Tag: white people

Every sports journalist’s worst nightmare

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

😬 – high school football prospect sets the internet ablaze by just his name alone: Noah Knigga

This right here, is every sports journalist’s worst nightmare.  Already, the biggest questions are on the correct pronunciation of his name, if the K is silent, and other low-hanging fruit remarks, but the harsh reality is that his mere existence, is going to inadvertently make life really hard for people who do not have bad intentions and merely want to report on sports.

Honestly, looking at his general junior year stats, 7.8 tackles per game and 3 sacks in just six games is pretty impressive, and supposedly Knigga is on some top-22 best underclassmen list, so it doesn’t sound like he’s a slouch.  He’s also rocking a 4.0 GPA, which leads to believe his character has some class and he respects academics enough, which makes it all the worse that he’s a kid that really deserves to advance his career, and make life difficult for all the people merely scared of his name, from a PR standpoint.

The funny thing is that despite his general paper-test shine, he seems to only have the attention of:

Knigga with a ‘K’ has piqued the interest of several top programs, which include West Virginia, Miami (Ohio), and James Madison

Now WVU is a decent program that often lives in or near the top-25 every year, and JMU is the pride of my hometown that I always have a soft spot for, but it’s interesting that he doesn’t seem to be attracting the attention of anyone, well, better.

I mean, if Arkansas is willing to recruit some kid named Bumper Pool, and Oklahoma is fine going after some guy named General Booty, it’s surprising how many power-5 programs are afraid to go after a guy who’s name sounds like the N-word.  Especially when you consider how most of their predominantly white student bases and boosters probably already use the word liberally behind closed doors, you’d think they wouldn’t bat an eye at a kid who’s name sounds like it in the first place.

But it feels like Knigga is going to be a kid who’s going to unfortunately suffer for what his name looks like it sounds like, mostly because teams don’t want to deal with the hot potato his name will create for their general PR.  You’d think, especially in like an SEC school, where most of the students are a bunch of racists to begin with, Knigga would be capable of moving a fuck-ton of merch from bros and troll bros who basically want to have an excuse to use the name that sounds like the word.

However, make no mistake, by the time the dust all settles, I agree with a lot of sentiment, that there will probably be a lot of sports journalists over the next few years, who will face some scrutiny, if not actual backlash, for them using Noah Knigga’s name.  And by no fault of his own, the poor guy will basically be, the living nightmare of sports journalists all over, and especially the ones local to where he ultimately ends up.

The Braves are the High Expectations Asian Dad of MLB

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Even though I don’t pay nearly as much attention to baseball as much as I used to, it can’t be said that I don’t know the Atlanta Braves.  Going into the offseason it was painfully obvious what the team’s needs were, which was pitching, pitching, pitching and moar pitching, because as the Braves were painfully exploited, their lack of pitching absolutely blew up in their face once the playoffs began.

They might have had the greatest offense in a century, and even with Ronald Acuña pulling a disappearing act in the playoffs, you can’t win baseball games if you can’t prevent the other team from scoring more runs than you do.

But in spite of the very obvious glaring need, I what was going to happen to the Braves before the offseason even really began.  Their name would be thrown into the hat on just about every notable starting pitching candidate, but one-by-one, they would lose in every single sweepstakes, usually because the Braves were too cheap, or unwilling to outbid any competitive suitors in terms of money or trade chips.  And once all the major names were off the board, the Braves would then land on picking up a starting pitcher that was too old, coming off injury/down year, both, or some other reason that made them available to the Braves and not all the other teams who are willing to dole out money like white people raising taxes on minorities.

And the Braves front office would pat themselves on the back and applaud themselves for not going over-budget, not locking themselves to a free agent contract that has any modicum of chance of being labeled a colossal bust, and then the contingent of Barves fans who believe Alex Anthopolous or any of the other Braves’ front office stooges are incapable of making bad business decisions with applaud them to, and the Braves will go into 2024, not a terrible team, but not exactly the world beaters that are expected to compete for the World Series.

Sure enough, that’s pretty much exactly what happened this off-season, and absolutely nothing that has transpired throughout the entire baseball winter has been a surprise to me, as it pertains to the Atlanta Braves.

