Day: May 13, 2021

An AEW direction I actually like

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I didn’t even know Rusev Miro was even in the title picture.  The last few weeks have been all about Darby Allin’s re-kindled rivalry with Ethan Page back from their Evolve or whatever indy fed they had a ton of brutal matches in, and for some reason, Scorpio Sky has been attached to him and sandbagging his own ascent, but the point is I didn’t even know Miro was even in line to wrestle for the Popeyes TNT Championship.

Regardless, I was quite pleased to see that Miro was given the ball, and had a relatively clean victory over Darby Allin and is now the new TNT Champion.  I was always very high on Rusev when he was still Rusev, and it was always saddening to see just how mishandled and misused he was in his later years with the WWE, and I always hoped he would go to New Japan afterward and become the IWGP World Champion.

Obviously, with the existence of a stateside alternative in TNAEWCW it was obvious where he would ultimately end up going especially considering his wife was still very much active in the WWE, but we could all have hopes.  I mean, Jon Moxley is doing it, and I love it so much I’m actually referring to him as Moxley instead of purposefully calling him by his old WWE name.

But anyway, I’m delighted to see that Miro has been given some actual direction in AEW instead of being the sidekick to Kip Sabian of all people.  When they paired them together, all I could think of how much of a colossal waste Rusev was going to be in AEW, and winced like OJ Simpson in court when he was stuck week after week in meaningless work against the Best Friends.

It’s yet to be determined just what AEW actually does with Rusev as a champion, and hopefully he’s not the first one in the promotion’s short history to be a transitional guy, or worse off, considering his first feud appears to be likely to be Lance Archer, hopefully he doesn’t lose it to him.  Considering what Rusev did with the WWE US Championship, I’m hoping Miro will get to do similar things with the AEW Popeyes TNT Championship, so that when he eventually drops it, it will be worth more than their poor world title, which is becoming lost in the shuffle in Kenny Omega’s collection of blets.

Revisiting An Old Post: Stephen Strasburg’s 2016 Extension

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

One of the best things I ever felt I implemented into my brog was the On This Day plug-in, which lets me look back to the date in all prior years in which there was a post, and read, cringe and laugh at myself for all the bullshit I’ve spewed throughout the years.  Occasionally, I’ll come across a post that I’ve written in the past, and think to myself, man, how much things have changed, or man, how fucking wrong was I about that?

Regardless, it serves to be potential inspiration for things to write about that aren’t the depressing-ass news of every single day in the world and it’s not that I’m so narcissistic that I source the inspiration for my writing to myself as much as sometimes I just don’t want to look at local or national news, because it’s all just so demoralizing, for humanity.

So, back in 2016, I wrote this diatribe about how the Washington Nationals were probably embarking on the path to becoming the New York Mets, because they were repeatedly exercising the contract strategy of deferring salary to way later in the future in order to maintain financial flexibility in the present, which is exactly one of the reasons on how the New York Mets became the laughing stock of baseball, because they deferred payment of $5.9 million dollars for one year of Bobby Bonilla, and somehow turned it into 25 annual installments of $1.3 million dollars, which it doesn’t take a math whiz to realize is vastly more than $5.9M cumulatively.

Back then, the Nationals had signed star pitcher Stephen Strasburg to a seven-year, $175 million dollar contract to stay with the team, where in the fine text of the deal was that the Nationals would pay him a large portion of his salary many years after the deal was done, to which baseball nerds love to ridicule deferred money, because they years in which they are paying are often times years in which the actual player themselves are somewhere else, or not even actually in baseball anymore, so effectively paying for nothing.

The thing is, the Nationals also had other players on similar deals, namely pitchers Max Scherzer and Rafael Soriano; and the thing that I had decided to zero in on was this window of time between 2024 and 2028, in which the Nationals would be on the hook for deferred payments to guys that will most likely no longer be on the Nationals, or even playing in Major League Baseball.  It would be a five-year window in which the Nationals would be paying a total of $127 million dollars to literally, no actual players.

Obviously, this is a giant epic fail, and we should all laugh at the Washington Nationals right??

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