Cleaning out the inbox

Courtesy; Richard Walker 

A long-awaited cleaning out the inbox begins with The Athletic writing about baseball uniforms and what various teams have used through the years along with defunct teams.
Lots of information to find here and that's including one nugget that I didn't know- the Texas Rangers returning to powder blue to use for their Sunday jerseys.
This made this writer far more excited about this than you would think that it would (Remember that I spent my first years as a Rangers fan) until I looked at them and was pretty disappointed.
BUT the best part was the pictured uniforms for the Toronto Giants that had never been seen before!
In the winter of 1976, the bleeding dollars of the longtime owners of the San Francisco Giants, the Stoneham family, were preparing to move the Giants to Toronto.
Toronto planned unveiling of the new logo and uniforms and a press conference was fifteen minutes away from starting before a phone call broke the news that the Giants had reached a deal to remain in Northern California.
Toronto would see the Blue Jays fly into town for the 1977 season, but National League baseball almost had Montreal vs Toronto for all those seasons.
Richard Walker is the person that designed the logo and uniforms and brought them out into the open for the first time.

The Athletic writes about Whitey's Booze and Burgers, the legendary Richfield, Ohio bar/restaurant that has been reputed for their great burgers and chili, but also as the former hangout for the Cleveland Cavaliers and the NBA teams that came through Richfield during the era of the Coliseum as the home of the Cavaliers.
The article tells lots of stories about those Cavaliers and their coaches with a hilarious story about the night the matriarch of the Bigadza family, who have owned Whitey's since its 1953 opening, locked eyes for a showdown against Ted Stepien, the Cavaliers owner that not only ran the team into the ground but forced the NBA to create the "Stepien Rule" of teams not being able to trade first-round picks in back to back rounds, which is a rule that exists to this day.
Whitey's is still displaying plenty of memorabilia from the Coliseum times, so for that reason alone, Whitey's continues its residence at the top of my list of places that I still need to see in Ohio.

One more from The Athletic as the topic is ESPN's first coverage of the NFL Draft forty years ago in 1980.
Various ESPN personalities, including a then-twenty-five-year-old Bob Ley, talk about the nuts and bolts of the fairly new network televising an event that then-NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle wondered why anyone would even consider putting on the air or in ESPN's case, the satellite.
It's hard to believe how far draft coverage has moved forward in that period as something that the leader of the league laughed about a network being interested and then becoming an industry all of its own.

The Ringer discusses the end of the XFL with the tag of "the league that was better than expected".
It really was better than expected and I still think the league would have returned for 2021 had the mess of Covid-19 not arrived on the American scene with all the damage that it has caused.
It writes of the successes of the league and its innovations, especially the kickoff rule which seemed to achieve the goal of being an exciting play and still safer than a conventional kickoff.
There have been rumors of the league potentially being sold through bankruptcy and a new owner returning the league for 2021, but that seems unlikely for the obvious reasons.
And when you add that commissioner Oliver Luck is suing Vince McMahon for firing him the day before closing the league 'for cause' when Luck claims there wasn't a firable offense and that could affect a new owner, the XFL's return is a long shot at best.

Arstechnica wraps us up with an enhanced look at the Apollo 13 service module with a much better picture than the familiar black and white version.
Apollo 13 recently passed the fifty-year mark of its mission and photographer Andy Saunders of Great Britain 'stacked' several frames of the same picture that brought out more color and detail than had been previously seen.
The service module blew out a portion of its side as the 1970 mission traveled to the moon and would result in the film Apollo 13.
Saunders is an Apollo buff and does this work as a hobby, while the original images are kept in a vault in Houston at the Johnson Space Center and NASA will occasionally bring images out to be re-scanned with new technology.
Those scans not only can improve the image quality but preserves the original that only gets older and degrades as the film of the era grows more brittle.