Stadium prints for sports fans

We’re always on the look-out for tasteful ways to represent beloved sports teams in home decor. Items that fit this bill are worth their weight in, well, not gold at current prices, but aluminum at least. They give the sports fan in the household a way to express pride and love while simultaneously giving their family, partner, or housemates a chance to express their own tasteful sense of home propriety. The large selection of colorful stadium prints from City Prints fits the bill on every detail.

City Prints is an online fine-art print shop founded and operated by Tony and Katie Rodono that specializes in prints of places. The idea for City Prints came to them years after Tony started a traffic counting company. That business didn’t take off but Tony took away an enjoyment of drawing intersections. When the couple had a child, Tony writes on the about page of the City Prints website, he “realized the importance of place” and the idea of making fine-art prints out of locations was born. City Prints sells a wide variety of map-art. I’ve personally purchased one of the few non-map prints, an Apple II computer schematic, so I can vouch for the quality of their work. Most of what they produce are maps of areas as large as the earth and as small as a sports stadium or race track.

All of the prints are available as 12 x 12 prints alone, matted, or matted and framed. You can also get them in 30 x 30 Gallery-Wrapped canvases. Here are some of my favorites with links to the specific product and category so that you can hunt for the print that’s most meaningful to you or the sports fan in your life.

Race Tracks

Churchill Downs — the legendary site of the Kentucky Derby. Put this print up in your living room and mix some refreshing mint juleps.

City Prints Churchill Downs

Talladega Track — for the NASCAR/Will Farrell fan in you(r life.)

City Prints Talladega

College Football

Michigan Stadium — called the Big House, this is one of the original and ultimate bowls in sports.

City Prints Michigan

College Basketball

Cameron Indoor Stadium — the home of the Duke Blue Devils, where Coach Krzyzewski roams the floor and the students stand the entire game.

City Prints Duke

Dean E. Smith Center — home of Duke’s main Rivals, the North Carolina Tarheels. This is a fair and balanced blog.

City Prints NC

NFL Football

Lambeau Field — home to the only collectively owned major professional sports franchise, the Green Bay Packers, Lambeau field is a national treasure.

City Prints Lambeau

NBA Basketball

Madison Square Garden — called basketball’s Mecca, Madison Square Garden in Manhattan is home to the New York Knicks but has also been an important location for the history of college basketball. It hosted the Big East championships for decades.

City Prints MSG

NHL Hockey

Bell Centre — What the New York Yankees are to baseball, the Montreal Canadiens are to hockey. The legendary franchise has won almost exactly one quarter of all the Stanley Cups in history.

City Prints Montreal

Soccer

White Hart Lane — City Prints has a wide selection of international and domestic soccer stadiums but if you’re looking for a typically British design, the map of Tottenham Hotspur’s stadium is unmatched.

City Prints Tottenham

Why are game sevens so great?

If you’re a sports fan, there is nothing better than a game seven. If you’re a fan of the team in the game seven, it’s the most dramatic, heart-wrenching, nerve-wracking, squeal inducing sports situation your team can possibly be in. If you’re simply a fan of sports but don’t have a rooting interest one way or another, game seven is a joy. If you’re wondering what I’m talking about and why game sevens are so great, read on.

Sports has developed a wide variety of ways to decide which team or person is the best. The most common ways of doing this are round-robin tournaments, single-elimination tournaments, multiple-elimination tournaments, and three, five, or seven game series. Sometimes a combination of these approaches are used. There is something to be said for each form of playoff but the one we are concerned with today is a seven game series. In a single elimination tournament, like March Madness in college basketball, a team that loses once is eliminated forever. In a double-elimination tournament, a team that loses twice is eliminated forever. This could go on to infinity if you wanted it to. In a quadruple elimination tournament, a team that lost four times would be out. In an undecuple (yes) elimination tournament, a team that loses eleven times would be eliminated from the tournament. The seven game series is a version of a quadruple elimination tournament where two teams play each other in successive games until one team has won (and the other team has lost) four games.

