Tag: comparison

Oh, Ratlanta #488

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Fox5Atlanta: Atlanta named in the top ten most rat-infested cities in the country (#10)

I’m not even going to try and defend the city, or think of any excuses to why this is.  There have been plenty of times in my life where I’ve thought to myself, or out loud, the phrase, what a fucking shithole when going around and about the city.  Short of any of the areas where the gentrification bombs have exploded, there’s lots of parts of Atlanta that are complete shitholes, that I’m not the least bit surprised to hear that the aggregate of the city breaks the top-10 in most rat-infested cities in America.

What I do find ironically offensive and laughably embarrassing is Atlanta’s ranking in comparison to supposed less-rat-infested cities that I would’ve figured to be way bigger shithole rat-infested places than Atlanta.  Like come on really, Baltimore (#11) is a less rat-infested city than Atlanta?  Seriously?  I find that very hard to believe.  Sure, it’s just a difference of one spot separating the two, but like in any competition, a one-point win is still a win.

I also heavily argue Detroit (#16) and Miami (#22) as somehow being less rat-infested than Atlanta is.  I’ve been to both those cities too, and much like Baltimore, they’ve all seemed like bigger shitholes that would have rat infestations than Atlanta does.

The funny thing is that no matter how long I’ve been down here, walked streets, and been around old Turner Field especially, I’ve actually never seen a rat in the wild.  Dead or alive.  I know they’re out there, and I’ve definitely seen places that have clearly been occupied by rats, but I’ve never actually seen one out in the wild.  I have seen rats in Baltimore and Miami though, with the latter not being more than just two months ago when I was barely in city proper for a few hours prior to the start of my cruise.

Perhaps all these other cities with surprisingly low rankings are just so plagued with squalor that nobody’s just contacting Terminix and boosting their numbers, and the rats are just overrunning these entire cities?  Seems more plausible than being ranked better than Atlanta is.

But metrics are metrics, and as much as I ironically want to cry foul and point out that there seems to be a correlation between rat-infestation and general size of markets, it’s not something worth the effort to debate.  When it comes to arguing over who’s more rat-infested it’s like asking yourself if you’d rather have herpes or the clap, because no matter what side of the argument you come out on, you’re still fucked.

Thoughts about the supposed Goonies 2

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

It’s hard to tell what’s real and what isn’t these days, and what’s declared to be real actually remaining real after a little bit of time, but for better or worse, at the time I’m writing this, it sounds like a 40-years later The Goonies sequel is really going to be happening.

My knee-jerk reaction is basically oh god please no whyyyyyy because I really wish Hollywood could leave things that are dead and resting, dead and resting, but seeing as how it seems like allowing The Goonies to have that privilege is coming off the table, might as well allow the ball to continue to roll and brog about it, since it’s evident that this has been on my mind over the last few days while I’ve been waiting for the smoke to clear on whether it’s legit or not, as well as trying to carve time out to write.

Needless to say, I’m not that thrilled with one of my legitimate all-time favorite stories of my childhood being drug out of the 80s just to capitalize on the low-hanging fruit of nostalgia, but what can I say, money is what makes the world go round.  And as Cobra Kai has proven, not every instance of a nostalgia-driven encore is entirely turrible, and although the likelihood isn’t high, I can only hope for the best as far as it concerns The Goonies.

Frankly, if this was ever going to happen, I feel like they’re 10-15 years too late, especially considering the fact that the intention seemed to always have been to bring back as much of the original cast as possible.  All of the OG cast at this point are all too fucking old to be parents to the next generation of Goonies, and they’re at this weird transitional age where they’re too old to be parents to kids but rather teens that are probably older than the original crew, but also a little too young to convincingly be grandparents to the next generation.

But push comes to shove, I’m going to have to assume that the children’s cast of this supposed sequel are probably all going to be the grandchildren of the original Goonies; Josh Brolin is 56 and Sean Astin is 53, and neither are going to convince anyone that they’re any younger than that, so as much as television and film likes to try to convince us that 30 year olds can portray teenagers with attitude, I think it’s probably best to age them up and make them grandparents instead.

Which would probably help to make more plausible the inevitable casting of minorities in the next generation of Goonies, because in the DEI world we live in now, it goes without saying that the next generation is guaranteed to not be a white boys + Data group, and is definitely going to be a little more colorfully diverse by the time this film comes supposedly drops in 2026 or so.

