Tag: cashmoney

Now here’s a guy that doesn’t play by the hour

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

That doesn’t work for me, hermano: Detroit Tigers pitcher Eduardo Rodriguez uses no-trade clause to block trade to the Los Angeles Dodgers; cites family and not wanting to uproot and move them in the middle of a season

At first glance, I want to applaud E-Rod for doing what he did, because I always have a ton of respect for professional athletes who see the world beyond money and accolades, especially those with families who have to think of other people than themselves but usually don’t, because they’re chasing money and accolades.  Rodriguez is entirely within his right to cite family reasons for blocking a trade, and fans of either team don’t have to like it, but need to accept that he did it.

The thing is though, in this particular situation, the Detroit Tigers are third in their division, comfortably out of contention at this point of the year, and were obviously trying to sell any useful assets like Rodriguez to start planning to re-tool for the future.  The Dodgers however, are first in their division and based on recent history, are more or less a sure-fire lock to be playing in the playoffs for the chance to go to the World Series.

It’s not like E-Rod was being traded to a team on the cusp, and would need every bit of contribution from him to fight and claw their way in, the Dodgers wanted E-Rod to help them maintain their playoff position and improve upon their playoff performance from the year prior.  For the professional athlete who wants to achieve championship glory in their careers, Rodriguez kind of let a gold-colored ship sail, even if I do have respect for the consideration he took for his family.

The thing is, trades and moves happen in every single professional sport, and are very much an everyday part of life in the business.  For every E-Rod that uses his family as a reason to not accept a trade from a basement dweller to a contender, there are 20 other trades that happen on the day of any sport’s trade deadline of guys who pull the trigger and go, either because they don’t have a no-trade clause and have no choice, or they want the opportunity to go to a contender and possibly win a championship.

Those players’ families often times just stay where they are, while the player that moves either picks up an apartment, stays with a teammate or family or friends that might be in their new teams’ cities and agree to kind of live out of suitcases for the next 2-3 months until the season wraps up, and then figure out what to do with their lives which is usually easy, because professional athlete salaries make it really easy to move around.

So what I’m really getting at here is that although it sounds all altruistic and sacrificial that Eduardo Rodriguez cites family values as his basis for not accepting a trade to the Dodgers, I also think there’s a part of his unspoken rationale that involves simply, not wanting to deal with the pressure, expectations and very likely additional workload of contender’s baseball.  Because I feel like nine times out of ten, other players in similar circumstances takes the trade, because they want the opportunity to play for a championship.

Here we have an example of a man who doesn’t work by the hour, and only wants to work the workload for the money that he is making, and nothing more than that.  By no means is he poor, as he’s making $14M this season, and has $49M more he’s contractually obligated to.  But it also sounds like he doesn’t want the immense pressure of working in Los Angeles, where the fickle fanbase is expecting another championship, versus the low-key, non-contending Tigers, where he can take the hill every five days, put up the stellar numbers he’s putting up this year, and coast his way to the end of September where his season is over, and he can begin a relaxing off-season with said family.

Either way, good for E-Rod.  I didn’t know too much about his financials prior to starting this post, but now that I’ve gotten a look at his numbers, I can’t hate on a well-paid guy that just wants to chill his way through a career, and is completely comfortable and at home pitching for a non-contender like the Tigers, and doesn’t feel like dealing with the pressure and bullshit of playing for the Dodgers.  He also probably has a reservation at Disney World for October, and he doesn’t want to give it up, because the Food & Wine Festival really is the best thing there.

When the photoshop drives the post

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

A few days ago, the Mets began their slow raising of the white flag when they traded David Robertson away.  Their $gabillion dollar payroll team, hilariously wasn’t working, and the Mets realized that the only way to get onto the path of recovery is to start selling, even in spite of post a historic payroll, thus proving the old adage that you can’t buy success, especially when you’re the New York Mets.

Not long afterward, the Mets successfully unloaded one of their biggest ballasts, when they shipped Max Scherzer over to the Texas Rangers.  Sure, the Mets would have to eat a massive chunk of the remainder of the money they owe Scherzer, but they did get back Luisangel Acuña, which is very much in relation to the Atlanta Braves’ superstar outfielder, Ronald Acuña, Jr., his little brother.   Obviously, the Mets are hoping the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, and that Acuña Jr-Jr might blossom into half the superstar that big brother Ronald is.

