Month: January 2025

Dad Brog (#145): almost three years to the day

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I have this saying that it only snows once every five years in Georgia, but miraculously, we got snow today.  It wasn’t a huge amount, but enough to give a nice white blanket to the world around us, to where the girls could wake up, look out the window and be marveled by the sight of falling snow a bright white morning outside.

In preparation for the winter conditions, most of the state went into its typical overreaction of shutting everything down, but after the Snowpocalypse of 2013, I’m not going to complain about the state erring on the side of safety and precaution versus thinking it won’t be so bad and ending up being a national embarrassment all over again.  The government shut down, schools closed, dance class closed.  My waste management company straight up said they weren’t coming, with no makeup day planned.  Pest control company was scheduled to come, and they nope’d out, understandably.

But the best was my job, who graciously announced closure of the office on Friday in preparation for the wintery conditions.  The kicker?  Everyone works from home on Fridays anyway, so it’s basically the equivalent of allowing people to go to church on Sunday.

Regardless, with snow having arrived, it was my utmost priority to get outside and spend some time with the girls, since they basically will see snow only every five years for as long as we live in Georgia and the south.  So, channeling one of my all-time favorite Calvin & Hobbes strips, I didn’t wait to have to be coerced and swayed to play some hooky from work so I could play with my kids in the snow, I basically just checked in at 9, got myself dressed and ready for the cold, and was out the door and in the snow with the girls as soon as I could.

And let me say, how lucky we were to have gotten that real good type of snow, that’s perfect for snowballs, making snowmen and being all malleable and perfect.  Getting to build a snowman with my kids is a privilege I didn’t think about how lucky I am to get to do it, considering the lack of opportunities it’s more likely to be in coming years, and it brings me great joy just thinking about how I was able to do such.  And the fact that my house just happened to have an actual carrot and lumps of coal for traditional eyes and noses, how fortunate that all have lined up so well.

I decided to name our snowman “Jon Snow, king in the south;” the girls were not impressed, and balked immediately. 

So I said okay, we can call him Aegon. 

They didn’t like that either.

But my au pair did have a wonderful idea, which was to recreate a photograph from when #2 wasn’t even a year old, when the last time snow fell on Georgia.  And it was from this, did I realize that it’s almost been exactly three years since the last snowfall.  Otherwise, I will never say no when the opportunity to do a timelapse photo.

#2 usually isn’t a fan of smiling for cameras, but clearly the arrival of snow seemed to elicit such a genuine happy response that here we are.  Best snow day ever.

How have the Mariners sucked so historically?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I was seeing some news about the 2025 baseball hall of fame ballot, and the only sure-fire, slam dunk guarantee on it is Ichiro, and the real question is if he’s going to get a unanimous induction, or if this will be another year where some anonymous BBWAA tryhard deliberately doesn’t vote for him for the sanctity of the Hall of Fame, and then goes into hiding so they don’t have to take any criticism for their, most likely in the case of Ichiro, racism because there’s absolutely no metric or no logical rationale why he isn’t worthy of unanimous induction.

I don’t particularly care for the overly-nationalistic disparaging remarks he’s made about Korean baseball throughout his career, but there’s absolutely no way to deny the fact that he’s was a legendary player, but I digress and will save these bullets for the midseason for when he inevitably gets 99.76% of the vote and one voter who will successfully remain anonymous, goes into hiding afterward.

But Felix Hernandez is also on the ballot for the first time, and I think he’s up for debate on whether he’s Hall-worthy or not; the man has a Cy Young and pitched a perfect game.  He doesn’t have the 3,000+ strikeouts, and he started his decline phase at around 32, but at the same time, his major league career started when he was 19, so he still enjoyed over a decade in the big leagues.

He also didn’t win a World Series, but the thing is, and the impetus of this entire post, neither has anyone else in Mariners history, no matter how talented or legendary of players have played for the team. 

It really got me thinking, how have the Seattle Mariners sucked so much throughout history?  Sure, they’ve only been around since 1977, way younger than teams like the Braves, Phillies, Reds, Yankees and Red Sox, but still, in the team’s entire history, they’ve only made the playoffs five times, and have collectively gone 15-22 in those appearances.  They’ve never made it to the World Series, and there was one year in which they set the modern record for regular season wins, winning an astonishing 116 games, only to get bounced out of the playoffs unceremoniously by the Yankees in the ALCS.

There was a stretch in time where the Mariners had a prime Ken Griffey, Jr., a Cy Young winning Randy Johnson, and even a young and rapidly rising Alex Rodriguez.  All were gone by 2001, but then there was a stretch when Ichiro came to the United States, and by 2005, Felix Hernandez arrived and was routinely one of the best pitchers in the game.  In between these eras was Edgar Martinez, who is a Hall of Famer in his own right, and was beloved in Seattle that the street near their ballpark is named after him.