To quickly summarize, the Braves’ name was associated to quality pitchers like Aaron Nola, Sonny Gray, Tyler Glasnow, Dylan Cease and even lol, Shohei Ohtani.  Nola used the Braves to leverage moar money before re-signing with the Phillies.  Sonny Gray signed a fairly reasonable deal with the St. Louis Cardinals so it stands to believe the Braves probably low-balled him and he joined a rebuilding Cards squad instead.  Dylan Cease talks appear to have evaporated for the time being, so the Braves probably were not willing to acquiesce on whatever the White Sox wanted from them, and not only did the Dodgers naturally win the Shohei Ohtani sweepstakes, days later they managed to swipe Tyler Glasnow from the Rays and secure him for several years, before doing the same thing with Yoshinobu Yamamoto, building a monster super squad in the process.

So with one part of my predicted Braves offseason complete, the second part came to fruition when the Braves traded one of their better prospects, Vaughn Grissom, to the Boston Red Sox for, Chris Sale.

A decade ago, landing Chris Sale would’ve been a boon, because he was easily one of the best pitchers in the game in the 2010’s decade.  But here’s a guy that almost as soon as he turned 30 years old, fell off a cliff.  His numbers started plummeting, he blew out his arm and required Tommy John Surgery, and has been battling a parade of random injuries since then.  He did manage to pitch over 100 innings last season, but to a far less effective 4.30 ERA than when he was still good at baseball.  His strikeout rates were still decent, but he was getting hammered when people did connect, allowing 15 homers in his limited duties.

The Braves landing Chris Sale at the expense of a prospect the caliber of Vaughn Grissom, I told my friend, was about the most Braves transaction ever, because it truly was.  They biffed on all of the available high-tier starting pitching options, and then settled on getting a high-risk, formerly-good player, because of cost, and with a litany of hopes and dreams attached that he can bounce back to being the dominant force he was throughout the 2010’s, a decade later and through tons of injuries.

And to make matters worse, they locked themselves into this union by extending him for two more years at $38 million, and I’m too lazy to look up the specifics, prior to this, they were only on the hook for around $500k of his 2024 salary, while the Red Sox had to pay the rest, but I’m assuming that that’s no longer the case with a new contract in tow.

But basically, the modus operandi of the Atlanta Braves is always avoid the risk of high-cost assets, even if means the team as a whole is hampered by mediocre alternatives.  They will never splurge on top-tier talent, and always pick up guys who are coming off of down years, injuries, or assumed to just be needing “a change of scenery.”  The Braves always seem to think they can always operate by getting okay talent and that they’ll magically outperform their expectations because they’re playing for the high and mighty Atlanta Braves, which is fine if you went into every single year with no aspirations other than not sucking.

They’re basically the High-Expectations Asian Dad of baseball, where they’re always banking on everyone to outperform their peripherals and history, and are full of nothing but loathing disappointment if and when they don’t succeed.

The Braves haven’t really played with their balls out since Ted Turner unloaded the team to Liberty Media, and Braves Corporate hasn’t shown that they don’t care about on-field results as much as they care about appeasing the shareholders, so I guess if that’s their goal, then they’re doing a bang-up job of being above average.

Seriously though, Chris Sale and Jarred Kelenic aren’t going to fix the team and get them any closer to getting over the hurdle of the October Phillies or any other playoff team they run into, should they even make the playoffs in 2024.  As good as Spencer Strider has been, it’s been two straight Octobers in which he’s faltered, Charlie Morton isn’t getting any younger, Chris Sale is still a gigantic question mark on what we’re going to get from an older, busted up version, and Max Fried might be the only reliable pitcher the team has, and only because it’s his walk year, and he’s going to be pitching for his next contract.

Not very promising going into 2024, but then again, I’m not convinced that Braves Corporate really cares about the team’s success as long as the annual report continues to show high profits.  But as much as the Braves have sucked throughout yet another offseason, there’s always a measure of satisfaction at knowing that I’m still usually right when it comes to matters pertaining to the Braves being the Barves, and being right always feels good.

It’s been a while, how about building another sports property??