That being said, let’s hypothesize the next generation of The Goonies, apples to apples, because I think it’s obvious that it’s got to be the descendants of the original crew that will comprise the kids’ cast.

  • Mikey will be represented by his granddaughter to be the leader of The New Goonies™; naïve and adventurous, and willing to believe in the remnants of One Eyed Willy’s treasure in the caves.
  • Brand will have married a black woman after Andi dumps him after high school, and their biracial daughter will then have married a black man, and therefore can cast a black male actor to be the descendant of Brand. He will naturally be the muscle and the big brother of the crew.
  • Chunk’s (despite the fact that Jeff Cohen lost all his chunk and is rather fit these days) grandson will be the most likely original Chunk, as in be a chubby Jewish boy who will somehow end up in a Hawaiian shirt and plaid pants, and act as the primary comic relief because it’s funny because he’s fat.
  • Mouth’s grandson will probably be ambiguously biracial, and I foresee someone looking like the next generation’s Mario Lopez will be playing this role. He will undoubtedly be as snarky and blabbermouthed as his grandfather.
  • Data being pretty traditionally Chinese despite the fact that Ke Huy Quan is from Vietnam, will have a granddaughter representing his role, and although she won’t have the trench coat or the backpack full of gadgets and crowd-control inventions, will still be the techie brains of the crew who will probably be good at MacGuyvering shit for the team when they need it.
  • And because the white quotient is starting to get outnumbered, Andi will have a cute granddaughter that probably will look like Sabrina Carpenter taking her place in the next generation, so that Brand can have a potential romantic interest, as well as giving the next generation of young boys something to be confused about through their own respective adolescences.
  • Which brings us to Stef, whom Martha Plimpton has accepted with grace as being the “last” one, will undoubtedly have had an adopted son/grandson, probably white, so that white people still have a slim majority in representation because that’s how Hollywood be, will resume Stef’s legacy of being the tail end of the team, and to provide as much contribution as his grandmother.

As for the actual plot of this film, who really knows what it’s going to be about.  If Chris Columbus and Richard Donner couldn’t figure something out throughout the last 30 years of Donner’s life, I don’t have much faith that anyone else is going to have any better ideas, but it really doesn’t matter. 

If this is going to work, it’s going to have to take place in Astoria, it’s going to have to involve the remains of One Eyed Willy’s treasure, because everyone knows at the end of the OG, the Inferno sails away into the Pacific Northwest, so I’m going to guess that there’s still caches of treasures in the remains of the caves, or perhaps additional ships that The New Goonies can go search for, but as long as the spirit of the film doesn’t stray too far from the original, it stands to believe that this might be able to be as popular with the next generation of kids as the original was to my own childhood.

What kind of irks me though is that I legitimately had plans on saying fuck it, and going to Astoria for my next birthday, by myself, because it’s something that I’ve always wanted to do in my life, and I’m no longer going to expect or even attempt to bring anyone along for the ride, because of people I know, nobody really wants to do this except for me.  Hopefully news of moar Goonies in the future doesn’t re-ignite other OG fans to want to make the same pilgrimage, and ruin my original fandom spurred on by news of a supposed sequel in the works.  Or worse off, by the time I get there, filming has started and I get monstrously cockblocked at seeing all of the original stuff that I had always wanted to see and walk in my own nostalgic life.

Only time will tell, and if any of this shit impacts my future travels, it’s only a question of just how pissed and disappointed it’ll make me.

DC’s Absolute Universe logos absolutely suck

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I don’t dislike DC Comics, but I’m definitely one of those fans that feels like no matter what they do, no matter what they try, it always seems like it falls flat, and when they’re inevitably compared to Marvel, they’re always this extraordinary distant second place.  I love Batman, and I have no qualms with really any other DC property, but in my opinion, I just feel like DC in particular has fallen a little too victim to the changing of the times and ideals of the world, and have been way too quick to pull the plug on long-term storytelling, and retconned things so rapidly and so frequently that it’s hard to even tell what’s canon versus what’s just some blow-off one-off.

It’s like the comic industry is truly no different than the rest of the working world in that nobody stays put long enough to see through any chances at some good long-term storytelling or even just a year’s worth of comics these days, and the industry as a whole is full of convoluted, clunky crap that I have little interest in reading on the monthly, and prefer to read about it later on Wikipedia synopses, so that I can then go, what the fuck?

