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Last night I attended the opening reception for a new exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum, called Who Shot Sports, which celebrates sports photography. It consists of hundreds of sports photos — old and new, color, black-and-white, and one daguerreotype — and it’s really good. There are some classic shots that I’d seen many times before, but the bulk of the exhibit consists of amazing pics that were new to me (including the incredible shot of Paralympics swimmer Xavi Torres, shown above).
The exhibit sprawls out over four rooms, and I can’t recommend it highly enough. If you live in or near NYC, it’s a must-see. Further details on the museum’s website and in this article/slideshow.
I took a bunch of photos but I didn’t have time to edit them — I just dumped them into this Flickr set (if you can’t see the slideshow below, click here):
Meanwhile, speaking of museums, there’s currently an exhibit about uniforms at the Fashion Institute of Technology. I had high hopes for this one, especially because I’ve seen really good stuff at FIT in the past (like this great exhibit a few years about Ivy League style), but I was really disappointed. The exhibit is small, poorly conceived, and poorly executed. I do not recommend it.
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Friday Flashback: The anniversary of the White Sox hosting the first throwback game in pro sports history was earlier this week, so my weekly Friday Flashback column on ESPN takes a look at that game — including recollections from some fans who were there at Comiskey — and also looks at some of the first throwbacks worn by the other Big Four leagues (including the NFL’s diamond anniversary throwbacks from 1994, shown above). Check it out here.
Raffle results, and today’s new raffle: The winner of the Yankees cap is Chris Kier. Congrats to him, and thanks to all who entered.
Our next ’47 cap up for raffle is this White Sox pillbox snapback:
To enter, send an email with your name and shipping address to this address (not to the usual Uni Watch email address, please) by 8pm Eastern TODAY. One entry per person. I’ll announce the winner on Monday, and I’ll also announce Monday’s raffle cap, and then we’ll keep repeating that process for each remaining weekday this month. If you win one of the raffles, please be nice enough to step aside and stop entering the remaining ones. Thanks.
StripeRite reminder: In case you missed it earlier this week, I’ve partnered with Scott Turner and American Trench to produce a new line of crew socks with great stripe patterns down toward the ankle, where everyone will be able to see them:
The socks are available here, and there’s lots of additional info here.
The Ticker
By Mike Chamernik
Baseball News: The Double-A Corpus Christi Hooks didn’t exist in 1976, so they will wear fauxbacks to represent that year instead. Here’s another look, and a view of the hats (from Payne Whatley and Nick Lineback). … Fans have a chance to rename the Lynchburg Hillcats, an Indians affiliate. The options aren’t very good (surprisingly, “Hillcats” is a choice), but I can get behind the Doves. Reminds me of the old Brooklyn MLB team. Seems quaint. But, if they do choose Doves, it will come with a menacing logo, which might actually be ironically amusing. All I’m saying is, go and vote for the Doves. … A new ESPN 30 for 30 film, Doc & Darryl, directed by Judd Apatow, premiered last night. Matthew Blinco likes the script “New York” jerseys the Mets wore on the road in 1987, and I like them, too. … That film also included a shot of Doc Gooden in a minor league Tidewater Tides uniform that included a sweet pillbox cap. That cap is sold, by the way, by Ebbets Field Flannels. … Everything lovable (or hatable) about Chicago cuisine rolled into one: The Cubs are offering a deep dish pizza loaded with Chicago-style hot dog ingredients. … The Brewers are hosting a ’90s Night on July 30. In anticipation of the evening, relievers Will Smith and Jeremy Jeffress reenacted photos of Will Smith, the rapper, and DJ Jazzy Jeff. They posed for a lot of pics, too. … Using MLB: The Show, someone simulated a season with every team having 25 Bartolo Colons on the roster. The results were spectacular. [Wow, that is sheer genius. Don’t miss! ”” PL] … A Wisconsin nail salon borrowed the late-1990s Angels logo (from Casey Littmann). … Good photo of Mickey Mantle chomping on a hot dog while wearing a Yoo-Hoo T-shirt. The Mick was a Yoo-Hoo endorser. … I never noticed this, but Lenny Dykstra was wearing Darren Daulton’s helmet in this classic photo. Dykstra’s uni number was 4 (from David A. Arnot). … Sportsnet interviewed Blue Jays pitcher J.A. Happ. Even after four years in Canada, he still doesn’t know how to buy milk (scroll down to the bottom). Apparently, in many parts of Canada milk is sold in bags with separate plastic jugs. This is news to me! … Paul Igel was at a Lids in Las Vegas and found this Red Sox cap with a David Ortiz farewell logo. Wonder if the Sox will wear that on the field during the last few games of the season. The Yankees did something similar for Derek Jeter and Mariano Rivera. … A Bowie Baysox player wore a Triple-A Norfolk helmet in the Double-A All-Star Game. … The brown/gold MLB All-Star merch sold well, and the Padres may be bringing back more brown next season, but those two things are not necessarily related (from Phil). … Also from Phil: Lots of minor league teams doing Christmas in July promotions. … Speaking of minor league promotions, many teams are incorporating food into their uniforms (from Andrew Hoenig). … Here are some uniform shots from the Japanese Home Run Derby.