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Over the span of the last decade or so, Georgia and primarily the Metro Atlanta area has seen a lot of sports-related projects be dropped onto us.  Spouting bullshit like economic impact, (minimum-wage) job creation and moar reasons for people to come visit _____ to feebly mask the reality that a bunch of old men are going to be getting rich on their investments while the taxpayers of each locale eat the brunt of the cost, we in Atlanta have witnessed such projects emerge or be proposed:

  • ScumTrust now Truist Park, the brand new home of the Atlanta Braves so that Braves fans could get away from all the scary black people in Downtown Atlanta
  • Mercedes-Benz Arena, the home of Atlanta United and the Atlanta Falcons because there was nothing wrong with the Georgia Dome other than the fact that it wasn’t designed to look like Megatron’s butthole and didn’t have an endorsement built into it
  • Atlanta United’s Training Grounds, because practicing and training at their brand new stadium is probably difficult because of all the traffic in Downtown
  • Gateway Center Arena, in Jurassic Ghetto College Park so that the Atlanta Hawks could have their developmental G-League squad have their very own stadium too
  • It was once proposed to build a Cricket Stadium out in Smyrna, coincidentally there is an extremely high concentration of Indians in the area, whom could probably actually justify its existence, but thankfully nothing really came from this
  • Out in Dawsonville, some developers want to build a Battery-like multi-purpose park, centered around a massive arena that would hope to lure an NHL team back to Atlanta in the event there are any more expansions in the future

So short of an NHL team that the city had already squandered, Atlanta’s pretty well represented in most major spectator sports, with the Braves, Hawks, Falcons and United, as well as minor league baseball and hockey smattered around the outskirts.  And they’ve all got their expensive little homes to mostly themselves; you’d think at this point, the city was actually full of sport venues/facilities, and couldn’t actually find any more means to build sport-related shit to bilk taxpayers, right?

LOL this post wouldn’t have come to fruition if the answer were actually yes.

So let’s congratulate Fayetteville, Georgia, for becoming the new and future home of the US Soccer National Training Center and the US Soccer Federation, and the latest victim member of Georgia’s club of regions to get more than likely fleeced by the building of something that the state had no need for in the first place.

Continue reading “It’s been a while, how about building another sports property??” →

If Ohtani ends up on the Braves, I will shave my balls

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

One of the big narratives this baseball offseason is, where will Shohei Ohtani go???  He’s basically the best player in the game right now and an unrestricted free agent, so the sky is the limit to where he’s going to go and for how much.  For months, people have been throwing around price tags of $500M for like 15 years in order to secure him, and ordinarily every time I hear such absurd numbers, I always think, sometimes say, that no human being alive in existence is worth that kind of money, but in the case of Ohtani, if there were ever a place to begin the conversation of the value of a person, his name should probably be up there.

However, one of the more obnoxious things that I’ve been seeing in recent days, is the Atlanta Braves’ name being mentioned in the same breath as Shohei Ohtani, as if they have any modicum of a chance at being able to get their hooks into the guy that is so far above Babe Ruth as Babe Ruth was above all of the rest of us in baseball talent.  Spouting all sorts of bullshit rhetoric that Ohtani wants to play for a winner, and seeing as how the Braves have been doing well for themselves over the last few years, Atlanta should not be discounted as a possible destination.  Bullshit claims from anonymously fake sources that Ohtani is “intrigued” by the Braves.

It also doesn’t help that the Braves are currently cleaning house internally, and they just non-tendered and traded a bunch of players to clear them off the 40-man roster, but from the last reports I heard, they’re really only saving like $14M in doing such, and it’s clear that the end game really were the roster spots, with the salary savings being a minute bonus.  Many of the names were recognizable and not just some minor league fodder, but given the circumstances over the last year or two, none of these should be surprising, or seen as that much of a loss.

But make no mistake, there is no fucking chance in hell that the Braves are going to get Ohtani, and I’d be really appreciative if the conversation of such asinine speculation would just stop, because all it’s doing is making a bunch of Braves homers look like idiots in thinking that there’s any iota chance of hell that he’ll suit up for the Braves. 

This isn’t one of those lame attempts to reverse jinx and tempt the fates at trying to control the universe, and have the Braves miraculously secure him in order to make me be a man of my word and shave my balls, I just so genuinely feel strongly that there’s no chance that the Braves will get him, and I just wish people would stop even making the speculation because it just makes everyone doing so, and everyone who gets hope, look dumb.