Like, with all the talent that has been in Seattle for long swaths of time, really begs the question, how have the Mariners actually sucked?

Yes, no single player can carry entire teams, but that logic is nowhere less than it is in baseball, where single players have managed to carry entire teams on their backs for small stretches of time, and usually talented players often inspire other talented players to want to come play with them, making the teams richer in talent when it happens.

It’s just incredible to think that even with such legendary talents such as Griffey and Ichiro, Johnson and Martinez, and even A-Rod and King Felix, the Mariners just could never put things together and see any success.  Like, after the 2001 season where they won 116 games, the franchise went 20 years before they saw the playoffs again, and frankly that’s mostly on account of the fact that they added an extra round which let a non-division winner like the 2022 squad even have chance.

As good as Ichiro was, after his mind-blowing rookie season where he won RoY and MVP, 2001 was the only time he ever saw the playoffs as a Mariner.  Felix Hernandez, as good as he was, never pitched a single post-season game in his entire career.  Griffey and Randy Johnson played in two of the Mariners’ five playoff appearances, Alex Rodriguez played in three, and Edgar Martinez played in four of them, since he played until he was 62 years old.

Things don’t really look like they’re going to get any better any time soon, especially in today’s MLB ecosystem, but I’d have to wager that after all this time, the Seattle Mariners franchise’s perception has become reality – they’re simply a squad that will never win, no matter how talented of players emerge and play for them, they either fizzle their careers out in Seattle, or they go to other places and win championships, like Alex Rodriguez and Randy Johnson did, Kyle Seager very recently, and even old vets like Jamie Moyer and Freddy Garcia.

Because when some of the greatest players in history couldn’t do it while they were there, sometimes concurrently, then I’m not going to wager that anyone will.  Most know that there’s no crapshoot like there is in baseball, but the Mariners are plagued with something completely else.

Thoughts on the RAW is Netflix debut

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I was looking forward to the debut of RAW on Netflix, because I hadn’t seen an episode of RAW in close to almost a decade, since my house had long since cut the cables, and I could usually keep up with the product solely on YouTube highlights or just catching the PPVs PLEs.  Furthermore, being a monumental debut class of episode, I had expectations that the WWE was going to put their best foot forward and have a loaded show.  If the Saturday Night’s Main Event revival they had a month ago was any indication to how they were going to treat special events, I thought the E was ready to pop off, and I was excited to see what was going to happen.

And of course, there was the whole curiosity of what the E was going to do on Netflix, as far as the freedom to push boundaries were going to be, since this isn’t cable television and they aren’t beholden to the television rating standards, I was curious to see what, if any, behavioral changes that were going to take place.  However, they are still a publicly traded company, with collaborative programming still on cable television, so it wasn’t any surprise that they still kept it fairly PG, aside from The Rock saying ‘bullshit’ at one point.

Overall, the show was decent, but I’d be lying if I didn’t have all sorts of opinions and criticisms for it, mostly the fact that the episode was a little bit drowned in the pomp and celebration of the move to Netflix, with all sorts of appearances, cameos and segments that chewed up time, drug on a little bit, and most importantly, got in the way of actual wrestling product.  The three-hour show had a total of four matches, and on paper they sounded good, but I don’t know what it was, but they were all pretty underwhelming in the grand spectrum of things.

The matches were sloppy and got sloppier as the night progressed, and honestly a Seth Rollins vs. CM Punk match could have been on a Wrestlemania card without anyone  questioning it, but as far as I’m concerned it was the worst match of the night for the RAW is Netflix debut.  I don’t know whether their personal beefs interfered with their ability to do business, or if there were any subtle instances of trying to sabotage one another, but the whole match was kind of clunky, and I felt like it was a good example of two talented guys that just didn’t click in the ring.

It’s like the talent caved into the magnitude of the scenario, which is funny considering all of these specific performers have worked multiple Wrestlemanias among other big shows at this point, and those shows are usually two to three times the size of this episode of RAW.

But the biggest thing in my opinion was the fact that the crowd was absolutely dead as fuck.  This was something my bros and I discussed in our group chat during the show, but my consensus was that the crowd was a dead crowd, and I always believe that performers really can feed off of the fans, and hot crowds can really inspire stalwart performances, and since the RAW is Netflix show was held in Los Angeles, primarily full of people who just wanted to there for the hot ticket, but not really because they’re actual wrestling fans, it led to an arena that was full, but full of mostly casuals who don’t know the nuances of a show, intricacies of existing storylines, or have any genuine fandom for any of the workers.  This was an event, and casuals want to be seen at events, and actual wrestling fans that feed a show their energy, weren’t there, be it being priced out or simply incapable of getting in because of the fairweather scenesters were boxing them all out.

