It always amuses me when the Braves suck

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Man, talk about lowered expectations.  Many sources prior to the start of the season had the Braves pegged to win the NL East again, and potentially challenge the Dodgers and the Padres for National League supremacy.  After all, they came so close during the pandemic year that didn’t count, having a 3-1 series lead on the Dodgers before choking monumentally and failing to make a completely winnable and validating World Series against the Rays that the Dodgers won instead, that surely they could be contenders again this year, right??

Admittedly I haven’t been paying that much attention to baseball or sports in general because of new dad, but I have tangenally been keeping track of Braves scores most nights, and I’m pretty sure they’re either in last place in the NL East or at least the bottom half of the standings.

But not only did the Braves drop both games of a doubleheader yesterday, and not only did they get shutout of both games yesterday, they got fucking no-hit in the second game, even though it was a shortened seven-inning game.

Sure, there’s all sorts of asterisks and MLB is not officially counting it as a no-hitter, but the fact of the matter is that the Braves had an absolutely humiliating and pathetic day of futility yesterday, and it seldom fails to amuse me when any team, much less the Braves has a day in which they get owned so hard.

Not only did the Braves get no-hit in the seven-inning second game, they got one-hit in the seven-inning first game, with the one hit coming in the sixth inning, which is the only thing preventing me from being all like well actually . . . the Braves DID get no-hit for nine straight innings on the same day technically . . .  But come on – 14 innings of one-hit baseball?  That’s fucking turrible and pathetic, no matter what way you look at it. 

And this was the weekend where the Barves relaxed a little bit more of the attendance and let more fans into the stadium; imagine the excitement of all the fans who are getting to see live baseball in Atlanta for the first time in over a year, all giddy and thrilled to have a pleasant day at the ballpark again… and then they get to sit on their hands and slog through two straight games of the Braves getting completely demoralized and humiliated, where they get one-hit and no-hit in successive games.  Complete hilarity.

Regardless, it’s still April, and there’s still a ton of time for the Braves to get their shit together and do something.  Even if they don’t, I really won’t care that much, because I’m pretty content where I’m at with my sports fandom.  My kids come first, and only if they actually become a contender will maybe I come back to give a shit, but until then, I can sit back from afar, judge and laugh at the Braves and any other team, gets owned.

We were there first

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I think?  Who really knows when this show was actually filmed, and whether or not it happened before my wedding.

Anyway, just finished watching The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.  At first, I thought it was just okay, and that it felt more like a transitional Marvel property show, that helped tie up a lot of loose ends throughout Phase One, as opposed to something that was sowing seeds for future potential phases.  Like WandaVision laid down a lot of groundwork for future plots, and I had expected similarly from the adventures of Sam and Bucky, and what I would expect from most other future Marvel television shows on Disney+.

But then the fifth episode happens, and shit suddenly gets very real, the plots get very deep very quickly, and by the time I finished the sixth and final episode of the series, I’m thinking, damn, this show was really god damn good.

Anyway, if I keep trying to write about the show, I’ll inevitably end up spoiling something, so I’ll refrain from going on about the show, except for the fact that it was really good, I enjoyed it, and it was yet another outstanding edition to Marvel’s screen adaptation equity.

I don’t think it’s a spoiler, but the above image is a scene from one of the episodes, that looked just a teensy-bit familiar to me.  Had to rewind, pause, and summon mythical wife to come take a look too.

But adding to the list of Georgia locations that are filmed and delivered as somewhere else, the Historic DeKalb Courthouse where I got married, was used as, well, a courthouse of some sorts, for a government hearing in the Falcon and the Winter Soldier.  At least it was actually used as its historic roots once were.  But it tickled me all the same, to see a place I’m quite familiar with, being used in an outstanding piece of television.  Multiple times.

How about y’all just get better at baseball instead?

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I don’t pay a tremendous amount of attention to baseball anymore these days, but I came across this particular article in Sports Illustrated about how recently retired Jay Bruce basically retired because the shift killed his career, and how they opined that shifting should be made illegal in baseball.

Now as far as sports columnists go, I actually really like Tom Verducci.  He’s a well-versed guy who has good insight, adapts to the times, and has always had a fairly pleasant, readable tone in his writing throughout all the years that I’ve known of his existence, but I have to say that his opinion that the shift should be made illegal is one of the dumbest things that I’ve ever read.

In short, the shift is when baseball fielders position themselves heavily on one side of the field, because a batter might have a very predictable tendency to hit to that side of the field, thus optimizing their chances at being able to field a hit ball and get them out.  Good examples of the shift in action are this fictional instance known as the DeVanzo Shift from Artie Lange’s Beer League, and this hilariously similar but actually real instance known as the Joey Gallo Shift from the Houston Astros.

