Tag: cashmoney

Imagine if I actually got paid to share baseball ideas*

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Not that anyone but me, or any other baseball geek that’s remotely interested in baseball statistics and the Moneyball game of salary management within the sport, would care, but Eric Hosmer just signed a free agent deal with the San Diego Padres.

This is not really major news, even by baseball standards.  Hosmer seems like a pretty good guy, and I’ll always remember how synonymous he was for the leadership he exhibited in 2015, leading the woeful Kansas City Royals to their first World Series championship in like an entire generation.  The team he signed with, the San Diego Padres, haven’t been good nor remotely relevant since Ray Kroc owned the team.  The bottom line is, Eric Hosmer is a pretty low-key baseball star, and the Padres are a very low-key existing baseball team, so the union of them isn’t particularly groundbreaking news, even despite the fact that sheer lack of free agent signings has been a somewhat notable topic throughout this baseball offseason.

However, the thing that’s the most interesting to me is the structure of Hosmer’s deal with the Padres.  The bare bones summary of the contract is that it’s an eight-year deal for $144 million dollars; but it’s not as simple as saying Hosmer will be getting exactly $18 million a year, because rarely will there ever be a long-term deal where a player simply gets the average number between the total amount divided by the length of the contract.

Typically, baseball contracts are often structured in a manner in which a player makes a pretty reasonable amount the first year, but then the annual salary of ensuing years typically ramps upward, and usually the last 2-3 years of a contract are where they peak, and you’ll see players making ludicrous Oprah-rich numbers of like $20-30 million dollars during those later years.

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As necessary as an asshole on an elbow

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Despite the efforts of a noble citizen, as predicted, corrupt progress can seldom be stopped when there’s investor profit to be had, and taxpayers to screw.  College Park for better or worse but most likely worse, will be saddled by the future home of The Gateway Center at College Park, the soon-to-be barely used 100,000 square foot venue that will primarily be known for the home of the developmental G-league Atlanta Hawks.

An asshole.  On your elbow.  That’s about how much anyone needs this.

Seriously, in College Park no less.  One of the most impoverished and crime-ridden regions in the entire state, and plopped right near the busiest airport in the country.  Everything about this is completely idiotic, and shocking nobody, this too will have absolutely no easy MARTA rail access or any other transit options, other than buses.  Meaning It will look like one of the fifty long-term parking car lots surrounding it, and probably be victimized just as badly as all of them, by the legions of car break-ins that have plagued this exact area for literal years now.

Literally right down the street is a shopping center that’s plagued with criminal activity that is getting worse, and a bunch of rich idiots think it’s a great idea to waste money and build a giant venue right near it?  Is this what they think gentrification is?  Building nice things in ghetto areas and hoping that things will just magically turn around?  I mean Atlanta’s trying to do that shit on the west end of the city, and plopping Publixes and Chick Fil-As in the ghetto doesn’t seem to be working.  I’d wager money that a brand new convention center/venue is going to drive crime away as much as waving a flashlight will spook some mosquitoes.

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Well that didn’t take too long

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Bashing the Atlanta Braves and all their dumb greedy business decisions is like the gift that keeps on giving.  Whenever I think I’ve written about the last Braves-related fuck up for a while, more and more just keeps coming out in recent days, which is hilarious considering the unofficial start of the baseball season kind of starts next week.

Just recently, there was the news report about the financial shortcomings of ScumTrust Park, and how WSB was investigating and digging for some justifiable answers with the Braves naturally holding their hands close to their hearts under lock and key and mountains of rehearsed rhetoric.  But because public money is involved, there’s always a way to get some degree of clarity, and it turns out that Cobb County is in nearly $30 million dollars of debt on account of ScumTrust Park and the predictably low-impact of its repayment terms.

It’s no surprise that this happened, but the great unknown was always what exactly was going to be the result of the Braves putting the county into the hole.  I figured an increase in tax, like a penny here or a half-cent there would be tacked on somewhere to make up for the deficit, but it looks like that the county has just decided to Tomahawk Chop™ off the public libraries of the county in order to make up for the shortfall. 

Neat.  Start closing off libraries in order to pay for a fucking baseball stadium, and deny children and other people the simple pleasure and/or benefit of, books.  Cobb County has some of the better-rated schools in the state, but it sounds like they’re willing to forfeit some of this ranking in exchange for a baseball venue that only really draws the majority of its money during the baseball season, and not much else.

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It took over a year for the rest of the pleebs to figure this out?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Man, it seems like the Braves-related news just isn’t stopping these days.  I’m beginning to feel like my offline brog is getting a little saturated with a singular topic, but then again, I’m off-fucking-line, so there’s really no concerns that anyone but myself is ever going to recollect these words, because I would wager money that anyone who returns to my brog one day will glaze over any subjects like this one.

BUT, it took an actual news investigation to conclude that ScumTrust Park might not be anywhere near close to “paying for itself.”