Anyway, in yet another reconning of the universe, DC Comics is apparently going in the route called the Absolute universe, which I’m guessing is a lot like when Marvel launched the Ultimate universe, but the fact of the matter is that it’s still a hard reset of all the flagship properties, with hopes of boosting sales, engaging the newer, even more ADD generation, and that it’s easier to start over from scratch versus even attempting to pick up the pieces from the latest wave of employee turnover.

And part of the entire reconning of the company, for some reason, they saw fit to redesign a bunch of logos of notable properties.  And if there’s one thing I’ve learned throughout my career as a creative, fewer things (attempt to) mask mediocrity than the changing of logos of a notable brand(s), or making them in the first place, for inconsequential purposes.  I mean, the City of Atlanta probably burns $10M a year on making logos and branding stupid bullshit while half of that is probably skimmed into the pockets of corrupt bureaucrats to begin with.

But most noteworthy among the rebrandings were the new logomarks for three of their most flagship properties: Batman, Wonder Woman and Superman.  And as the title of this post clearly states, they all absolutely suck.

Batman’s new logo silhouette has been transformed into a multi cutter tool’s blade, seeing as how it’s a very lightly serrated rectangle now.  It seriously looks like if I were to trace this as a stencil onto a piece of sheet metal, cut it out and jerry-rig it into my Ryobi, I could probably use it to fairly efficiently cut through plastics or foams, if I were still at the stage of my life where I would make costumes for Dragon*Con.

Wonder Woman’s logo now isn’t too far from its old iteration, but much like many things that are feminine in nature and display now, it’s been widened, fattened and made to look all thicc, because it’s okay if not all women don’t look like Jim Lee interpretations of females, especially in comics.  But in doing so, it’s almost as if they’ve been successfully bullied out of their own original identity by the growing Whataburger company, who didn’t really do a good job with their own branding to not act like they weren’t completely lifting the original Wonder Woman emblem in the first place.

So let the record show that the regional fast food burger company has successfully bullied the vaunted Wonder Woman out of using her own fucking identity.  Poor form, DC.

Finally, we have Superman’s logo, which at least, manages to at least salvage their traditional five-sided pentagon shape, and is the one logo that seems to retain the closest to its original iteration.  But much like in the world of typography, the original serifs have been lopped off of the S, and for whatever reason, the top left part of the emblem looks really fucking weird to me, because there’s no break in the red from the S and the edge of the emblem and it all bleeds together looking sloppy.  I can interpret that the general thickness of the S probably wouldn’t accommodate for there needing to be any space near the edge of the emblem, but it just looks really off, like Capcom’s shitty logo for not putting any space in the second C and the O of their wordmark that bothers the shit out of me.

And if you were to focus on the yellow parts alone, it looks like a really erect dick about to really overshoot the toilet underneath it, and I hope that any of my zero readers were to read this observation, they would become unable to unsee it, and spread the opinion out to the rest of the world like an obnoxious virus.

So, in conclusion, DC Comics felt the need to reset their shitty universe once again, and for some reason decided to rebrand some of their most iconic properties in the process.  And in changing logos that never needed to be changed in the first place, we’re left with a saw blade, a fat version of the Whataburger logo, and a dick and toilet emblem in the end.

gg dc, wp.

Damn, the new Chick Fil-A looks like Avengers HQ

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

CFA: Chick Fil-A opens brand new, state-of-the-art restaurant in Bumfuck, Georgia that is two stories, drive-thru only, featuring multiple lanes, including several app-only lanes

My first thought when I saw this brand-new Chick Fil-A was exactly what the title of this post is: damn, this place looks like a baby Avengers HQ.  And frankly, it might as well be, considering the company’s hard reliance on drive-thru service when it comes to their bottom line, it makes sense for them to have a location that’s entirely drive-thru only, featuring the feature that I love best, the app-only lanes for the evolved class of human being that understands how easy, efficient and optimal using Chick Fil-A’s app is when it comes to food service.

What doesn’t really make much sense are CFA locations that have scrapped drive-thru outright, and I think there’s one up in North Druid Hills that does that, and I can’t imagine that their business is nearly as fruitful as those CFA locations that have efficient and reliable drive-thru service, like the ones near my own home that my household tends to go to, at least 2-3 times a month, but that’s neither here nor there for the purpose of this specific post.

