't quite have the chops to pull it off. More what I was talking about is the name is the same kind of overthought, but under-researched multi-word nonsense that Brandiose loves to push. Sod Poodles, Baby Cakes, or Skycarp type stuff etc. Names that nobody from said town actually says.

That feels like someone trying to replicate the Brandiose formula and not getting it right.

Floating stadium in the middle of the bay. Unanchored so it's constantly moving and bumping into the shore, bridges, and other boats, which would make for everchanging wind and sun angles. You have to take a boat just to get to it.

It’s an ai file. I’ll look and see if I still have it.