Tag: braves

The comeback is complete

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Vindication: Jonny Venters wins National League Comeback Player of the Year

In the grand scheme of baseball seasons are World Series championships, home runs soaring, Triple Crowns, batting title chases, and all sorts of accolades, records and honors (and sometimes dishonors) being pursued.

As far as the 2018 was concerned, there really was only one specific thing that I’ve remotely paid any attention to: the return of Jonny Venters.  By now, I’ve written tons of words about how happy and proud I was to see the story of a ballplayer absolutely refusing to give up, even after three and a half debilitating injuries and the surgeries that ensued.  And after year after year of heartbreaking setbacks, 2018 was the year where Venters gingerly approached the glass ceiling, before Shoryuken-ning through it and getting back to the Major Leagues, and sticking once back.

Frankly, given the fact that he started the season and made his comeback officially with the Tampa Bay Rays, before getting traded back home to the Braves, I’d say there should be some argument that maybe he should’ve won both the AL and NL Comeback Player of the Year awards, especially since a scrub like David Price ended up winning it, obviously on his playoff performance, contrary to the claims that awards are decided before they even begin. 

But such a wish is a pipedream for a player to win simultaneous awards in both leagues.  I just want Jonny Venters to get all the accolades, because frankly as far as comebacks are defined, nobody deserved the award more than him.

Either way, I couldn’t be anymore happy and proud to see Jonny Venters formally recognized for his strength and perseverance.  Guys have won this award for less hardships, like bouncing back from sucking like Price did, or “just” a single Tommy John surgery.  But to come back from three (and a half) Tommy Johns??  Nobody’s done that shit before, in the history of the game.  Frankly, Comeback Player of the Year doesn’t really define what Jonny Venters accomplished in 2018, and I agree with these guys:

Who, more than Jonny Venters, deserves to win this award in 2018? He should win it for both leagues. The award, quite frankly, should be henceforth known as the “Jonny Venters Award.”

I’ll try to re-evaluate this in future seasons, to determine whether future winners are merely comeback players, or actual Jonny Venters.  I’d wager that much like the actual Jonny Venters, there probably won’t be another, any time soon.  But that seems to be pretty appropriate.

Different Braves, same shit

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Honestly, I’m just glad that the Braves won a game.  I’d have been very not mad, just disappointed had the Braves gone into the playoffs and gotten swept and embarrassed like the Rockies or Indians did, and at least they can hang a single laurel that they put up a modicum of a fight before the inevitable Atlanta tradition of getting bounced from the playoffs came to fruition.

I haven’t really written much, if anything about the Braves (baseball team, not ownership) this season, because really there wasn’t really that much to talk about.  Sure, the team of the future arrived a little bit earlier than schedule, and jump started life into the franchise, powering them to a surprise division title and an actual playoff berth.  But there was one part disbelief that the team would actually achieve success and that between the Nationals or Phillies, they’d have gotten upended in September and miss the playoffs, and there was another part that simply didn’t want to tempt the laws of fate and risk jinxing anything, when the team was going so well.

But either way, when the race for all the divisions were settled, and it was apparent that the Braves were in, I can’t say that I was really at all that excited, and this just might be the sentiment of all fans of sports that live in the Atlanta area.  I can’t speak for anyone but myself, but I can’t help but feel that the curse of Atlanta sports is just too strong, and as exciting as the 2018 Braves were, were just too young, and really achieved as much success as they did, heavily on the notion that their divisional rivals were all just that bad.  I didn’t just predict that the Braves were going to get bounced in the first round, I’d have put actual money on it, because that’s simply what the Braves do.

Seriously, the Braves haven’t made it out of the first round of the playoffs since 2001, and they’ve made the playoffs eight times since then.  That’s eight times getting bounced in the first round, and almost always, by a team that was seeded lower than they were.  And that’s just the Braves; as far as other Atlanta and Georgia sports are concerned, most of us here remember the epic historic Super Bowl 28-3 collapse of the Falcons.  The Georgia Bulldogs proceeded to lose the National Championship in similar fashion months later.  The Atlanta United soccer team made it to the playoffs in their first year, only to get bounced in the first round by the lower seed, and even the Atlanta Dream WNBA team made it to the WNBA Finals, only to get swept.

Continue reading “Different Braves, same shit” →

Man, fuck the Braves*

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment
Looking for a good picture to use with this post, nothing says failure like a (likely CG’d) photograph of the Braves’ bar/venue/restaurant packed to the gills with St. Louis Cardinals fans going bonkers watching the Cardinals play against the Reds.

Long story short: despite the fact that Cobb County has already paid a gozillion dollars to fund the corrupt and immoral White Flight ScumTrust Park and Battery Atlanta, the Braves are balking over another $5 million dollars, having the audacity to claim that they are owed, for some infrastructure fees

One again, man, fuck the Braves.*

*management, I have to constantly remind myself that I’m still a fan of the baseball product, but I absolutely abhor and loathe the shitheads that actually own the team

A bunch of greedy motherfuckers who already bilked a county out of $400 million+, resulting in tax increases and the dismal possibility of closures and removal of simple community amenities like parks and libraries, is complaining over another $5 million dollars?  Sure, most of the time the rich are rich, because they’re staunch about money like this capacity, but god damn, fuck them and fuck anyone else who is so completely self-important and self-absorbed to not see the absurdity in their demands.

The Braves have already, for lack of a better term, raped the county for ungodly amounts of tax dollars, so they could have a brand-new stadium and glorified shopping center around their stadium, that was away from a scary black community.  Seriously, there’s no way the talking heads behind all this have contributed nearly as much money as the county was forced to pony up, mostly against their will.  And now they’re complaining because they want the county to go ahead and pay for the plumbing for the entire fucking stadium grounds?  Get the fuck out of here.

Continue reading “Man, fuck the Braves*” →

Full circle

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Back to where it all began: Tampa Bay Rays trade Jonny Venters to the Atlanta Braves

Honestly, I thought I’d be more pumped up about this trade, considering how much I love Jonny Venters, and that he’s coming back to the Atlanta Braves.  But I guess there’s this permanent small resentment towards the Braves in my brain, involving their unnecessary move, their affiliation with ScumTrust, the tax increases they caused, and their general apathetic baseball operations that kind of makes me feel that they didn’t deserve to have the services of a classy guy like Jonny Venters.

Especially since the Braves basically cut Venters loose while he was at his very lowest point after numerous injuries, it was the Rays that kept his career alive, and I guess it was with the Rays in which I would’ve liked to have seen his career reignite.  Or at least, I would’ve loved to have seen the Rays trade Venters to an actual contender, and not like the currently free-falling Braves, who need starting pitching and not more relievers.

Continue reading “Full circle” →

A catch-up post

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

It’s not lost on me that it’s been a minute since I last wrote anything.  And among the last things that I did write about, it was probably sports and or professional wrestling-related in the first place, and admittedly I don’t like to stick to the same topic too frequently because I like the idea of being a well-rounded person who has thoughts, opinions and words to write about a myriad of things and not just a small pool of interests.

Sure, a part of the dormancy is the fact that I haven’t really found much to write about, but also the fact that in my work and personal lives, I’ve actually been kind of busy.   Not a day goes by where there isn’t some local news that isn’t violent and could easily be twisted into a racial commentary, and there’s otherwise little else locally to talk about other than the impending Republican runoff for governor that I’ve already said numerous things about.

My taxes are going up in the upcoming fiscal year, which isn’t a surprise that the primary culprit of it all is the Atlanta Braves, which is something that most everyone with a brain saw coming, seeing as how the construction of ScumTrust Park and The Battery was a gigantic money suck to state and county coffers that is naturally the unfortunate responsibility of taxpayers.  Obviously, I’m a little salty over the fact that my monthly rates will go up, but at the same time, I’m okay with it if it means that things like parks and libraries aren’t shut down and rendered inaccessible services to the people.  Granted, I’d rather the Braves never moved in the first place and this wouldn’t have happened, but I don’t have the completed Infinity Gauntlet in my possession, so I can’t go back in time to rectify that.