Make no mistake though, as much of a pride-swallowing, crow-eating gesture that trading Max Scherzer is for the Mets, it absolutely is a big win for the organization.  Probably the best thing to happen to the organization all season.  Sure, they’re eating $35M of the remaining $58M they owe him in order for the Rangers to take him, but the $23M savings they are getting in the aggregate is a pretty big deal in the long game.

That being said, when the 2024 season rolls around, thanks to the ridiculous deferred money deal Scherzer made with the Nationals, he will be getting paychecks from an unprecedented three different MLB organizations, all of which are going to be over $15M each.  The Nationals will be paying him one of their annual $15M installments which goes all the way to 2028, the Rangers will be paying him $15M, and from what I’ve read, the Mets will be paying a $28M chunk of their remaining obligation to Scherzer, which means he’s slated to be making $58 million fucking dollars in 2024.

I don’t really know how to explain it, but he’s like the reverse, anti-Bobby Bonilla with this kind of arrangement, where he’s not going to be getting paid until the end of time regardless of his playing status, he’s somehow swindled multiple organizations to be contractually obligated to giving him massive amounts of money for a very short period of years.

But as the subject says, this wasn’t really something that I was intending on writing about, even though this is the kind of bullshit of baseball that I love hearing about, but when chatting with some bros about sports and this topic, I made an analogy about how Max Scherzer is like the Thanos of getting baseball teams to pay him money, and by somehow managing to swindle three teams to pay him simultaneously, he’s basically like Thanos collecting Infinity Stones.

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How have the Angels sucked?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

With the Major League Baseball trade deadline looming, and with there being an endless array of articles, hypothetical and proposed trades for uber-superstar Shohei Ohtani, the question has come up a lot recently, as well as being one of baseball’s more recent memories over the last decade: how have the Angels sucked?

Going back to 2012, when the Angels had acquired a prime-Albert Pujols, fresh off a World Series win, they also called up Mike Trout, who has for the better part of the last decade, been the best player in MLB, you’d think the Angels would have opened a window in which championships wouldn’t just be contended for, they would be expected.

Obviously, everyone knows that baseball is a team sport and that one man does not a championship win, but a guy like Mike Trout is a generational talent, and with someone the talent of at least five good players, success in theory should have come by a little easier for the Angels than it would for like, the Seattle Mariners.

And over the decade, the Angels would go on to win the signing rights and acquire Shohei Ohtani, who wasn’t just the next Babe Ruth, he’s light years better than ol’ Herman, with his homerun hitting prowess, as well as his ace-caliber power pitching.

Seriously, here are the AL MVP rankings over the last eleven seasons:

2012: Mike Trout, MVP
2013: Mike Trout, 2nd in MVP voting
2014: Mike Trout, MVP
2015: Mike Trout, 2nd in MVP voting
2016: Mike Trout, MVP
2017: Mike Trout, 4th in MVP voting
2018: Mike Trout, 2nd in MVP voting
2019: Mike Trout, MVP
2020: Mike Trout, 5th in MVP voting
2021: Shohei Ohtani, MVP
2022: Shohei Ohtani, 2nd in MVP voting

The Angels have had the AL MVP in five of the last eleven seasons, which is pretty unprecedented.  With such abundance of talent, you’d think the Angels would have been at the very least, in the playoffs every single year or something, right?

Well of course not!  Otherwise a brog post like this wouldn’t ever come to fruition, and these are the kinds of things that happen in baseball that make baseball such a wonderful sport to be a fan of, because logic doesn’t matter sometimes, and wacky shit happens every single day in a baseball season.

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It doesn’t happen often

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

But what we have here is someone who appears to be more egregiously overpaid than a professional athlete: Georgia Department of Transportation commissioner to receive a $100,000 raise, bringing annual salary up to $550,000

Obviously there’s no shortage of crooked government workers in any state, but GDOT’s flagrant doling out of taxpayer dollars to some stooge who doesn’t know how to use the railroad button in Sim City is pretty noteworthy, at least to make it onto the brog, interrupting the fairly droll legion of baseball, professional wrestling and angsty dad brog posts.  At least it gives me the opportunity to blow the dust off of the ohgeorgia tag and utilize it to throw shade at the state’s poorly veiled attempts to pad the pockets of some glorified crooks.