I mean… no shit.  The sky is also blue, water is also wet, and I wish I had more disposable income.

I have to say the teaser video did kind of intrigue me, because it not only cites ScumTrust Park as an example of how the Braves fleeced local taxpayers into paying for their ballparks, but also two of the three minor league facilities that house Braves affiliates, the one in Jackson, Mississippi, and then the one right up the road in Lawrenceville, the respective homes to the AA-Braves and the AAA-BravesStripers.  Yeah, they’re struggling too, after the Braves duped those towns into building their crappy ballparks as well.

I can’t say that I’ve been compelled to watch the news, but I have to admit that I’m intrigued by this story, and might actually have to make an effort to check it out on television.  Or hope the actual video report up online for convenient viewing, because I kind of want to watch it.

But it’s not like it’s going to be anything remotely a revelation for me, I am however curious to see what the rest of the sheep think about the topic, considering it’s taken them over a year to realize that it perhaps wasn’t the best idea in the world to undertake a baseball stadium.

Exposing convenient revisionist history

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

With Marvel Studio’s Black Panther on the horizon, spouting all sorts of racial rhetoric about it being historic and things other than a comic book movie, Washington Post contributor Sonny Bunch drops Mjolnir on the truth of the matter: before Black Panther, there was Blade.

Obviously, Blade happened way before the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and long before there was an odd existence of Marvel movies between FOX, Sony, and whomever produced the turds of Ben Affleck’s Daredevil, Nicolas Cage’s Ghost Rider, and the poor Jessica Alba Fantastic Fours that I’m too lazy to expend the few seconds to Google.

But for all intents and purposes, Blade is still a Marvel property, and therefore seeing as how the title of the film is named after him, makes him the first ever Marvel production starring a black person in the titular role.  As much as the internet and the rest of the world really want to claim Black Panther is this evolutionary revolutionary, in the grand spectrum of comic book films, it’s really not.  It’s just another addition to a library that’s way bigger than lots of people want to believe, for the sake of pushing a very expensive agenda in order to expedite the recouping of a gargantuan budget.

I love this article because Bunch does a great job of anticipating arguments to his article, and stomps them out before they can even be made, like pointing out all the other films, as small and as obscure as they may have been, being made in ages prior to the current internet, that have long beaten Black Panther to the punch as far as identifying black directors, black soundtracks, and other black things that are especially under the microscope now that we’ve traversed into February, the vaunted Black History Month. 

I hope he dropped a mic after this piece went to publish.

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A glimmer of hope

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I read this story* about a local man in-College Park, Georgia-who heroically cockblocked the issuance of bonds on a technicality and successfully stalled the procedures that would have begun the motion of a sporting arena being built, so that the Atlanta Hawks could have a local developmental team. 

In College Park, Georgia.  One of the most dangerous cities in the entire state.

*This is unfortunately behind the AJC’s pitiful paywall, but frankly you can just hit the stop button as soon as the page opens to dead stop the script that tries to tell you that it’s paid content, and usually the essential text has already loaded by then

As much as I admire the moxie of this individual, he’s unfortunately simply prolonging the inevitable, and delaying yet another sporting venue that the city doesn’t need, because Atlanta is obsessed with sporting facilities and will stop at nothing to have arenas soon for cricket, eSports, and another popular local activity, urban ATV riders running from the police.

But he did buy some time in which even the dimwits at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution could even think that maybe, just maybe, building an arena in College Park, for the Atlanta Hawks, just might not be the best idea in the world.  Or at least putting into words the very obvious revelation that stadiums and monstrous convention centers are not at all profitable and ultimately end up hurting the people they’re built near, but obviously not the investors and corporations who came up with the ideas to build them in the first place.

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More time to raise costs, duh

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Less surprising than Grayson Allen tripping someone again despite saying he’s grown out of it, the Atlanta Braves’ spring training saga yet continues on, this time revealing that the team has signed an extension with the Disney Wide World of Sports for the 2019 season, with the writing between the lines meaning that the new facility in Sarasota, won’t be finished in time.

Who would’ve thunk it?  That in spite of the $100M+ budget and all the promises and plans in the world, the magical construction of an entire facility in a calendar year seems to be viewed as potentially unrealistic.

In all fairness, the Braves do deserve a little bit of credit at identifying the potential for failure this early, and moving forward with a logical contingency plan.  And as much as I bet Disney would have loved to have turned the screws to the Braves and told them that seat’s taken and that they would have to find somewhere else, the reality is that almost all of the teams in the Grapefruit League want to be in a coastal town, so Orlando is kind of screwed for Spring Training once the Braves depart.  So clearer heads prevailed, and the Braves get one last partial Spring Training at Disney, and Disney gets to cash in on that sweet MLB money for one more spring.

But it’s still a failure in the sense that the Braves made all these grandiose plans and basically gave Disney their walking papers, but when their shit started to seep through the cracks, they kind of had to crawl back to the hand that’s been feeding them for the last few decades for their safety net.

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