I would legitimately feel comfortable in betting my house that it’s not going to happen, because even if Ohtani were interested in Atlanta’s strength at getting into the postseason, there’s no way the Braves would be even close to meeting his financial demands.  Ohtani is likely going to want $500M, and due to the unending escalation of player salaries, will command $500M, and the Braves are going to haggle and be all Braves-ey and ask him to drop down to $295M for 13 years, and try to sell him on the chances of World Series glory at a discount, and then Ohtani is going to be insulted and annoyed that he wasted his time even entertaining the thought of coming to Atlanta.

Then he’ll end up signing with the Dodgers or the Phillies because those are the only two teams anyone seems to want to go to anymore, and worse off, he won’t forget the disrespect from the Braves, and use it as fuel to crush Atlanta whenever they play against each other in the regular season, and then when the Braves inevitably meet up with whatever team Ohtani ends up on in the NLDS, Ohtani will throw a post-season no-hitter against them while clubbing 3 HR and driving in 8 RBI en route to an NLDS MVP* and helping with yet another NLDS exit for the Braves.

*for the record I know that there’s no such thing as an NLDS MVP award but I’m just flexing my baseball humor for the time where some pitcher on the Cardinals had a clause in his contract for a bonus for winning NLDS MVP

Plus the Braves haven’t exactly had a stellar history when it comes to accommodating Asian baseball players.  Jung Bong was basically an ace in Korea, and barely amounted to a fourth starter for the Braves.  Chien-Ming Wang, the greatest Taiwanese pitcher of all time, decided that he’d rather go play indy ball than play for the Gwinnett Braves when he was trying to return from injury.  And then there was fellow Japanese pitcher Kenshin Kawakami, who is probably texting Ohtani telling him to stay the fuck away from Atlanta, if he has his number or any means of getting in contact with him.

Instead, the Braves will bring in some 2 or 3-tier starting pitchers at economical contracts, that will be expected to overperform, bounce back, or be veteran leaders for the next wave of Mike Sorokas, Kyle Wrights, Braden Shewmakes and other promising young starting pitchers that will ultimately be unloaded for relievers later on, and even if they play well during the regular season, they’ll be too old and tired or injured by the time October rolls around.

For real though, can we all just stop with the embarrassment of speculating Ohtani to the Braves?  It’s not going to happen, and everyone who gives into hoping that it will is just setting themselves up for as much disappointment as whenever the Braves make the playoffs and people think they’ll actually get out of the NLDS.  I ain’t having anymore kids, so it’s never going to happen again, and the chances of me having to shave my balls is more than likely even less.

Jimbo Fisher: The Bobby Bonilla of College Football

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

When I first heard the rumblings that Texas A&M was planning to axe Jimbo Fisher, I didn’t think much of it.  Just that it must really suck to be Jimbo Fisher and having to hear through the grapevine that your termination was basically coming, and that you just have to sit there waiting for the shoe to drop.  Even more so than the fact that at the time, Texas A&M, while not having a great season, were still 6-4, bowl eligible and in the grand spectrum of the sport, at least more than likely going to have yet another winning season.

Frankly, I’m surprised that Texas A&M is doing such, because Jimbo, in spite of not having won a National Championship for the school, is still a rare breed of good coach, who has been to the top of the mountain before, when he won a natty with Florida State, and for all intents and purposes knows what he’s doing.  The interesting thing is that ATM* hasn’t exactly been a cellar dweller under Jimbo Fisher, which is usually one of the first pre-requisites for firing a coach; under Jimbo, ATM has gone 45-25, and won 9, 8, 9, 8 games before a five-win season a year ago, and as it stands right now, the Aggies probably will finish with seven this year.  But two unsatisfactory years is basically bad luck, injuries, a miss on a recruit or two, but really nothing a fairly successful football program like ATM should worry about.

*what I like to call Texas A&M because their logo’s letter order is literally, “ATM” and it’s also a metaphor to the cash cow that college football is

What it really boils down to is the fact that ATM has higher expectations than much of the rest of CFB, and are tired of hanging out in the middle of the pack and want to make a change for the sake of making change.  The thing is, there’s a vastly higher chance that ATM is going to go through some really dismal years over the next few, possibly miss some bowls (and the payouts that come with participation), and probably would have been better off in terms of wins and losses if they stuck with Jimbo.