Just reaching game seven in a seven game series tells you so many things about the series. For one thing, both teams have won (and lost) three games. The two teams are close to even in skill and determination, otherwise one would have been eliminated before then. There have been lots of ups and downs during the series. There’s been enough time for the players on the opposing teams to get to know each other and (usually) develop an explosive mixture of begrudging respect and bubbling disdain. This is magnified in sports like hockey where so much physicality is allowed during the game. It’s also magnified the farther you go in the playoffs. A first round game seven is not as dramatic as a second round game seven. Some sports, like baseball, recognize this and save the seven game series for later rounds, using shorter series earlier on. A game seven in the Stanley Cup finals, the NBA finals, or the World Series is the absolute pinnacle of sporting drama. The team that wins these game sevens are achieving life-long dreams and reaching the highest professional success possible.

Even if you put all the other factors aside, game sevens are still really cool because of their emotional resonance for the players. One common complaint about professional sports is that the fans care more about the teams than the players do; that the players are mercenaries who do it just for the money. In a game seven, you know that every player who steps on the pitchers mound or the batting box, every player who vaults over the boards onto the ice, every player who grabs a rebound or makes a layup, somewhere, in the back of their heads is thinking “Game seven, World Series/Stanley Cup final/NBA final…” just like they did when they were nine years-old in their backyards playing with a friend or two. Game sevens have a way of reducing sports back down to their essentials. Box out. Dump the puck. Make contact. Keep your eye on the ball.

Tonight the Kansas City Royals and the San Francisco Giants play in game seven of the World Series. Let’s enjoy it.

Bob Ryan's book: Scribe

What? You think it’s too early to start shopping for Christmas? I agree with you but it’s not what some of my local stores think because they’re already gearing up for the rush. I say, skip the stores and buy the sports fan in your life the new autobiographical book, Scribe: My Life in Sports, by Bob Ryan. Bob Ryan is one of the best known and most respected sports writers in the country. He started as an intern at the Boston Globe in 1968 and retired from full-time work there in 2012 after 44 years as a beat writer and columnist. He is a Boston sports writer, through and through — never bothering to adopt the feigned objective neutrality of many journalists in sports. When asked about that in a recent interview by Ryan Glasspiegel of The Big Lead, Ryan said:

I don’t see why anybody would ever have a problem with it. If you’re not a sports fan, why are you in the business? To me, I don’t quite understand people who aren’t true sports fans who are involved in this business.

It’s not that hard. You internally root. You don’t sit there and externally root — you internally care. And you do your job. It’s just not that hard. You see a game, the team wins or loses, you go talk to people, and if somebody stinks you say so. If it’s a good story, you’re positive. I just don’t understand what the inherent conflict is.

I haven’t read Scribe yet — it just came out — but I’ve enjoyed reading Ryan over the years as well as seeing him on TV as a panelist on the Sports Reporters, Around the Horn, and as a substitute host on Pardon the Interruption. He’s one of my favorite guests on the Tony Kornheiser radio show. Ryan is the most enthusiastic and knowledgeable sports personality out there. The Boston Globe review of Scribe noted that writing autobiographically, Ryan “offers a bonus: a reflective humor that can only come from years of working at a job you love.” I believe it!

It’s been quite enjoyable to have the publication of Ryan’s book as an excuse for a real Ryan love-fest in sports media. My favorite article about Ryan was Bryan Curtishomage in Grantland. His reverential tone serves to lift your own appreciation of Ryan as a writer and person. One of the effective tools he uses is including quotes about Ryan from athletes. For those of you who don’t follow sports that closely, athletes generally consider journalists to be a form of life somewhere between the mosquito and the raccoon. Bob Ryan is an exception:

The players followed Ryan, too. “He was an artist,” said guard Paul Westphal. “You could actually learn something about basketball, even as a player, by reading Bob’s articles.”

“I remember Bob coming up to me one day and asking if I wanted to have a beer after practice. I said, ‘Sure.’ We were just talking, and then Bob starts describing what we were doing on the court. He knew all our plays. He knew when people came off the bench. I was a rookie, remember. I started thinking, Do all the reporters know everything we’re doing out there?”