Seriously, I’m hard pressed to think of anyone getting more money for as little justification as possible as this clown of a DOT commissioner.  Even the article itself fails to really come close to justifying why they deserved a 22% raise up to over a half-million dollars cumulatively:

Among achievements Brown cites are McMurry’s management of a series of highway improvement projects, including reconstructions of major interstate junctions in Atlanta, Macon and Savannah.

Reconstruction?  What reconstruction?  I’ve literally driven in all three of these cities within the last six weeks, and there’s been no real construction anywhere.  There have been lots of instances where shoulders are closed, cones are doled out all over the roads, some concrete barriers are erected, and the rando police car with their lights on to try and get the speed demons of Georgia to slow the fuck down, but there sure as shit hasn’t been any construction beyond maybe re-paving of some highways here and there.  Unless we’re awarding raises to people who look like they’re pretending to do work, there’s zero merit to these fake claims that these are actual improvement projects.

Brown also credits McMurry’s leadership for Georgia’s growing transportation budget, and notes praise Georgia has received for its infrastructure during McMurry’s tenure.

Translation: traffic is so epidemically bad once again due to the world seemingly believing the pandemic is completely over and so they’re all hitting the roads again and clogging everything up that Peach Pass registrations and toll payments have gone up, which is where this transportation budget is coming from.  Too bad it’s going directly into the pockets of all these clowns in GDOT and their cronies, because there sure as shit is still no real infrastructure in this entire state to be worthy of any mention.

What’s incredible is that whomever this guy is, he must have incriminating photos of the people who are in charge of giving him raises, because this is far from the first raise he’s gotten for doing absolutely nothing:

McMurry’s pay rose from $250,000 to $350,000 in 2017, then to $450,000 in 2021. The raises, including the latest, will also boost McMurry’s state pension.

Seriously, the guy got his foot in the door of a job where he doesn’t do anything, and banks a quarter mil.  For pretty much no reason other than he was too lazy to look for anything else, he ends up doubling his salary over the span of like 6-7 years, and he has accomplished basically nothing.  2-3 of those years were kind of a wash thanks to Coronavirus and people not really going anywhere, and the bozo still got a $100k raise in 2021.

Here’s the kicker too.

The state paid Gov. [Yosemite Sam] $176,250 in 2022.

The governor of the entire state makes less than half of what the GDOT commissioner makes.  Now I don’t like that cocksucker either, but something seems fishy when he’s getting literally lapped salary-wise.

Either way, it’s pretty incredible that there’s actually someone out there that actually makes as much money as a professional athlete and deserves the money even less.  It’s also pretty incredible that I somehow managed to find the time to bang out a brog post about something out of the usual array of fallback topics, but I wouldn’t anticipate it happening again for another minute, but for what it’s worth, it was a little reprieve.

When I like to think I’m funny

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I don’t really know what prompted it, but for some reason, the thought of Mortal Kombat’s Test Your Might bonus stages came to mind, and I thought about how silly it was that one, almost nobody ever got to see it in the arcades, because at its heyday, Mortal Kombat was always so constantly played that the game seldom ever got to reset to a point where the bonus stages could be triggered, and two, even if you did see all the bonus stages, you might have seen that the final bonus stage is trying to shatter a giant block of diamond.

With your bare hands.  One of the hardest stone surfaces on the planet.

Either way, maybe it’s because I’ve been feeling so mopey about finances, that the thought of a magical giant diamond block just manifested and mutated into thinking about Mortal Kombat, and how absurd it is that anyone could imagine breaking diamond with their bare hands, but why any of the Kombatants wouldn’t just take this diamond and get the fuck out of Outworld and go retire or save the planet from the likely immense worth of a diamond the size of a JVC Kaboom Box.

And of course, it’s Liu Kang being the mega nerdy paragon honorific square, that insists on trying to break a giant diamond block, but the more vapid, superficial Johnny Cage whom might actually know what the value of the finer things in the world are worth, that comes to question the objective versus an alternative solution.

Regardless, enough words, all the context that’s needed is in the comic strip itself.

The things I think when I start to feel mopey about being broke all the time

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Welp, I didn’t win Powerball yesterday; but I did win a whole whopping four dollars, which seems like a pretty solid consolation prize, I suppose.  So I guess it’s back to fantasy land when it comes to imagining a world where I didn’t have to stress about finances and all the money I don’t have no matter what I do in my life.

One of the things I often hear about, mostly from professional athletes, is the general idea of the importance of banking their first million as fast as possible, because the idea is that once you have a million in the bank, you can start to get on the short road of being able to live off of the interest and dividends alone, as long as you’re smart and don’t go too crazy with newfound wealth.