Sure, guys like The Rock and John Cena got some big reactions.  Roman Reigns got a decent pop, as did Rhea Ripley, Seth Rollins and CM Punk.  Jey Uso didn’t get the raucous reaction that he normally has been getting, as the most over guy in the company currently.  Dominic Mysterio and the New Day, who have been getting absolutely drowned out by boos and heat in the last few months, I’m convinced had to have boos piped into the arena because of how lukewarm the dead crowd was.

It’s like the people in attendance had it in them to have initial reactions to everything they saw, but by and large were sitting on their hands for the remainder of every segment, reacting to big spots and probably whatever the actual fans dispersed throughout the arena were reacting to and going along with it.  It was almost like watching a New Japan show, by how non-plussed the fans were, except whereas the Japanese chalk it up to cultural meekness and lack of expression, the LA scenesters were dead because they’re not really wrestling fans as much as they wanted to be at a big event so they could boast about it on social media.

I get it, it was important for the E to put their best foot forward, have it in LA and pack it with as many execs, celebrities and people who might actually gain more exposure, but in the process, they priced and pushed out actual fans from attending and it led to a dead crowd that didn’t help the general uninspired performing from the workers on the card.  Wrestlemanias and big shows get away with celeb-stacking and posturing, because they’re held at giant venues where the majority of the audience can still be actual fans, but the dinky Intuit Dome with their capacity of like 16,000, had the majority of the attendance being casuals and/or scenesters, and it was painfully obvious.

However, if there was one segment where the crowd woke up and came to life that truly stood out, was when Hulk Hogan made his appearance and was absolutely booed the fuck out of the building.  It was like the fans were told that they had a finite amount of booing that they were allowed to do, and they passed on using any of it on Dom Mysterio or The New Day and absolutely unloaded on Hulk Hogan.  Unsurprisingly, this was my most notable and entertaining moment of the evening where the most emotion was elicited from me, in the form of laughter.

The funniest part about it all was that how out of touch Hulk Hogan is with the world and the current state of the industry, is that he stood there, somehow surprised that a California crowd was booing him into oblivion when just less than three months ago, he was ripping his shirt and cutting a cringeworthy promo in support of the orange turd prior to the election.  Poor Jimmy Hart standing there with his longtime friend, waving Old Glory, complicit by association, taking tons of shrapnel.  And then Hogan just goes straight into his babyface promo, putting over Netflix, putting over his beer company, and putting over the company, while everyone is still just booing the fuck out of him.

The power of a crowd when they get hot!

Take all the pomp and circumstance, and the whole Netflix narrative out of the night, and this was an extremely mediocre show.  The matches were average at best, the crowd was dead as fuck, and not even all the special appearances did much for me.  A tremendous amount of time was spent on showing off celebrities and speaking segments, and in true first-world wrestling smark problems, the lack of formal commercial breaks really cramped my style of multitasking while watching wrestling like I used to.

The good news is that whether it was intentional or not, the RAW on Netflix bar has been set at not a tremendously high level, and the brand can only go upward from here, and the sky’s the limit.  I’m sure once the novelty of being on Netflix wears out, and regular fans are allowed to start going back to the shows, business will get back to normal, and as far as the E is concerned, that’s probably exactly where they want to be.

Revisiting a massive biff of an old post: Chris Sale to the Braves

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

As daily as I can, I like to look at the posts I’ve blathered over the years, utilizing the On This Day WordPress extensions.  It feeds into what narcissism I do have, I like to see if there have been any noteworthy changes in my opinions over the years, and in cases like this, it’s interesting to see when I’ve made some clairvoyant predictions or in this case, colossal biffs.

A year ago, I was none too pleased to see that the Braves’ solution for their lack of pitching depth was trading for Chris Sale, when there were many acceptable pitchers available, such as Sonny Gray, Tyler Glasnow, Dylan Cease, and as pipe dream as it would’ve been, Shohei Ohtani.  Some were more preferable than others, but any one of them would have been an obvious upgrade to what was a typical Braves-ey pitching rotation.

All of the ships sailed, and then the Braves traded away noteworthy infield prospect Vaughn Grissom to the Boston Red Sox for Chris Sale, which had me scratching my head and immediately pondering just how bad of a deal this was sounding like; even more so when the Braves immediately extended Chris Sale for two more years at actual money, something that the Braves are basically allergic to doing, locking themselves in for two more years at $38M.

Sale used to be one of the best pitchers in the game, but he was two years removed from Tommy John Surgery, a maligned season where his numbers fell off a cliff, and looked like he was busted goods at this point.  At the time, it seemed like the Braves were trading away a valuable chip for a broken pitcher, and I thought that this was going to be a colossal L for the Braves, punishment for being the usual Braves-ey cheap, bargain basement hunters.