Scribe: My Life in Sports is available in hardcover and kindle now. It would make a great Christmas present for the sports fans in your life… and apparently, it’s time to think about that sort of thing!

News Clippings: Sunday, October 12

One of my favorite parts of writing Dear Sports Fan is reading other great writers cover sports in a way that’s accessible and compelling for the whole spectrum from super-fans to lay people. Here are selections from some of the articles this week that inspired me.

This article profiles former NBA player Keyon Dooling and his life long struggle to come to terms with and recover from being abused as a child. It’s a fascinating and eventually uplifting piece that reminds us that no matter how big, strong, and fearless athletes look when they’re on stage, they are real people with their own struggles.

Keyon Dooling’s Secret

By Jordan Ritter Conn for Grantland

Now, when Dooling looks back on those years, he sees how he tried to cope with the trauma of his past. He sees himself in fourth grade, sneaking to his father’s liquor cabinet, pouring himself strong drinks and sipping them until the world was gone. He sees himself in middle school, smoking weed with friends, letting the drug ease the anxiety he’d felt since that afternoon. He sees himself at that same age, flirting with girls and then taking them home. The more girls he slept with, he thought, the more he proved that he was no longer that little boy.

Basketball helped. On the court, he could assert his dominance. With the ball in his hands, he never felt like a victim. He loved the power his talent gave him, the confidence that grew from knowing that almost every kid in his school and his neighborhood could only dream of doing what he could do on a hardwood floor. The first time he dunked — as a freshman, in a game — he felt invincible. As he grew older, the memory of that afternoon faded, but the coping strategies remained.

This past week, I reblogged a piece about how baseball fans need to decide — do they want a clean game or an exciting game. This triggered a back and forth with a baseball fan and friend of Dear Sports Fan who sent me this well-written piece as a rebuttal. I have to admit, after reading this defense of the pace of baseball, I question how much of my attitudes towards the sport are the product of hearing other people’s cliched criticism. 

What Pace of Game Problem?

By Russell Carleton for Fox Sports

Allowing for the fact that some of the rule changes would spawn some workarounds, you might save 20 minutes off the average game. All it would cost you is the clock-less-ness of baseball, the idea of free substitution, and a small piece of the integrity of the game. In other words, baseball would become a different game and for not much benefit.

What I find interesting is that baseball seems to have a pace of game problem because everyone says that it does… Maybe it’s just time that baseball recognized that there are people out there who enjoy a slower game and stopped trying to be all things to all people… Baseball should simply embrace the fact that it is a slower game and market itself accordingly. It’s a feature, not a bug. There’s no pace of game problem because there’s nothing morally superior about playing rushed games that take two and a half hours instead of three, no matter what United States culture tries to say.

This essay grapples with the difficulty of producing accurate statistics comparing NFL players to… well, to who, exactly? That’s part of the problem. With all of the scary statistics flying around about the health effects of playing professional football, it’s very hard to know what is real and what isn’t. I hope someone can take the work of this charmingly skeptical article and do the hard work to produce more reasonable and accurate scientific studies. There’s undeniably something scary happening to some percent of pro football players. Let’s figure it out.

NFL Players Die Young. Or Maybe They Live Long Lives.

By Daniel Engber for Slate

For every 770 men who play the sport on a professional level, we can expect one extra death from ALS. (Extra deaths from Alzheimer’s are even more unusual.)

Any extra death is cause for grave concern, but if you look at other, much more common deadly conditions, the change in risk goes the other way. The same dataset suggests that for every 770 football retirees, we should expect 13 fewer deaths from cardiovascular disease and 14 fewer from cancer. So while it’s true that Alzheimer’s and ALS rates among NFL athletes could reasonably be described as “through the roof,” the number of players’ lives saved from heart disease and cancer exceeds the number of lives lost to those diseases by 2,150 percent.

But the methods used to find these stats raise a familiar and important question: Should football players really be compared to average men their age, of any race or body size or income level? How much does the choice of analysis affect its outcome?

So is it better to control for income or race, or should studies strive for both? And what about body size?

These may sound like simple questions, but they’re exceedingly difficult to answer. To some extent, the best approach depends on how you think about the NFL, and what point you’d like to make.

This charming story about the financial plight of the Haiti and Trinidad and Tobago women’s national soccer teams reminds us that not all athletes have financial support on NFL levels. Sometimes it takes a desperate tweet and a kind opponent to get things started so that the Clinton foundation can finish things up!

Haiti pledges money to Trinidad and Tobago soccer

By Kurt Voigt and Anne M. Peterson for the Associated Press

Upon getting word that the Trinidad and Tobago women’s national soccer team might not even have enough money for lunch, Haiti’s team took a look at its fundraising for World Cup qualifying — an account totaling a little over $1,300 — and decided to turn it over to the competition.

Why is the start of a season in sports so exciting?

Dear Sports Fan,

Sports seasons are so long — how can anyone get excited at the very start? It’s going to be at least six months until the playoffs in most sports.

Thanks,
Jan

— — —

Dear Jan,

The start of a season is exciting for many reasons and only a few of them have to do with making the playoffs. You’re absolutely right about how long sports seasons are. Take the National Hockey League (NHL) which is starting tonight. The NHL regular season is 82 games. It starts in early October and ends in mid-April. That’s a long, long time and a lot of games! The National Basketball Association plays the same number of games. Baseball plays 162 or roughly twice the number. Football is the outlier here with relatively short seasons — 16 games in the National Football League and around 12 for college teams. Setting football aside, the first few games for a baseball, basketball, or hockey team don’t actually mean very much in terms of their eventual record and qualification for the playoffs. A fan’s excitement for and enjoyment of the start of the season can’t be measured in wins and losses but it can be described. Let’s give it a shot.

Saying hello to old friends and meeting new ones

Part of following a team is getting to know the players on the team. The players on your favorite team or even their biggest rivals[1]  become like characters on a long-running sit-com. You learn their quirks. You cheer with them when they celebrate and you share their anger and frustration when the team is down. You track their various injury rehabilitations with bated breath. You might even wear a shirt with their name on the back. Players on your favorite team feel like an extension of your social circle in a weird way. The start of a season in sports is a little like the start of a season of a television show you really like or a new book in a series you love. You can’t wait to drop back in on their lives to see how they’re doing, if they’ve grown a funny beard, lost weight, gained weight, changed in any way. As a Penguins fan, I look forward to dropping back in on Sidney Crosby’s life just as much as I look forward to seeing what’s up with Lady Mary as a Downton Abbey fan.

Teams never stay the same from one season to a next. Players are traded, retire, or become free agents and move to another team. The first games of the season are your first chance to meet the new guys or gals on the team you follow. Some of them are players you know from other teams in the league. This can be great if you’ve always grudgingly respected their play. It can be challenging if you’ve always (sports) hated them and now you have to find a way to root for them. Rookies or players who have moved up from the minor leagues are always exciting to meet because their potential is unknown and therefore theoretically limitless.

Returning to ritual

Watching sports is also an important part of many fan’s social lives. Whether you go to games in person, watch them in a bar, or at home, watch them alone, with a partner, or with friends, watching and rooting can be a big part of a sport’s fans life. The start of the season means a return to social settings that you haven’t had access to during the offseason. It’s like the end of summer when you were a kid and all your friends got home from summer camp or the end of a long sustained period of craziness at work that allows you to rest, relax, and actually meet a friend for a drink instead of just heading home to rest up for the next day.

I have friends that I know I’m going to hear from ten times more during a particular sports season than I would otherwise. It’s great!

Getting a feel for your team

The first few games of a hockey, basketball, or baseball season may not have much of a statistical effect on their outcome for the year but that doesn’t mean fans don’t watch them attentively to get a feel for how their team might do. If you root for a team that just won a championship, you’re looking for evidence of the lethargy that often infects teams after they win. If you’re like most of us and you root for a team that did well but didn’t win the championship last year, you’re looking to see if the team has improved or taken a step back. How has a new coach affected the team’s play? How well are new players integrated into the team? Which players have improved? Which have lost a step? If you root for one of the worst teams in the league last year, the first few games may be your only time of true hope during the year.