By the way, I actually caught up and watched Avengers: Infinity War, which is in large part to making this reference.  It was slightly better than I had anticipated, because I felt there was a high possibility of them fucking things up by having to cram so much crossing over into a singular film, that it could convolute things real fast, but I didn’t think they did a bad job, and put out a pretty decent flick.

Continue reading “A catch-up post” →

JONNY VENTERS IS BACK

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

As the 2018 baseball season began to take shape, I had earmarked April 28th on the calendar.  Instead of jet-setting off to some other city to watch baseball somewhere else, or catching a Braves game at still-newish Racist ScumTrust Park, it was actually a minor-league game up in Lawrenceville that had my interest: The Gwinnett Braves Strippers Stripers versus the Durham Bulls, the triple-A affiliate of the Tampa Bay Rays.

It was kind of the best option of all worlds; I’m a baseball hipster that prefers minor league baseball over the majors, I could check out the newly enshrined Stripers and possibly get a new baseball cap to add to my collection, and I could check out the future of the Braves in uber-prospect wunderkind Ronald Acuña, who laughably was held in triple-A for obvious financial and team-control purposes.

Above all else though, it was actually a guy on the other team that I was more interested in: Jonny Venters, he of the former Braves all-star relief corps with Craig Kimbrel, but with the ridiculous power sinker from the left side that I had the luxury of watching for three straight years as he made MLB look like his own personal playground whenever he took the mound.  That is, until he got hurt, blowing out his elbow not just once, not just twice, but three total times in his long and arduous journey back to baseball.

Now he’s in the Rays organization, and at the start of the season, he was assigned to triple-A, presumably to keep warm and ready for whenever the Rays would need to get some reinforcements, he would be high up on the list.

Continue reading “JONNY VENTERS IS BACK” →

Would you rather have an awesome player longer, or an awesome player immediately?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

This is the age-old debate that resurfaces just about every single year, around this time during Major League Baseball’s Spring Training time.  Team X has a highly-touted prospect that has some hype behind their potential, and they get a substantial chunk of time with the Major League squad, getting to scrimmage against Major League players, and it turns out that they can not only hold their own, but excel immediately.

But then right about this time every year, citing some sort of bullshit excuse along the lines of “they need more seasoning” or “they need to work on hitting breaking balls on Monday night games with 75%+ humidity,” Team X, Team Y and every other team that has a hotshot prospect, reassigns them to minor league camp, where they will inevitably start out their seasons in either Triple-A or Double-A minor league baseball.

And then right on cue, the internet explodes up in arms about the fallacy of the so-called “abuse” of the “system,” how young prospect players are artificially held back in the minor leagues, regardless of how ready they are, so that the teams can manipulate their service clocks in a manner that would give them the maximum amount of time they are allowed to employ the player at the most minimal financial commitment.  How it’s crooked, and abusive to the players, and this and that concerning themselves over money that is hardly their own, and concerns that are curious to why people care so much about how a private business operates.

This year, the Atlanta Braves are the de facto Team X of 2018 Spring Training that is embarking on this journey, as they have just recently assigned 20-year old phenom outfielder Ronald Acuña to minor league camp, where he will remain and begin his season with the Triple-A Gwinnett Strippers Stripers.  Despite the fact that he had a blistering Spring Training up to this point where he literally led the big league squad in hitting, batting .432 with 4 home runs and 11 RBI, the Braves have stated the fluffy excuse of how he needs to “work on his flow,” to which not a single person can comprehend what that actually means, but whatever, Acuña is in the minor leagues, and just about any educated baseball fan with a brain would have guessed, was going to happen with 150% certainty.

Continue reading “Would you rather have an awesome player longer, or an awesome player immediately?” →