Fast forward back to present time, and Chris Sale is the National League Cy Young winner, after pitching the triple crown of leading the NL in Wins, Strikeouts and ERA.  I’m not entirely sure how he didn’t get a unanimous vote, but the BBWAA is a bunch of spiteful blowhards who don’t really vote with any objectivity in the first place, so I guess it’s no surprise, but the point is, I doubted the effectiveness of acquiring Chris Sale, and was completely wrong, and I’m big enough to admit it.

Chris Sale was the epitome of the ace pitcher he used to be for the White Sox and the Red Sox, and he truly turned the clock back and pitched lights out baseball all year long.  Especially when Spencer Strider went down, it was Sale who was the bastion of stability and acted like the stopper, when Max Fried buckled under the weight of the walk year, Charlie Morton really started to show is age, and whenever the squad kept trotting Bryce Elder out there and expected fans to accept him as a viable starting pitcher.

And to further reflect on the trade itself, Vaughn Grissom put up a clunker season for Boston, hitting mediocrely for their Triple-A squad and even worse when he was called up.  He’s still pretty young and playing ahead of his age expectations, but if the last three years have been any indication of what kind of path he’s headed, then it looks like the Braves are going to continue to win this trade, as long as Sale continues to pitch well and Grisson continues to slide.

Although I admit the biff I had had with my opinion of this trade, the worst part of it all is that this does buy the Braves front office a little equity with the opinion that they might know what they’re doing.  It brings some validation to their decisions to shop the bargain bins and for a little while, it gives them a little grace whenever they pull this act again in the near future, that their next (few) low-risk/high-reward decisions could always end up being the next Chris Sale.

As pleased I was with Chris Sale in 2024, Chris Sale was most definitely the exception and not the rule, and I’ll be ready to pounce on scathing the Braves for being the Barves when they make their next shitty Braves-ey cheapskate move, without much concern that I’d have to revisit it in the future if I’m wrong.

Self-improvement is learning a new language

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I’m not one for New Year’s resolutions anymore, because my world is pretty small and there’s not a lot of things that I could really resolve to do, like lots of the popular resolutions like “save money” and “lose weight” that would end with me feeling disappointed and dejected when the results would inevitably be minimal, if at anything at all.

But somewhere in the month of December, I decided that I should give Duolingo a try and try to pick up a foreign language, and that starting on the New Year seemed like a good of time as there would be to begin doing so.  That being said, I will be one of many people in the world doing a little bit of lessons on a daily basis, trying to bring myself to some degree of competency in Spanish.

I’ve always felt that the world is way too small to not know more than a single language, and I’ve always felt fortunate that I know a passable amount of Korean on top of English.  I always find it real cringey when Americans are rendered utterly useless when approached by someone who speaks a different language, or if they’re in a different country and completely inept at speaking something else and arrogantly assume everyone else should be speaking English.

I still remember returning from a trip to Europe and walking through customs at New York-JFK, and seeing the faces of foreign tourists go from wide-eyed excitement to fear and disappointment when trying to communicate with airport personnel, almost none of which could speak another language.  Meanwhile, on the way out of the country, arriving in places like Paris or Munich, everyone in those places speaks English, are helpful and accommodating, and a complete 180 of the treatment people get when arriving in America.

I actually struggled on deciding between Spanish and French as a new language to learn, because I actually would have preferred to learn French, seeing as how mythical wife is fluent in it, and as someone who has aspirations to see more of the world in my life, French being the language spoken in the largest number of countries, feels like it would have the most usefulness.

But I’m not going to be traveling internationally any time soon, despite the Global Entry that I went out of my way to acquire, so I decided to go with Spanish, since I already had a little bit of experience with it, having taken two years of it in middle and high school, and the sheer fact that when push comes to shove, knowing Español would have a tremendously higher chance of being useful in America than French would.

And the thing is, I’ve seen Duolingo work out for people that I know that use it.  I’ve watched friends of mine become fairly proficient in other languages, and it’s not like they’re going full-tryhard mode and sinking a tremendous amount of time into foreign language lessons.  They’re just consistent, and if there’s absolutely one thing that I know that I’m 1%-level elite at, is being consistent and sticking with things, once I get started with them.

One of my bros has like a 2,000+ day streak going with his own journey.  I told him that I was coming for him, to which he laughed off, but I kindly reminded him that I’ve been brogging for the last 15 years, and even ten more before that, before I migrated all my shit to WordPress.  If there’s something that I’m among the best at, it’s sticking with things, and I’m hoping that if I can stick to Duolingo remotely close to how I stick to things like my brog, Wordle, Fire Emblem Heroes and Pokémon GO, then I’ll become a pretty decent Spanish speaker before long. 

I’m enjoying it so far, and I’m hoping that one day, being able to bust out some Español can come in handy or helpful to myself or others.