Truthfully, the first few games probably can’t shed too much light on what the season will hold for your team, but that won’t stop fans from trying!

Enjoy the start of the season,
Ezra Fischer

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. note the outpouring of sincere love from Red Sox fans for the departing Derek Jeter

Cue Cards 10-2-14

Cue Cards is a series designed to assist with the common small talk about high-profile recent sporting events that is so omnipresent in the workplace, the bar, and other social settings.

clapperboard
Yesterday —  Wednesday, October 1

  1. Following a boom with a fizzle — After the epic single-elimination Wild Card game between the Royals and the As, fans probably were expecting a little more from the second Wild Card game last night. This one was impressive but not exciting as the San Francisco Giants beat the Pittsburgh Pirates 8-0. I suppose we shouldn’t be that surprised. Of the four Wild Card teams, the As, the Royals, and the Pirates are all long-time tortured franchises while the Giants are a traditional power. If you just took a baseball fan out of a time-machine and told them those four teams were in the Wild Card round, after they fainted from surprise that the first three even made the playoffs, they would recover to say that the Giants were sure to advance.
    Line: I’m not surprised but I do (unless you live in San Francisco) feel for the Pirates. It means so much for them to even make the playoffs and now their out having only played one game and scored no runs.
  2. Basketball (and LeBron) is back — That’s right — preseason basketball has begun. The first official preseason game is not until this Saturday but teams are already practicing and scrimmaging. Yesterday, the Cleveland Cavaliers had a public scrimmage and showed off their new acquisitions, Lebron James and Kevin Love. These two players are expected to launch them back into the championship hunt.
    Line: LeBron is back in Cleveland and this time, I think he’s going to bring them a championship.

Cue Cards 9-15-14

Cue Cards is a series designed to assist with the common small talk about high-profile recent sporting events that is so omnipresent in the workplace, the bar, and other social settings.

clapperboardYesterday —  Sunday, September 14

  1. The NFL plays football — After a week full of ancillary cultural stories, the NFL actually played football games yesterday. Read the Week Two NFL One Liners for full (and brief) coverage of each game.
  2. Well, that was easy — The United States Men’s National Basketball team finished their romp through the FIBA World Cup of Basketball with a 129-92 victory. Looking back on the tournament, the toughest game the team had, was against Turkey in the group stage. It may have been different if Spain had made it to the finals, because they were expected to be around even with our team, but they were knocked out of the tournament in the quarterfinals by France.

Cue Cards 9-12-14

Cue Cards is a series designed to assist with the common small talk about high-profile recent sporting events that is so omnipresent in the workplace, the bar, and other social settings.

clapperboardYesterday —  Thursday, September 11

  1. Goliath beats David easily — After France’s upset of Spain in their FIBA Basketball World Cup quarterfinal game, it was easy to feel like upset was in the air, and to get a little nervous about the United States’ game against Lithuania. Not to worry though, after a slow start, the United States outscored their opponent 53 to 24 in the second half. The U.S. team moves on to the finals in Madrid where they will face the winner of France vs. Serbia.
    Line: It’s starting to look like the U.S. team, even missing some of our biggest stars like LeBron, Kevin Durant, and Paul George, is simply in a different class from its opponents.
  2. It’s us against the world = victory — One of the incongruities of how people within the NFL talk about football is the subject of “distractions”. “Distractions” like from having an openly gay player on your team are seen to be a legitimate cause of concern as something that could derail the performance of the team. But, predictably, when there are real distractions, like when your team is embroiled in a domestic abuse scandal and potential cover up, that “distraction” gets used as a rally cry within the team’s locker room and seems to almost always lead to a victory. So it was last night when Ray Rice’s old team, the Baltimore Ravens played their division rivals, the Pittsburgh Steelers. The Ravens won, 26 to 6.
    Line: I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised at the Ravens performance. Doesn’t it seem like teams in the middle of scandals always play well and usually win?