But the bigger story is the fact that in firing Jimbo Fisher, ATM is still on the hook for around $77 million dollars of contracted salary, and despite the fact that he won’t be driving the reigns for the program, are very much responsible for paying every single cent.  Unsurprisingly, this is the highest payout in CFB history, and if there’s one thing that never seems to change with my interests, is stories about sports having too much fucking money and doing a whole lot of dumb shit with it.

Long story short, from what I’ve seen, it appears that ATM is taking a page out of MLB and going on an installment plan in order to help spread out the money they owe Jimbo, instead of just plunking down $77M, slapping him on the ass and bidding him adieu.  So until 2031, it looks like ATM will be paying $7.27M every single year to not be coaching ATM.  He gets a lump sum of $19.4 immediately for some reason, I don’t care to know the granular details, but basically starting in 2024 and over the next eight years, he’ll be getting a cool $7.27M for doing absolutely nothing,

This is of course, a similar situation to Bobby Bonilla, the baseball player whose agent somehow transformed $5.9M into nearly $30M, spread out over 25 years, except the fact that it doesn’t appear that Jimbo’s agent negotiated any variables for inflation or interest.  But who’s to say that within the next eight years, ATM gets sick of how much cash they’re literally throwing away, and renegotiate something that does encroach more similarly to Bobby Bo territory, but that’ll be another post for if it ever occurs.

But given the sheer dollar amount and the breakdown of daily intake, Jimbo Fisher is not only the Bobby Bonilla of CFB, he’s actually making out way bigger than Bobby Bonilla ever did.  $77M is greater than $30M, and whereas Bobby Bo is basically making $3k a day for existing, Jimbo Fisher will be making roughly $28k every single day until the end of 2031, merely for existing.

Chalk this up as another reason why sports are so (ironically) great, and just how much needless money is dumped into these industries to where programs can literally set millions and millions of dollars on fire and suffer absolutely no consequences in the process.  Whereas I couldn’t have given any lesser number of shits about Texas A&M in the past, just due to this failure of a scenario, I kind of feel like I need to root against them, and whomever is Jimbo’s successor, just so I can imagine a guy I gave no turds about in the past, laughing in front of a television while the Aggies get rolled around in the basement of the SEC for years to come.

The joys of running on the Silver Comet Trail not

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

The above image encapsulates exactly what it’s like to run on the Silver Comet trail, which is a super awesome run/bike trail here in the Metro Atlanta area that basically stretches from the outskirts of the city and supposedly connects all the way west, to almost the Alabama state line.  It’s a great trail for people of all skill and experience levels, because it has so many points of access, people can use it for leisurely walks, lengthy excursions or just to train or casually exercise on.

I’ve always used it as a place to train up for long runs, as well as my preferred location to do any of the longer, numerous virtual runs that I always sign up for in order to add to my running medal collection, and it really is a wonderful trail because it’s fairly flat, completely shaded by trees which helps in even the hottest of summers, and there are multiple break points for people to rest, get water and take bathroom breaks if needed.

However, my only real criticism of the Silver Comet trail, isn’t something that can really be controlled, and is actually something that I’ve gripe-brogged about in the past, which is all the fucking bicyclists on the trail who think they own the entire thing, and go around flying down the path at 30+ mph, screaming ON YOUR LEFT all the time as if they were getting paid a quarter every time they had to wail it out.

Seriously, thanks to the Silver Comet, I fucking hate bicyclists, more than the times when I used to have to traverse around the city and had to share the roads with all the hipsters on their fixed gears clogging up lanes.  And to be more specific it’s not all bicyclists, and it’s not even the mega-tryhards that act like they’re participating in the Tour de France with their matching uniforms and barely existent thin-ass aluminum bicycles.

It’s the weekender bicyclists who think they’re on Lance Armstrong’s level when he was roided up to the gills, who are usually by themselves or with 1-2 other douchebag weekenders, who get on the trail and act like the whole thing belongs to them.  They’re the ones who are incessantly screaming ON YOUR LEFT to everyone as if they’re taxicabs in F-Zero, strategically placed just to ruin their day when they’re the ones in fact ruining everyone else’s day by being entitled assholes, hogging the entire trail for themselves and screaming at everyone.