However, the one drawback to this Baby Avengers HQ of a Chick Fil-A is that it’s located way the fuck outside of Atlanta, and barely even deserves to be considered metro area in the first place.  McDonough is one of those areas that’s literally like an hour outside of city proper, but because there are enough psychopaths that commute to the city from there, they get to be considered Metro enough to get the occasional nod in morning traffic reports because there’s usually some apocalyptic traffic coming out of I-75 in their location.  Frankly, that’s the only reason why I even know the name of the street it’s on, Jodeco Road.

Needless to say, I can’t see myself making a trip just to experience this location, because they’re not Tim Horton’s, they’re not Buc-ee’s, nor are they Wawa.  Even though I would probably take joy in the expedient manner in which an app-only line could be, it would be the same food that I could get at any of the CFAs that are within 1-2 miles from my own home.

All the same, I hope this location does gangbusters, so that the company can start replacing all the other CFAs throughout the city, as well as all over the country, with these mini Avenger HQs that can show the rest of the fast food world up, on how to optimally run the fast food business.

Would be great if it meant we had some real Los Pollos Hermanos

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

WSB: 2,380 lbs. of meth discovered in Clayton County at a farmers market by Atlanta DEA

If there’s one thing I ever learned from watching shows like Breaking Bad and Weeds is that illegal drugs are most optimally hidden in suburban, white, affluent areas, where the local law enforcement is minimal and as long as the boat isn’t rocked too hard, nobody would bat an eye to illegal activities going on in plain sight.

That said, it seems like a rookie mistake by the Mexican Cartel that they would ship their Gus Fring-caliber quantity of meth to Clayton County of all places in the state of Georgia, because I’m hard pressed to think of anywhere else in the entire state that has a higher crime problem than Clayton County.

I’d imagine that a place with higher crime rates should* have higher police presence, and that a place under such conditions might not be a great idea to move a literal ton-plus of meth; but this is why I am not a criminal, perhaps they know a lot more about crime and trafficking drugs than some inconsequential brogger who’s watched too much television.

*operative word, conversely these conditions could be precisely why there’s not enough police presence, but all I know is that people in my area drive around like the wild west because of the lack of police presence which is the case due to the low crime rates

If I were the Cartel, I’d probably have moved this giant haul over to like Newnan or Douglasville; suburban, mostly white areas that have upper-middle class demographics, but also quick access to the highway, proximity to state lines, while also not being too egregiously far from the airport.  From what I’ve observed from reading about local drug trafficking, escape routes are critical and always under consideration, otherwise I’d have suggested places like Peachtree City or Johns Creek, except they’re basically islands with no efficient escape routes.

Crime rates in those areas aren’t nearly as tragic as they are in all of Clayton County, and those areas would probably welcome giant farmers markets because white people love farmers markets since it lets them feel good about thinking that they’re supporting poor farmers and/or minorities under the illusion that the produce they’re getting isn’t just farmed in South America instead.  And where there are large populations of bustling white people, is the illusion of safety and low crime, and as a result would be low police coverage and therefore less scrutiny when it comes to moving illegal product.

Anyway, the train of thought that brought this post into fruition is that hearing about all this meth obviously makes me think of Breaking Bad, and the pathetic movement of the drugs makes me think that this is definitely something that Gus Fring would not have done.  After all, he would basically use an entire refrigerator truck to smuggle probably no more than 2-3 lbs of Blue Sky between his restaurant locations, and not 2,380 lbs of it at a time, poorly hidden under a layer of celery hearts.

And then, it makes me pine for the actual existence of real Los Pollos Hermanos restaurants, because Chilean-inspired fried chicken does sound incredible, and I wish such restaurants actually existed.  I’m not into narcotics, so there’s a part of me that might turn the other cheek when it comes to them, if it meant that we got some real-life Pollos.  It’s not like Atlanta, much less Clayton County wouldn’t be able to support yet another option when it comes to fried chicken.

Are Ravens fans really this dumb, pt 2

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Even before I had daughters, I’ve always been in support of women’s rights.  What’s wrong with believing in that whole notion that everyone should be equal?

So a few days ago, I saw while scrolling, a quote from a Ravens player I’d never heard of before, about how he thought it was literally disgusting to see Simone Biles and Jordan Chiles playfully giving the bow down motion to Gold medalist Rebeca Andrade of Brazil.