There is absolutely nothing illegal about teams shifting their fielders, and as a result over the last decade, the strategy has been adopted all over the league and employed on a countless number of mostly-left hand hitters, although there is no shortage of righties that hard shifts work on as well.  And as the number of teams employing shifts has gone up, the careers of many pull-happy hitters have gradually begun plunging down metaphorical toilets all over.

So instead of suggesting a not-illegal tactic be made illegal, here’s a wild and crazy suggestion for baseball players being victimized into retirement by the shift: get fucking better at baseball.

Learn to hit the other way.  Learn to drop a good bunt down the opposite field.  Pop your hips early and hit the ball where they ain’t; accept singles as not making outs instead of looking like a fucking idiot swinging for the fences, but then hitting a hard grounder to a shortstop playing in shallow right field 75 feet away from they’d normally be positioned.

Verducci suggesting MLB ban shifting is a sad pro-players suggestion that shields a league full of overrated assholes who get paid millions to play a kids game so that the league can make billions to exploit broadcast it.  Seriously, the league minimum last I checked was a hair under $500,000 a year, so even the shittiest 26th man on the roster is still making half a million dollars, but still can’t hit the ball to the opposite field, so the league should just change the rules?  Fuck that shit.

Players who can’t adapt to defensive strategies all deserve to have their stats and value plummet, because as often times as baseball can metaphorically be compared to life, it really is a story of adapt or die.  It’s ironic too, because so many baseball players get to the biggest league in the world, because at some point, they’re taught and demonstrated good hitting acumen, which usually involves being able to hit baseballs to various parts of the field except pull-side, but somewhere along the path of the majors, whether it’s poor coaching or aspiration of greed, guys end up these pull hitters who are eaten alive by shifts.

Guys like Pete Rose and Ichiro Suzuki are the greatest all-time hitters and played for eons respectively, because they were guys who could always hit to all parts of the field, even if they weren’t putting up gaudy home run numbers.  Meanwhile jobbers like Jay Bruce are calling it quits because they can’t produce because the shift is killing them, and all I can think of how sad and pathetic it is that there are guys that would rather quit, instead of perhaps going back to the cage and breaking the rust off of the ability to possibly hit the other way instead.

Like I said, I typically enjoy Verducci’s writing and opinions, but this one was a total stinker.  Instead of banning the shift, how about baseball players collectively just get better at playing baseball, and learning to hit baseballs to more parts of the field except their pull side?  That, right there, would be some real Moneyball shit, in the sense of it being an underutilized strategy to exploit.  

I’d love to see an MLB squad rebuild, with a mentality of building a team of good spray hitters, and then when the stars align, they go on a 98-win season, dinky-hitting all their opponents to death and march through the playoffs and bust open the World Series with all sorts of drag bunts, opposite field singles and triples down the line.  And after a few years of other teams copying that game-breaking strategy, maybe Verducci will write an article about how opposite-field hitting should be outlawed.

90 Day Fiancé season 8 thoughts

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

It’s been a while since I wrote about 90 Day Fiancé, but then again it’s also been a while since I’ve actually watched an entire season from start to finish.  It’s not that I haven’t watched almost every season that’s been produced, it’s just that so often times, I fall off the wagon at some point, be it my life being busy, or the episodes aren’t always available on Plex or the TLCgo app when I’m ready to watch, but I haven’t watched a season from start to finish in a while until now.

Including the uncomfortable and cringey Tell All episodes, to which I have decided to spent a little bit of time to write about season 8, because seeing as how I actually watched it all, might as well share some thoughts about yet another successful season of one of the true anchors of TLC.

I think one of the most miraculous things about season 8 is that all across the board, the show actually managed to make ALL of the Americans and their friends and family seem like the assholes among each couple, while the mail-order spouses all somehow seem like the people us viewers end up feeling sympathy for throughout the season.

Usually in seasons past, there’s always one or two mail-order spouses who are clearly in the game for a green card, and/or are insufferable demons who make viewers scream at their screens at why some pathetic American schlub is putting up with it, and that they need to flex their leverage at the fact that they control the citizenship routes.  Like Mohamed or Anfisa, people who come from other countries who are miserable and easy to dislike.

But season 8 actually manages to execute, where all the Americans look like assholes or are the worse of each couple, and I’m left hoping that some of these people actually throw their hands up and go back to their home countries.  I’ll try to break it down by each couple, and maybe power rank by trainwreck-ability or something.

Continue reading “90 Day Fiancé season 8 thoughts” →

Tirty-Nine

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Among the few things that I afford myself to indulge in on my birthdays is that I often feel like writing something, if for anything at all, the fact that it is my birthday.  Otherwise, I make little deal about it, I rarely talk about it, and almost nobody at work knows it’s my birthday, nor do I have any real intention to bring it up.

Usually, around this time of year, I have this ironic sense of dread of something bad somewhere in the world occurring, like a bombing, a fire, or some sort of massive loss of human life, that has so often times taken place around my birthday every single year.  But over the last few years, and especially this one, there seems to be a massive shooting that occurs somewhere in the United States on a weekly basis, to where all the shooting incidents that have happened within the past week alone seems to overshadow the notion that anything turrible happening is limited to just the radius of days surrounding my birthday.

