Ferdinand Cesarano

Yeah, none of them are biased. Oh, stop. They are serious reporters who back up everything they report. Of course they both are angry that the team will probably move; but their reporting is undeniably credible.

Where did you see that? In every report by Brodie Brazil and Casey Pratt, and in the Oakland mayor's comments to Pratt.

The city and the team were on the verge of a deal when the team showed bad faith by blindsiding the city with an announcement of a "binding" agreement on the first Las Vegas site back in April.

I agree that Fisher is not going to sell. But his refusal to sell cannot be on account of his being a "cheapskate", as a sale would get him about $1 billion in profit as compared to his purchase price.

It's preferable to measure distance with units of distance, so I will say that I do indeed know that Rockford is about 80 or 90 miles away from Chicago, which, admittedly, is considerably more than the 40 or 50 miles that separate Santa Clara and San Francisco. Still, the point remains that naming a team after the big city in the region is unobjectionable, even if the team is located in an area that is, strictly speaking, outside the big city's recognised metropolitan area. The point is to be more attractive to advertisers, and also to have the listing look better on a TV schedule.

To be fair, the USFL calls Detroit "Philadelphia", Canton, OH "Pittsburgh" and "New Jersey", Memphis "Houston" and Birmingham "New Orleans". So... When I started to read this post, I thought that it was going to be the acknowledgement that the NFL calls Santa Clara "San Francisco", calls East Rutherford "New York", and calls Arlington "Dallas", and that it may soon be calling Naperville "Chicago". It also used to call Pontiac "Detroit", as did the NBA, which, additionally, called Richfield "Cleveland", and which at one time seemed poised to call Camden "Philadelphia". And Major League Baseball calls Anaheim "Los Angeles". Which is to say that there's nothing wrong with this. A major city has a sphere of influence that encompasses many neighbouring municipalities, so naming a team that is based in one of those smaller municipalities after the region's primary city is sensible. Please note that I am not necessarily claiming that the new AFL is not cheesy. But if it's cheesy, the reason that it's cheesy is not its naming practices.

That Atlanta logo would be an excellent letter logo if not for the gradient and especially the obtrusive shadows. Faux-3D ruins that logo, just as it ruins every single other logo of which it is a part (another example being the annoying bevelling on the Grand Rapids team's wordmark). I can't do anything about the gradient, but here's the obvious improvement that comes from removing the shadow.

The Nets really should have kept that design. The change of uniform and logo upon the move was a huge downgrade.

You're welcome! I went looking for those interviews knowing that I had heard them before, but not remembering exactly what project they were part of. I was very glad to have found them again. The weird thing is that I happened upon another example yesterday while I was not looking for it. I was just doing what I normally do, which is to listen to old-time radio. In the commercial for Jell-O that opens Jack Benny's radio show of October 24, 1937, the announcer Don Wilson (born 1900) mentions the creation of the product "back in the year 1904", a year which he says as "nineteen four". I share this not to belabour the point, but merely to address the possible suspicion that that form of expression was limited to the sporting world, rather than being the general norm.

Sorry, a language comment. It's "shoo-in", an expression that comes from horse racing. OK, carry on.

They didn't.

If this is the case, it's all the more reason that the combined league should retain the USFL name.

The Atlanta Legends' look was the best of a strong lot.

That's right, players from the aughts interviewed decades later. They'd say years in the form "nineteen two" or else in the form "nineteen hundred (and) two". But never "nineteen oh two"; that's strictly a latter-day construction. Sorry for the double post, but I just found some of these interviews that I had recalled hearing before. In the interview by Lawrence Ritter of "Wahoo" Sam Crawford (the holder of the all-time career record for triples) from the mid-1960s for the book Glory of Their Times, Crawford refers to the year 1907 as "nineteen seven". In Ritter's interview with Smoky Joe Wood, Ritter himself (born in 1922) refers to the year 1908 as "ninteen eight". In Ritter's interview with Hans Lobert, an infielder in the National League from 1903 to 1917, Ritter asks "What were the parks like in nineteen three, four, five?" This practice was the norm for people born in the mid-19th century and the early 20th century. The norm changed to "ninteen oh (whatever)" probably for people born in the late 1930s or early 1940s.