My first thought was, who the fuck is Marlon Humphrey, but then feeling my own disgust that someone was so offended by some women demonstrating a beautiful scene of sportsmanship and camaraderie with a fellow Olympian, to where they needed to use their influence as a for-lack-of-a-better-term, celebrity on Twitter to take a shit on it.

I felt the compulsion to comment on it:

Man plays on a team whose fans gave ovations to a guy whom had video evidence of him beating the Jesus out of his babymama in an elevator, and he thinks some sportsmanship is literally disgusting. Yeah ok

I didn’t give it much thought afterward, but clearly I had ignited Ravens fans for taking a pot-shot at their fanbase for how they so glowingly supported Ray Rice after his domestic assault charges against his fiancée, implying that they are as brainless and dumb as I genuinely think of most of them anyway, and the responses were about as predictable as one might imagine.

Firstly, most everyone who replied to my comment completely missed the point of being in support of female gymnasts, because I had committed the most heinous of sins, which was to take a swipe at the Ravens, and all these schmucks were blinded with rage when composing their own silly rebuttals, with denial, personal attacks, including a racist one where a black guy told me to stick to ping pong that either was deleted, or they had the wherewithal to delete themselves, and a not-surprising amount of people who were inadvertently taking Humphrey’s side just because he’s on the Ravens.

The thing is, what a lot of these butthurt commenters don’t seem to realize that by attacking me, they’re basically showing their support of Marlon Humphrey’s disdain for women athletes demonstrating sportsmanship as well as being okay with domestic violence towards women.  Yes, it’s a little bit of a reach to come to those conclusions, but looking at the gamut of people who took their time to air out their grievances with my words with their own, it doesn’t seem that far-fetched after all.

My favorites are the people who tried to defend Ray Rice by stating how he helped the Ravens win a Super Bowl some time ago, as if it makes it completely okay that he beat the living shit out of his fiancée in a hotel service elevator.  Or how she was spitting on him and cursing and smacking him first, so she seemed to deserve it.

I like when abusers, or those who are okay with it identify themselves, because it makes it easy for me to steer clear of the pieces of shit they are.

The thing is, my remarks also got a surprisingly high (300+) number of likes, showing that a lot of more intelligent people agreed with my opinion of Humphrey’s dumbass remark.  Unfortunately, those people were all smarter than me and didn’t comment in the first place, and frankly I don’t know why I do it sometimes, other than inadvertently embarking on some weird social experiments.

But hey, unsurprising as it is, it’s something to see, that even ten years after the last time I posted about Ravens fans being idiots, absolutely nothing at all seems to have changed.

I see you, Balakey

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I can’t say that I’m particularly a fan of pitcher Blake Snell; I tend to not care for baseball players that act like out-of-touch man-babies when it comes to how much they’re paid for the privilege of playing professional baseball, and Snell is amongst the worst. 

He once suggested that players should’ve been paid their full salaries during the COVID season, and he’s one of those guys that it’s pretty clear that his full career objective is accumulating as much money as possible, which inherently there’s nothing wrong with, but it’s also the way that he’s trying to accomplish it with an inequitable amount of effort exerted to earn it that rubs me the wrong way.

This past off-season was a delight to see him flounder away during free agency, and basically becoming the cautionary poster boy for talented free agent to get absolutely pwned by the process.  He was looking for comparable money that the Dodgers had paid Japanese import Yoshinobu Yamamoto (12-year, $365M), and along the way had turned down an offer from the Yankees that was half that, thinking if he held out, he could get better, if not comparable.

He was wrong.  Delightfully.

Ultimately, he signed with the Giants on a two-year, $62M deal which is still an egregious annual value to a human being to throw a baseball over and over again, and seeing as how it had an opt-out clause in between, it was evident that Snell’s goal was going to be to pitch his ass off, opt-out, and try again for a Yamamoto deal, while also having the security cushion of a fat $31M second year with the Giants if things fell through.

The 2024 season couldn’t have started off any worse for someone playing the game Snell was trying to play; he would go 0-3, never getting out of the fifth inning, and have an ERA of 11.57.  His peripherals were shit, he was throwing too many pitches, walking too many guys, and downright sucked.  It was clear that he basically did no work or working out during the offseason, and didn’t prepare at all during the spring since he was technically unemployed almost until the start of the season, and it was showing on the field.