Cue Cards 9-11-14

Cue Cards is a series designed to assist with the common small talk about high-profile recent sporting events that is so omnipresent in the workplace, the bar, and other social settings.

clapperboardYesterday —  Wednesday, September 10

  1. Spain upset by France — It sounds like the plot of a children’s book about regional food but it really happened yesterday in the FIBA Basketball World Cup. The host country, and co-favorite to win the entire tournament, Spain, was defeated 65-52 by France. This is a real shock, in part because France lost by 24 points to Spain earlier in the tournament. What to make of it? Well, for one, it means that the United States matchup against Spain in the championship game that was expected, won’t happen. Spain is eliminated. It’s a good reminder though, that if the gap between the rest of the world and the United States in terms of basketball wherewithal (that should be the name of a blog) is closing, then so too is the gap between the rest of the world and itself.
    Line: I can’t believe Spain lost on their home court. And to neighboring France to boot! They must be so sad in Spain today.
  2. Decade-long underdogs holding on — People often use the phrase “national pastime” to refer to baseball, but it must be said, given how little room on sports pages baseball is receiving, even as its regular season charges into tight playoff races, that it’s no longer our national sport. That said, the most compelling part of baseball season is upon us and a couple of long-suffering, long-pretty-bad franchises are desperately trying to hold onto playoff spots. Both won important games last night. The Pittsburgh Pirates beat in-state rival, Philadelphia Phillies, 6-3 and the Kansas City Royals shut out the Detroit Tigers 3-0. If the season ended now, both the Pirates and the Royals would make the playoffs.
    Line: Baseball might not be the national pastime anymore but rooting for the underdog still is! Go Pirates and Royals!
  3. The NFL’s Watergate Week continues — An AP story broke yesterday with the news that the NFL received a copy of the video from inside the elevator where Ray Rice assaulted his fiancee months ago. This only confirms my opinion that the question we should be asking NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell is “what did he know and when did he know it.” Given yesterday’s news, it sounds more likely than ever that Goodell’s job is in jeopardy over this.
    Line: Wow. Goodell’s got to resign or be fired.

Cue Cards 9-10-14

Cue Cards is a series designed to assist with the common small talk about high-profile recent sporting events that is so omnipresent in the workplace, the bar, and other social settings.

clapperboardYesterday —  Tuesday, September 9

  1. U.S. Basketball Advances — It seems more and more like neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night will stay our national basketball team from its appointed FIBA Basketball World Cup championship matchup with Spain. Slovenia fought the good fight but by the third quarter, the U.S. team had run them ragged. The final score was United States 119, Slovenia 79. In the other quarterfinal, Lithuania toppled Turkey 73 to 61. Serbia plays Brazil today at noon ET and France plays Spain at 4 p.m. ET. You can catch those games on ESPN3.
    Line: Rooting for the U.S. team is an exercise in rooting for the other team to keep it exciting for the first three quarters and then, if necessary, rooting for the U.S. in the fourth quarter.
  2. Game two of the WNBA Finals — Okay, truthfully, almost no sports fans that you bump into during the day today will be talking about this. But they should be, so here’s a few facts you can use to get the conversation started. The finals are a best three out of five series between the Chicago Sky and the Phoenix Mercury. Game two was last night and the Mercury won big, beating the Sky 97 to 68. This was the single largest margin of victory in WNBA finals history. The Mercury are also on a 20 game winning streak which started before the playoffs even begun. Phoenix stars Diana Taurasi at point guard and Brittney Griner who plays center. During last night’s game, “Chicago scratched Brittney Griner across the eyelid, chipped one of her teeth and bloodied her lip.” She barely missed any playing time and finished the game with 19 points, six rebounds, and four blocks. After the game, her teammate Candice Dupree reported that, Griner’s teammates, “huddled around her, and were saying, ‘Come on, BG, you’re all right.’ Sometimes you gotta give people tough love. I think, emotionally, it would have gotten to her last year. If nothing is broken and you’re not bleeding to death, then you’re OK.” Game three is on Friday night, 8 p.m. ET on ESPN2.
    Line: Hey, did you watch game two of the WNBA finals last night? Heck of a game… [insert factoid from above] Want to get together to watch game three on Friday?