We wore an onion on our belts, which was the style at the time.

That fantasy alignment is good, except for the Eastern Division. To fix it, return the Gladiators to New Jersey, and replace the Columbus Destroyers with the New York Dragons.

Right! Thanks for pointing out those additional examples. (And thanks also for the spelling correction.)

Yes, indeed. The names New York Sentinels and California Redwoods in particular are good ones. The latter employs the practice of using for a team an existing name of something else, such as was done with the names Baltimore Orioles, Texas Rangers, Chicago Fire, Colorado Rockies, and Florida Panthers.

That's right, players from the aughts interviewed decades later. They'd say years in the form "nineteen two" or else in the form "nineteen hundred (and) two". But never "nineteen oh two"; that's strictly a latter-day construction.

A - From hearing interviews with people saying it like that. B - I trust that you are not picking on the slight hyperbole in the use of "everyone" to mean "just about everyone". The important point is that the vast majority said "two thousand two" and a few goofballs said "twenty oh two", but absolutely no one said "twenty two" (analogous to "nineteen two").

That was indeed the convention in the spoken language at the time. If you had asked someone in 1902 what year it was, that person would have responded with "nineteen two". This style can be heard in interviews with old-time ballplayers. Of course, this style could not have been used a century later; the year 2002 could not be said as "twenty two". If someone wanted to start the name of the year with "twenty", then the only option after that is "oh 2". (In practice, everyone said "two thousand two"; the convention of starting the name of the name of the year with "twenty" didn't really take hold until 2010.)

This is why the best playoff format was the 1969-1993 format, in which playoffs were for division winners only. That format was the best of both worlds. It provided head-to-head playoff match-ups; yet it still preserved the historic pre-playoffs principle of only champions having the right to advance, giving maximum value and meaning to the regular season. In addition, it is conceptually consistent, in that the regular season is the first round of the overall championship competition, and the winners of that round are the divisional champs.

You guys forgot alleys so there's just trash piled up everywhere. Good point! We're working on remedying the effects of that oversight.

There's also the overwhelming likelihood that every team did it to one degree or another. This is because stealing signs is part of the game, and always has been. The Astros, like the 1951 Giants, did nothing wrong.

Even I as an arrogant New Yorker agree with this. The decade of the 1950s, with the Yankees' run of greatness and the epic Giant-Dodger battles was pretty special; but the 1969-1993 period was the high point of baseball, and always will be. (Side note: a fun thing to do is to take the 100 Team Challenge, which is to name the four division winners from each year of the four-division alignment, from memory. If you want to really demonstrate your grasp of history, do it in random order rather than in chronological order.) And now you've blown it. New York is really like a small planet. Everyone knows of the mighty skyscrapers and the reliable subway that together constitute our signature, along with our unmatched variety of museums and theatres. But we also have abundant parkland (including some that is composed of primeval forest), as well as wetlands and nature preserves. And our beaches are absolutely magnificent; on a summer's day, Riis Park is possibly the most beautiful place on Earth. Best of all, we have more than a thousand miles of bike lanes; these lanes, taken together, have transformed our City for the better, creating the greatest improvement in New Yorkers' quality of life since the Tenament Law. New York remains a beacon for people from marginalised and oppressed groups who have escaped from the benighted corners of this country, as well as for the classic tired, hungry, and poor huddled masses from around the world who are commemorated on the Statue of Liberty; and we boast the greatest amound of linguistic diversity of anywhere in the world. Of course we also have our own embarrassing and backward sections (**cough** statenisland **cough**); alas, being a small planet, we have a little bit of everything. This great City constitutes the pinnacle of human civilisation, and it is the unquestionable centre of the Universe. If a vistor fails to grasp this obvious reality, that says more about that visitor than about our beautiful, thriving, endlessly fascinating metropolis.