Pro and College Football News: The new Washington Arena League team will be known as the Valor. The colors and logos were also revealed yesterday (from several readers). … An investment group led by HOF safety Ronnie Lott wants to build a new Raiders stadium at the Coliseum site in Oakland. … Sports Illustrated got Georgia State mixed up with Georgia Southern (from Preston Hornsby). … SMU is getting new turf (from Phil).
Hockey News: The Las Vegas expansion franchise is having trouble trademarking a name. Obtaining the “Black Knights,” the preferred name and a nod to owner Bill Foley’s military background, would require for the team to negotiate with the U.S. government over a trademark. The NHL isn’t fond of any gambling-themed names, either. Rumors indicate the team is leaning towards “Knights” as its nickname (from Alan Kreit). … Here’s a really cool-looking hockey-themed pinball machine. Click on the two photos to see larger versions.
NBA News: Timberwolves owner Glen Taylor says his team is planning new logos and jerseys for the near future. … Shaq held up a Heat jersey with a Spurs tag when Miami introduced him after the trade with the Lakers in 2004. I wish the tag said what size the jersey was (from @NVZXR). … Did you know the Mavericks’ team name was somewhat controversial when it was chosen? It’s the same name used by teams at the University of Texas at Arlington, and they weren’t too pleased about the then-new NBA team using their moniker. Details in this 1980 Sports Illustrated piece (from Aaron Husul).
Soccer News: Paul’s day was 15 percent cruddier yesterday, as both Real Madrid and Barcelona released new purple kits (from Mark Coale). … Here’s a good breakdown of all the new Premier League kits next year (from @TheBigJamesG). … New kits for FC St. Pauli (from Troy R. Wells). … New kits for West Virginia (from @cDubya242). … A designer created soccer jersey concepts for the Buffalo Bills and Sabres. … Barça’s new signing Lucas Digne will wear a protective mask. He recently had surgery for a nasal fracture (from Yellow Away Kit). … New jerseys upcoming tomorrow for WisÅ‚a Kraków. … Hull fans are unhappy because their away kit looks just like Everton’s. “That’s the appropriate response to templates,” says Casey Hart.
Grab Bag: A friend of Peter Gaston’s created a site that automatically colorizes black-and-white photos in seconds. … New logos for the programs at Washington & Jefferson College (from Bob Fittipaldo). … Golfer Jordan Spieth dropped out of the Olympics, so Coke is dropping him from its Olympic-themed packaging and will use a golfer’s silhouette instead (from @Walkerdb7). … Tour de France rider Chris Froome crashed with a motorbike yesterday and ran on foot before getting a replacement bike. … Nice cricket matchup of striped blue-and-yellow teams. … Many New Zealanders feel that the country’s Olympic uniforms are too generic. Perhaps the athletes have been outfitted by apparel from The Warehouse, a store which Camryn Brown says is the country’s equivalent of Wal-Mart. … Greg Mays recently found decades-old documents for California license plates in a his VW Microbus. “Don’t think I ever saw a Cali Olympics plate on the road,” he says. “Wish I had a set for the bus, even though it hasn’t been out of my driveway in a decade!” … New logo for Mastercard. … New package design for BreathSavers. … For many years, female varsity athletes at Michigan received different varsity jackets than the more iconic male versions. The university is now addressing that inequity by giving standard varsity jackets to over 700 past female athletes (from Jeffrey Sak). … Phil Mickelson is still wearing that binder clip!
Preventing the Vegas NHL team from being named the Black Knights should go on the U.S. Army’s list of heroic victories. Las Vegas Knights would be a terrific name, whereas basically any two-word sports team nickname that doesn’t include an article of clothing is for crap.
Jam-packed baseball ticker today. Really great stuff throughout! As with Tampa Bay, Corpus Christi has developed 1970s fauxback that are superior to what the team actually wears. Adapting the classic “Breaking Madden” project to baseball is great stuff – that all-Bartolo league is pretty much just MLB during the Taft administration. Doves are fine, but Lynchburg should totally go with the Derechos, and then rise to the challenge of bulding a better identity around a vague meteorological nickname than Omaha.
I agree with you about the inefficacy of two-word nicknames. Ones I like (Redwings, Blackhawks, Tarheels) can be rendered as compound words.
Tar Heels and Red Wings are always 2 words. No exceptions. And Blackhawks refers to an army unit. Sorry man.