Like, real pro-tryhard bicyclists for one, travel in large packs, but also have been doing what they do long enough to understand that all other travelers on the trail are not stupid, blind or deaf, all at the same time, and don’t hardly ever spam ON YOUR LEFT, unless they have a reason, like some dumbass who’s swerving along the trail.  The weekenders scream at everyone as if it’s their problem that they haven’t noticed that the people in front of them 100 yards away have maintained their lines and paces, and need to be reminded to watch out for them, while they travel at speeds, which in a car would definitely kill a pedestrian, but on a bicycle could be pretty lethal too.

For real though, weekender bicyclists are the god damn worst.  Nothing pockmarks a good run session than any time some bicycle douche screams ON YOUR LEFT and whizzes past me way too close to comfort when I’m already running on the edge of the trail, because it’s slightly flatter than the slight slope which is meant to control water on the surface from pooling aboard.  It’s like these cocksuckers all think I actually can pull over to the right any more than I already am at to convenience them, and they’re really lucky I just don’t stick my arm out and start clotheslining from hell every shithead who thinks they’re going to win the Tour de Douchebag.

I’d say as much as I loved being able to get back out onto the Silver Comet for the first time in nearly three years over the Labor Day weekend, that the weekend bicycle douchefucks were the worst thing about my run, it actually turns out that my 10K time crept over the 60-minute mark that I so fervently try to stay underneath.  At 61:14, I’m glad I was able to complete a 10K without any difficult laboring, but I’m pretty dissatisfied that it took me over an hour to accomplish.  I can’t use a lack of training as an excuse this time, considering I’ve been fairly consistent with my maintenance running over the last year, so I guess this is just a sign of age starting to catch up with me, and that I have to make some actual changes if I want to get my speed back up.

God Bless Rednecks, Sometimes part 2

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Nope, the following picture is not a photoshop or a sports meme gone awry.  General Booty’s legal name is actually, General Booty.  There is a man living in the United States who’s birth certificate is legitimately General Booty.  General Axel Booty, and not an actual military rank.

I really hope this becomes more of a thing in coming years, because fewer things are more smugly amusing than hearing about rednecks from Texas who have ridiculous names like General Booty or Bumper Pool, whom to their credit of overcoming the criticism that silly names tend to degrade at, manage to get good enough at football to where they can actually try to make a future out of it.

Because I was quite tickled pink six years ago when I found out about Bumper Pool, and I’m quite amused to find out that there’s an actual possible starting quarterback for fucking Oklahoma, named General Booty.  I mean we’re talking about possibly being a successor to guys like Baker Mayfield, Kyler Murray, Jalen Hurts and Spencer Rattler.  General Booty has the opportunity to get his name into the annals of Oklahoma football, and not just because his name is General Booty, although I think he’s already on his way there, regardless of if he ends up as QB1, 2 or even 3.

Regardless of his chances, let’s just do a little mini-dive into this guy named General Booty, and how the hell he came to fruition:

To no surprise, his father is a former player himself, having played at LSU as a wide receiver.  I say no surprise, because it’s the meathead jock type like a guy who played at LSU whom would be so fixated on the military rank of General to where he vowed to name his son by a rank should he have one, and by god did he ever, and therefore we have a legitimate person named General Booty.

Aside from his dumbass dad, it turns out that General Booty is actually related to former USC quarterback John David Booty, who actually made it to the NFL, even if he didn’t last that long in the show, but it goes to show that there’s clearly football in the genetics of the ol’ Booty lineage.

If I’m a betting man, it doesn’t seem likely that he’s going to be QB1 for the Sooners, seeing as how fifth-year senior Dillon Gabriel seems to be the more likely candidate to start, but stranger things have happened in sport.  I imagine that with the awareness of General Booty spreads, he’ll have a Brian Scalabrine-like cult following in the world of sports fandom, and any time he steps onto the field, people will be snickering and chuckling over his name, and by proxy, probably cheer everything he does, just so that they can talk about and spread the word about a guy named General Booty.