Tag: braves

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.

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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The Braves’ latest failure: Blooper

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

So, to recap what kind of off-season it’s been for the Braves between the 2017 and 2018 seasons:

  • Their general manager, John Coppolella was fired and banned for life by Major League Baseball for basically cheating the system when it came to signing international amateur talent
  • As a result of Coppolella’s tampering of the system, the Braves were penalized by means of forfeiting the rights to 13 prospects
  • The Gwinnett Braves decided to rename their team because they want people to believe that their fans are stupid enough to mistake minor league Gwinnett Braves tickets for major league Atlanta Braves tickets, so to avoid the confusion, they decided to hold a contest for a new name, where the winner ultimately ended up being none of the selected options but instead, the “Gwinnett Stripers”
  • Their new spring training facility in Sarasota has gone from approved, to having an estimated cost of $75 million, to now costing $110 million, with likely more increases to come as time passes
  • Despite plenty of speculation that the team would try to capitalize on the Miami Marlins’ fire sale and make a trade for budding star Christian Yelich, they didn’t, and lost him to the Milwaukee Brewers (where his career will likely stagnate and become forgotten, in a boring market)

Needless to say, it’s been a pretty typical crappy offseason for the Braves this year.  It’s hard to say that things could possibly get any worse, but whenever anyone decides to tempt fate by saying that things couldn’t get any worse, inevitably they just have to.

Introducing Blooper, the new mascot of the Atlanta Braves.  What is Blooper?  Nobody really knows.  Apparently, he came from the “Character Builder 3000” and is a pretty good metaphor for the organization itself: uncreative, stagnant and nowhere remotely near innovative.

All anyone does know is that Blooper is like a Caucasian, less fat imitation of the Phillie Phanatic, of the division rival Philadelphia Phillies, which is extremely sad that the Braves are basically copying the Phillies.  Aside from when the Phillies won the World Series in 2008, nobody should want to copy the Phillies – they suck, their city sucks, and everything remotely associated with Philadelphia sucks.

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SURPRISE, SURPRISE

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I don’t remember the exact numbers I estimated when I originally started going off on diatribes about the Braves’ new Spring Training facility that’s being built in Sarasota, Florida, but I do recall it being somewhere in the range of 40-50% more than what was estimated.  Because if there’s one reoccurring pattern in the development of stadiums is that there is a 150% chance that whatever is originally estimated, will be exceeded, and by no small amounts.

That being said, it’s about as shocking as finding out that the WWE’s Enzo Amore has been accused of sexual misconduct, that the Braves’ original estimation of somewhere around $80 million dollars for their new training grounds, has risen.

Somewhere in the revisionist history of the timeline of this unnecessary extravagance, I’m pretty sure the original price tag was set at $75 million dollars.  Apparently, prior to the start of the new year, it was revised to $100 million, and as of this morning, it’s been confirmed to have hit $110 million.  I want to say that in my earlier rants about this bullshit facility that I predicted that it would top out at around $125 million.

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Only the Braves

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Back during the summer, the Triple-A Gwinnett Braves announced they were going to change their name, moving forward.  After sifting through the dank and salt for viable candidates, the final ballot was narrowed down to the following six options:

  • Gwinnett Buttons
  • Gwinnett Big Mouths
  • Gwinnett Gobblers
  • Gwinnett Hush Puppies
  • Gwinnett Lamb Chops
  • Gwinnett Sweet Teas

Obviously, none of these were particularly fantastic options, but I figured Buttons would’ve won easily, since it was the least over-the-top campy name, and that there was the historical element behind it, as Button Gwinnett was whom the entire county was named after as well as a signer of the Declaration of Independence.

Regardless, at the county level and those who were remotely interested in the distraction of a dumb story like this, there was much debate, but more pettiness when it came to the topic of renaming the Gwinnett Braves, that really could be summed up with the fact that all available options were pretty shitty.

So naturally, the winner of the contest ended up being the Gwinnett Stripers.

What’s that you say?  It wasn’t an option?  By golly, it wasn’t!  The Braves blindsided the fans yet again, with the bat of no-transparency, and went ahead and made choices without the people that sign their paychecks!

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Traffic is never bad for bad teams

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Apparently, traffic expectations for SunTrust Park are not as bad as expected when the Braves are playing home games.

This shouldn’t be a surprise when the Braves are about to finish off a dreadful season in which they’ll be at least 10-11 games under .500 and whose third-place ranking in the division is solely on account of being in the worst division in baseball.  They played 37-44 at ScumTrust, which says fans had a better chance of seeing an L every time they stepped foot onto the new ballpark.

Also, Atlanta sports fans are fickle and fair-weathered and only show up to games when the teams are actually winning.  Since the Braves are a bad team this year, it should come as no surprise that traffic is not terrible, because people aren’t really going to that many games, especially once the honeymoon period of new ballpark ended, leaving only a below-average team playing in ballpark built with dirty money.

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