Needless to say, expecting something turrible to happen around my birthday has kind of lost its meaning over the last few years, because turrible shit seems to happen all the time throughout this god-forsaken country.

Narrowing down the world to just my own little concentrated space, things are certainly brighter and more positive, in spite of the fact that I loathe my job, and feel a little bit trapped and held hostage by the fact that no matter how much I want out, they still hold the ultimate trump card solely because of the paternity time that I am entitled to, and plan on utilizing when my second child is born later in the summer.

But speaking of children, I can’t really complain.  My first daughter is still basically everything I could have ever wanted in my offspring, and it’s a daily joy to spend time with her and watch her grow, develop, learn and become increasingly mobile and intelligent on a regular basis.

Life as a father and a husband is about everything I could have imagined it to be, and sometimes I still bring myself to a point of disbelief when I’m spending time with mythical wife and my child to know that this is where I am in life, and as much as my sister gives me grief about it, having taken so long, I am here at least now, and I take a little bit of comfort in knowing that I’ll have both of my kids before the age of 40, and knowing that my life will be mostly complete in that regard, is a pleasant thought.

New Father Brogging, #039

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27.5 inches.  That’s how high my daughter fell when she climbed out of her pack and play.

I’ve never felt as big of a failure as a parent than this incident, where barely 60 degrees behind me, my daughter managed to climb out of her pack and play and fall onto the kitchen floor, while I was preparing her dinner, chopping green beans.

Given how increasingly mobile she gets on a daily basis, I didn’t stop to consider that with walking would come climbing, and I’ve witnessed her trying to climb things already, so I don’t know why I didn’t even think that she wouldn’t do it in the pack and play, as she’s attempted everywhere else.

But instead, I was blissfully taking for granted that she would be safe in her pack and play, while I was preparing her dinner, and I naively positioned her to where she was not within my line of sight or even my periphery, so that she couldn’t reach and grab things on the counter or on the nearby shelf, not considering that I wouldn’t see her when she inevitably managed to get up and over the side railing of her enclosure.

The thud still resonates in my brain, and the delayed shock at turning and seeing her laying on her back on the floor, her own shock still just registering the fact that she bumped her head and the pain hadn’t kicked in yet.  I picked her up immediately, hoping this would be something that she would no-sell and impress me with pain tolerance that hopefully mirrored my own, but this was for naught, so much as she was really gearing up to let loose some shrieks of pain from having fallen 27.5 inches, roughly somewhere in the neighborhood of her own height.

Fortunately, save for an unsightly bruise, nothing seems to be that bad.  No signs of concussion, no signs of any breaks or serious injury, just a tender bruise for her, and a monumental amount of frustration, defeat and self-loathing for dad.

Obviously, with raising a child and growing up, scrapes, cuts and bruises are going to happen.  But we’ve gone a year without a tremendous number of those, which made me feel like I was probably doing something right, but all it took was a few minutes of taking my head out of the game, and taking safety for granted for all that equity to come crashing down, and me feeling like a horrible fucking parent for having let it happen.

Oh, Atlanta #819

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Long story short: cops execute some raids on a home on account of investigating a meth operation, unearth a motherlode of meth, but in the process also discover that the owners of the property are also running a cockfighting ring

There’s not a lot to really say about the situation; meth is dangerous, cockfighting is inhumane, both are highly illegal.  Cops had just cause to raid for one thing, find out that there’s a second thing going on in the process.  77 lbs. of meth, plus a bunch of pissed off chickens ready to kill motherfuckers.  Kinda fucked up on all accounts, no matter what way you look at it.

But what drew my attention in this whole story is that, as a former resident of South Fulton county, this is a region that I’m pretty familiar with.  The two raids happened at properties where the streets are disclosed, and the interesting thing about them is that they all occurred less than a mile away from the Fulton County South services center.

I’ve been to the services center more times than I’d like to have had in my life, because it’s the place where tags are issued, among other things, but the reason I point this out is that it’s also a place that at any given time, is crawling with police.  I don’t know the specifics, but I’m pretty certain there’s police training, some modicum of local court businesses going on, but the bottom line is that it’s basically a police station among other county-related operations.

Basically, this whole meth and cockfighting ring, was happening less than a mile away from a police station.  There’s a lot of context missing in the details, most notably time frames, so the jury’s out on whether it’s ironic or not to say, fucking brilliant.

But if I’m a betting man, I’d have to lean that there was probably a lot more meth produced and a lot of illegal cockfighting that occurred before any busts actually happen, because government is slow to act or react, plus South Fulton county is about as competent as a Walmart greeter is at stopping theft.

So cockfighting and meth happening just a stone’s throw away from a police station?  That’s an Oh, Atlanta post if there ever was one to come back with.