In 1970, a conglomerate called Haven Industries bought the ABA’s Pittsburgh Pipers, who’d moved to Minnesota and returned by then. They announced a Name the Team contest, and the winner was Pioneers. Point Park College, whose teams were the Pioneers, threatened to sue. Management thought about it, and decided they really wanted to call their team the Condors. More than one person noted that the condor was an endangered species, and two years later, the Pittsburgh Condors folded. (The birds, and the Point Park Pioneers, survive.)
Wasn’t the original nickname of Tampa Bay MLB supposed to be the Stingrays? And didn’t a nearby college enjoin them from using what seems in retrospect to be an obvious nickname?
Stingrays was one of the options (as were other seafood), but they found that entrepreneurial poachers had already trademarked that. They chose the more obscure Devil Ray; it had no such claims. The owner’s brother was also named Ray. It was never made clear if/how that figured into the discussion.
Ah, bagged milk. My wife’s family is from Buffalo and her family rents cottages on a lake a couple hours past Toronto every summer since her parents were our children’s ages. The first time I went with them, I could not find milk that was not sold in bags. IMO it makes the milk a whole lot less palatable. What other liquid is sold in bags (at least in the US and Canada)? Weird.
Packing the car for the drive up to Buffalo as we speak – bagged milk here we come!
You don’t have to drive to Canada to get bagged milk. You can get it in Wisconsin, at any Kwik Trip store.
link
We had milk in bags since the ’80’s. Our school had milk in pint-sized bags with a pokey straw (like Capri Sun drinks). Made a huge mess if you didn’t access the milk properly. Little kids had the hardest time getting used to them. I think the dairy that produced them which was near Bruce, WI, is now out of business.
I can be in Montréal in 7.5 hours. I can be in Milwaukee in 14 hours.
Kwik Trip also sells orange juice in bags.
According to someone on reddit, Beep (fruit based drink) was once sold in bags. link
I only remember my grandma, when i was a kid, getting it in cartons.
Boxes of wine are really bags of wine held in a box. The milk dispensers used in restaurants and other institutions have big bags of milk in plastic crates. And then there’s link.
I guess in Austrailia the bag inside a wine box is called a goon sax. This band took their name from it.
link
Pretty good album.
I once read an article (sorry, can’t find the link) that bagged milk was one thing that made it easier for Canada to switch to the metric system, as it was easier to resize the bags and fill amount for nice round metric sizes than it would be to retool machinery to create a slightly different sized carton, jug or bottle.
Yeah, I think that picture of Dykstra was right after he wrecked his car and put his passenger Darren Daulton an inch away from death. As if wearing the man’s hat says “sorry.” Also, that is a gross amount of chew.
As an American who once was new to Canada and its grocery stores, I agree that JA Happ’s neighbor should show him how bagged milk in the pitcher is done!
Huh. I remembered that Daulton was injured in that crash, but I had forgotten that Dykstra was driving. That occurred about a mile from my house, and I remember looking at the offending tree every time I drove past.
shouldn’t that be OFFENDED tree?
The tree didn’t do anything wrong, as I recall…
Not sure about the reason for his complaints about bagged milk. It’s also been available in cartons in various sizes for a long, long time. The 4L bags are cheaper than the cartons but I doubt that would be a real concern for a MLB player.
Thought relatively recent (maybe a couple decades now ???) and not as ubiquitous as the bagged milk and the carton the plastic jugs of milk can be found many places milk is sold.
Being in Northwestern Ontario, from a very brief internet search, I suspect this region is likely the most western point to commonly have bagged milk in Canada. Those in western Canada, correct me if I am wrong.
I think you’re correct. We had bag milk in NW Ontario, plastic jugs in Winnipeg.
(Former Atikokanite)
Ironic that the new Pokemon Go game has a “Team Valor” that is primary Red (other two teams are yellow (Instinct) and blue (Mystic)). I could see that new Arena team trying to cash in on that.
I wish Washington would go back to the burgundy/gold color scheme with a solid or striped helmet (or maybe spearhead if they could get FSU approval to mimic again). Looks much better than the current cluster uniform.
“The Cubs are offering a deep dish pizza loaded with Chicago-style hot dog.”
Not a sandwich.
“Not a sandwich.”
~~~
Neither is a hot dog.
And my twitter poll proves it.
There’s still time to vote tho…
Proves nothing. You can’t put the truth up for a vote. It is what it is, regardless of people’s feelings about it. Sandwich.
Because it’s s hoagie!!! I stand by this as different than a sandwich. Hahaha!
More importantly, if the crust is thick enough to earn the adjective “Chicago,” it’s not a pizza, either.
Not a sandwich, hot dog or pizza? I’ll tell you what it is…obscene.
“New logo for Mastercard.”
I’m still calling it Master Charge!