He was put on the DL for sucking, AKA bullshit injury to justify poor performance, and came back at the end of May, where he would proceed to string together three more shitty starts, where he still couldn’t get out of the fifth inning, and was pitching terribly, but was masked by the fact that the Giants still won two of those games in spite of him.

I relished in Snell’s poor performance, and despite my general disdain for Bay Area sports fans, even I didn’t think they deserved the turd that the Blake Snell contract was turning into.  Without question, he was going to opt-in to year two of his deal, and hamstring the Giants for another $31M that could’ve been utilized in so many better ways.

Once again he went on the DL for sucking, and he was back on July 9th and this is where the story really begins.  Snell would pitch five innings, giving up just a single hit and no runs, and the Giants would win.  The Giants would win two of his next three starts, with Snell pitching like the two-time Cy Young winner he was.

On August 2nd, Snell would get the first win of his season, after pitching a fucking no-hitter against the Cincinnati Reds, and he would follow that with another quality start and another win.

The overall picture of Blake Snell’s current 2024 isn’t notable – 2-3 W-L in 12 starts, a 4.31 ERA, with the Giants going 7-5.  But since July, he’s gone 2-0 in six starts, has an ERA of 1.15 and the team has gone 5-1.

It’s very apparent that he’s finally woken up, and that he’s beginning to pitch his ass off so that he can opt-out at the end of the season and make another try for a long-term Yamamoto-money deal.

Here’s the thing though, as many words as I’ve spoken to be critical about Blake Snell, I actually have never bothered to really take a deep dive into the numbers that paint the picture of Blake Snell; until now.  And the most interesting thing I’m discovering about ol’ Balakey is that save for the no-hitter, the season narrative described above is absolutely nothing out of the ordinary for him.

I’ve read numerous times about how Snell is “a slow starter” but figured it was typical media defending of the guy.  But looking at his career numbers and splits, slow starter doesn’t do the man justice.

I’m now convinced that Blake Snell is probably the smartest baseball player there is, at the way he has absolutely gamed the game of baseball in order to make as much money as he can, with the least amount of effort possible.  I mean, the guy streams video games in his downtime, gaming is nothing outside of his realm of interests, and it’s apparent that he’s brought that mentality into his career strategy.

Looking over his game logs over the last few seasons, which were coincidentally the most critical years in terms of showcasing himself in preparation for free agency, his Aprils have as many L’s as the 2024 Chicago White Sox, and he looks like shit; can’t get more than five innings, giving up lots of runs, mundane strikeout numbers.

But then July hits each year, Snell’s fairy godmother materializes out of nowhere and turns him into fucking Nolan Ryan.  He starts piling up strikeouts, the inning numbers start turning from 5.0 to 7.0, and the team starts piling up W’s like they’re the 1996 Chicago Bulls.

This isn’t hyperbole, there really is that drastic of a split between the first halves and second halves of his seasons, career-wide:

1st Halves: 28-39 W-L, 3.98 ERA, 1.339 WHIP, 10.9 K/9
2nd Halves: 41-17 W-L, 2.41 ERA, 1.097 WHIP, 11.4 K/9

Now I know all these numbers don’t mean a thing to anyone who doesn’t follow baseball, but what it really says is that Blake Snell is trash in the first half of most seasons, and turns into a fucking demi-god in the second half.  He walks fewer guys, strikes out more guys, and the team just flat out wins.

And the thing is, I don’t think this is coincidental, I don’t think this is fluky, I think it’s entirely by design and mostly deliberate by Blake Snell.  It’s no secret in the world of professional sports that athletes tend to metaphorically hit the NOS during their walk-years, and there’s mountains of evidence that exist these days to justify such a notion.  It’s also no secret that professional sport is influenced tremendously by recency bias, where the most recent version of an athlete is the one to consider when it comes time to negotiate dolla-dollas.

I may not be a fan of Blake Snell’s perceived-by-me money-grubbing ways, but I see you, Balakey.  I kind of respect the cerebral approach to optimizing his earning capabilities.  I’m not going to poo-poo on a guy’s effort to make as much money as he can, but at the same time, I’m not going to also not think that it does seem crappy to the teams, the fans of those teams, and those who root for him, to often be knowing that unless it’s July or later, he’s probably holding something back and not trying his hardest, because as he’s demonstrated for us all over the last few years, those April-May-June starts definitely don’t mean as much as the months July and on.