Obviously, it’s easy for the wealthy to spout this kind of simplistic ideation, but seeing as how it feels like I’ll never see a million bucks in my entire lifetime, who am I to argue with such a broad stroked idea in the first place?

That being said, I think it’d be really cool if I could befriend a wealthy person who has several millions of dollars in the bank, and really wouldn’t be at all affected if they were to temporarily part with just one of those millions, and allow me to just hold and sit on it, so that I too, could feel what it’s like to be able to sit back and watch money come in, solely from having some in the first place.  And after a predetermined amount of time, I would give the original million dollars back to this wealthy friend, and them being an actual friend, would charge me no interest and not make me feel bad about borrowing it in the first place.

I wouldn’t want to borrow a million dollars to frivolously spend and go nuts on all the outstanding mortgage and car payments.  Or fix up the house, make additions, or buy any shit I don’t need.  I just want to borrow a million dollars so that I can get a little bit of a boost at being able to passively accrue my own wealth.  To literally let it sit in a bank account of mine, where it can generate interest and grow for no other reason than the fact that it’s there.

And if the rich athlete theory is truly correct, then after a while, the money starts working for itself, wealth continues to accrue, and I can give the money back and start to live on my own proceeds.  And if this friend is truly a really good friend, they’ll float that million bucks over to someone else who just needs a boost at being able to start making their own passive interest wealth as well.

Obviously though, this is a pipe dream as unlikely to happen as the magical appearance of a fucking genie.  People, especially the very wealthy, are far too greedy, far too possessive and far too protective over their money to be willing to participate in such an idea, no matter just how many people in the world it could help if they were just willing to try. 

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I would just love one day where I don’t feel like I have to hard carry, everything

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I am really fucking miserable right now, and this is another post where I don’t really feel like I can unload my baggage onto anyone, so I just put it all into writing the best I can and throw it up on the internet onto a brog where I have zero readers and hope that my words are heard.

But as the subject of this post says, I would just love to have a single day in my life where I don’t feel like the weight of absolutely every responsibility was on my shoulders.  I’m exhausted with life right now and I don’t particularly see anything getting better any time soon, and it’s becoming harder and harder to keep up the façade some days that I’m anything at all beyond an overworked dad and basically nothing else of any redeemable contributions.

I’m sure it’s of no surprise that a lot of this stemmed from the recent homeownership woes that my house has been going through.  I say my house, but the reality is that it’s what I’m going through, because when it comes to any of the home maintenance stuff, that pretty much falls solely on me to do.

I’m grateful to my neighbors almost to the point of tears for their generosity in time and effort in helping me get the whole fallen tree thing resolved, but as expected, the bigger issue was the plumbing matter, where I had a leak infiltrating the lower level from the bathroom above.  After all, moisture is the bane of homeownership, and I just knew that this was going to be a more aggravating matter than the fallen tree.

To summarize, plumbers came out to assess the situation, and I was fully bracing for a $1,000 expense, because nowadays, my old belief that most every small matter pertaining to cars, medical, home repairs, or any sort of labor, usually comes to $500, but due to inflation and just ‘Murica, I’ve upped it to $1,000.  Anything under $1,000 would be decided to be a win.

The showerhead was spraying back, which was determined the culprit of the leak, and a new shower head was affixed.  $467.  I was pretty pleased to have made it under $1,000 and I had hoped that the matter was solved. 

But this post wouldn’t be here if that were the case, and that evening sure as shit, the leaking was still present.  I got in touch with the plumbers, whom were total pros, polite, and I genuinely like them, but seeing as how all this shit was happening behind walls, the next solution would be to convert my 30+ year old three-valve shower hardware to a single pipe system, because the dated hardware was probably what was leaking.  Suddenly, I’m up to $1,700, and add in the showerhead and I’m looking at not just $1,000, but $2,000+ to solve this conundrum.

Whatever fine, I just need this shit fixed.  But since I’m poor as fuck and mostly living paycheck to paycheck these days, I have no real idea on how I’m going to cover this, but I know I need to get this resolved sooner rather than later, because the last thing I want is my home to deteriorate from a leak, because I really do take serious that moisture is the antichrist when it comes to homeownership.

Continue reading “I would just love one day where I don’t feel like I have to hard carry, everything” →