Wanson Lumber (local lumber business) still has their metal Chargex and Master Charger signs attached to their building.
Can see it on Google maps:
link
Dig it!
you probably look for TICKETRON when you want to go to a game, right?
The Friday Flashback is up:
link
Great Memories of the first TBTC game. It was a makeup game, schedule were tight, and they had to get some kind of union approval to even play it, as it was the Wednesday after the All-Star game, normally a day off. Even though it was post-Veeck, many commented about his influence and fingerprints all over. WGN televised the afternoon game.
The one thing that stands out for me was how quiet the ballpark was. The lineup announcements were made via megaphones. One could actually hear, and sometimes decipher, the players’ chatter during plays. It was a neat event in a great old ballpark. Comiskey Park and, by the way, Bill Veeck, R.I.P.
Per basketball memorabilia websites Shaq wore sizes 58-60…
The Dwight Gooden Tidewater tides pic I remember
link
The League of Bartolo Colons is pretty excellent.
It’s very Breaking Madden-esque, for those familiar with that series. Cool that someone finally decided to do something like it for The Show, as it’s a very well-designed, well-programmed game relative to other sports games. It’s always interesting to push simulation games like that to their limits because, generally speaking, if programmers made the game to handle extremes (like a League of Bartolos), the game can probably handle normal play pretty well, too. Madden is well-known for only keeping score up to 255. It’s interesting to me that we now know The Show can simulate marathon extra-inning games.
The one walk the whole season thing is odd, but it might show the difference between how the game handles “live” COM vs. COM gameplay simulation versus non-gameplay game simulation. The live sim might be a little less aggressive about going after weak-hitting Bartolos than the sim that generates the results for non-live simmed games.
If the fine folks at San Diego Studios were smart, they’d promote that article and maybe do a promo or something with Bartolo playing every position — Bartolo 1 groaning about bending down to catch for a 17th inning for the sixth-straight day as Bartolo 2 boasts about leading the league with a .200 batting average, that sort of thing. EA did it when a kid released a video surrounding some glitchy check physics in their NHL series:
The “Hercules Check”: link
EA’s response: link
Breaking Madden:
link
That has become for me by far the best thing about the NFL season. By far.
The Colon clone thing reminded me of playing Earl Weaver Baseball on the Apple II and playing the ’44 Browns from the classic teams list against present-day teams.
The Mets have had two different “New York” scripts; the one from the 1990’s had a tail. But yeah, I like the ones from 1987. In this regard, the Mets have had an embarrassment of riches.
I’ve played that Bobby Orr pinball machine! The arcade that owns it brought it to the big pinball expo a few years back in Denver. It was WAY fun!
Wow, the Washington Valor! Looks great! Perhaps another Washington area football team would like to buy their branding.
Reminds me of the WLAF’s Ohio Glory.
“Ultimately and unanimously … Valor became the obvious choice for our AFL team,” Mody said. “To a man and a woman, everybody loved the name.”
Bunch of yes men and women, I presume. You mean to tell me no one besides me thinks this is a corny 90s-ish name?
Not a long life expectancy, no. But remember, this is arena football.
Hey Paul, thanks for the head’s up on the FIT exhibit. Had planned on going. Just curious, how long did it take for you to go through the exhibit?
How long did the FIT exhibit take? Not long at all — it’s small. Like, 15 minutes. (On the plus side, it’s free.)
The Brooklyn Museum exhibit is considerably larger, better, and more time-consuming. I’d plan on devoting at least an hour to it, and maybe closer to two. It’s that good.
That ridiculous hot dog pizza is disgusting. It would have been just as disgusting if it were a regular Giordano’s pizza, though….
If it ends up being the Las Vegas Knights, the good news is that they already have a theme song, courtesy of Hootie:
link
Decent tune even if it doesn’t scream “Hockey”…
As a Wolves fan I’ll wait to see about the new look. I’m in the minority that actually like the current look and the previous look the current was based on.
I do love the howling wolf alt so it would be nice to see that tweaked a bit or updated into the previous blue, green, black, gray colors. Or tweak the current wolf head, turn it to the side, and put it on a modern ball to give the original logo a modern look.
The Wolves have had one element in their iconography worth keeping: the green/black trim with the outlines of evergreens separating the two colors. Incorporate that with a simple uniform and it will probably look fine.
I voted for Love Apples and as far as I know, calling someone a bag of milk in Canada is an insult.
Loved Bartolo League Baseball…the original should be named Bartolo Colon…the clones should each be Bartolo Clone or maybe Colone.
Col. Blake: [Radar] I will never understand how you can hear me before I ever call you.
Radar:I guess it’s the same as cows lying down on all fours just before it rains.
Col. Blake: Do cows lay down on all fours before it rains?
Radar: Yes, sir.
Col. Blake: I wonder why.
Radar: I don’t think they want to get their bags wet.