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Happy Friday, everyone! I have all these links to talk about, and most of the aren't really all that new, but hey, maybe you missed them. And if not you, then maybe someone else missed them. Not everyone is as up-to-date on the news as you are, you know. You're very special. Have a cookie.
SF Giants Hunter Pence scores again, this time with $3.8M SoCal beachfront home
That house looks nice. I'm beginning to suspect that being a major league baseball player is a lucrative profession. I should see if there are any job openings.
The Radical Case for Cities Buying Sports Teams, Not Sports Stadiums
Cities paying for sports stadiums is always bullshit. Always. Literally always. Public financing is nothing more than a way for teams to blackmail politicians into paying hundreds of millions of dollars for something that the team will own and operate and receive all the money from, just so that the politicians don't have to face the charge of being "THE GUY WHO LOST THE SPORTS TEAM."
So why not let cities pay for teams? Well, other owners really wouldn't like it; baseball prevented the Padres from being donated to San Diego, and disallowed the city of Pittsburgh from getting a piece of the Pirates in exchange for an unpaid loan. So, as always, screw the owners. Screw all the owners, forever, in hell, because that's where you'd have to be, because they are generally extremely unpleasant-looking.
All of this is just to say that the Giants paid for their own park and it's the best one in the league and that's great all around and every city in every league should point at every team that begged for public money and call them turds.
MLB, union to meet this month on domestic violence policy
When I saw that this was happening, I thought about writing a thing about it, but then I remembered this article, and was all "That was really good and now I don't see the point." But if you spent the fall feeling smug about how terribly the NFL handled their crises and how much better baseball would have done it, the bad news is that baseball proved you wrong plenty of times. The good news is that the smugness could just be redirected to the Giants' World Series win. Phew! Close call.
Former Augusta coach Steve Kline named to Richmond's staff
Steve Kline! He's pretty okay!
This Is The Video CNN Will Play When The World Ends
Yeah, yeah, you all saw it this week. But did you know the Giants also prepared a video for when the world ends? Here it is: