Tag: braves

I hope Sarasota looks forward to paying $140M for the Braves

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Because nobody seems to know any better: Sarasota County agrees to continue negotiations with the Atlanta Braves in regards to building a brand spanking new exclusive Spring Training facility estimated at $75-80 million dollars

Naturally the Braves are hoping to contribute nothing but $Free.99 towards this grandiose and unnecessary expenditure, while the (mostly) innocent public picks up the rest of the tab.  And as 100% of sporting venues have proven, the initial estimate is always incorrect, and the safe rule of thumb is to double the estimate, and that’s closer to the end result than originally intended.  It’s a whole lot less disappointing when they actually fail to exceed an estimate, albeit revised and deliberately inflated one.

Best part is?  If this stupid and pointless project actually takes off and the Braves get their new Spring Training complex, with public funds doing most (all) of the lifting, the Braves might not even have to make the financial records public.  This is often being called something along the lines of the “Pitbull clause,” since apparently rapper Pitbull found some loophole that allowed for him to privatize the financial records to a some tourism event or whatever, but the bottom line is that because Pitbull did it, it leans to believe that the Atlanta Braves might be able to do it as well.  And what’s more trustworthy than taking measures to eliminate transparency and hiding records that should be public, if being paid by the public?

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Ohhhhhh-ohhh-oh-oh-owwwnnneeeeddd

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

If you don’t know what the Tomahawk Chop is, take a few seconds to educate yourself on what it sounds like.  Now imagine changing the last part of the chant to a drawn out “owned” instead of an “ohhhhh.”

Because that’s what it sounds like when the Atlanta Braves organization gets owned.

At long last, the national nightmare of ambivalent taxpayers getting fleeced to build expensive, egregious and unnecessary stadiums, complexes and training fields for the Atlanta Braves has run into some resistance, for a change.  The Collier County board of commissioners unanimously voted 5-0 in favor of NO to the Atlanta Braves’ want to build a new spring training facility in the Naples area; naturally, at the expense of local taxpayers, and not out of their own deep, deep pockets.

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The Atlanta Braves are basically Kurt Angle

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

What other shitty things can they do: Cobb County to evict and demolish anywhere from 15~30 existing homes in order to create a four-lane road to help alleviate traffic, namely that will be caused by the arrival of the Atlanta Braves

In the late 90s, Kurt Angle arrived in the WWF.  Back then, nobody really knew what was going to happen when he showed up on television, and it was clear that creative had a general idea, but they had to see how the fans would react before they could really move forward.  So Angle came out, started winning his matches, celebrating a little on the excessive side, and started cutting promos about his “three I’s.”  As hoped, the fans soured on his character, and Kurt Angle headed down the path of becoming an insufferable heel.

However, in spite of the fact that he had successfully drawn the ire of the fans, and was on the heel end of the spectrum, his character was obnoxiously square, acting like he was the best guy on the planet, and insisted that he was a respectable, admirable, wholesome wrestler that everyone’s kids should look up to.

That’s basically what the Atlanta Braves are now, with the help of the greedy bureaucrats that run Cobb County acting like Creative, to help churn this heel of an organization along, while they act like they’ve done nothing wrong.  They’re Kurt Angle.

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Happy trails, Turner Field

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Sandwiched in between two hectic weeks between two, two-week vacations were a lot of catching up on sleep, catching up at work, catching up on home maintenance, and my favorite, catching up on paying bills.  In spite of the fairly busy schedule with not a lot of free time, there was one thing that I felt very strongly about wanting to do: catch one more game at Turner Field.

Now I’ve made no secret of my general disdain for the Braves organization and their pursuit of cash-greener pastures in Marietta.  I’m still disappointed that the Braves failed to lose 100 games for the second straight year in spite of superior draft positioning.  And I still feel disgust every time I read anything about blatantly transparent greed and corruption involving the development of ScumTrust Park.

But this is a time to set all those loathsome feelings aside, and to take an evening to enjoy a place where I’ve spent countless nights watching baseball, at various points of my baseball fandom.

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Failing at failing

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

When the Braves started the season 0-9, I thought “oh man, this is the year.”  This was the year I would sit back and watch the Atlanta Braves drop 100 games, and I would feel some sadistic satisfaction that the organization that chose to deliberately flip the bird to all their collective fans in exchange for dirty money, would watch large numbers of said collective fans shake their heads in not mad, just disapproval.

I felt good when they finished the month of April at 5-18.  I felt even better when they finished May with a record of 15-36, with more than twice the losses than they had wins.  Things were even looking good when the Braves hobbled into the All-Star break at a paltry 31-58 record, a putrid win percentage of .348.

Now a .467 winning percentage is nothing to really boast about, but that’s what the Braves have played since the All-Star break, and at the time I’m writing this, they’ve gone 29-33 since the break.  They’re sitting at 60-91 with 11 games to play, and even a .467 team would have difficulty in going 2-9 and securing the unholy 100-loss season. 

The math simply does not favor the failure.

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The Gwinnett Braves have bad attendance?  YOU DON’T SAY

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

About as easy to predict as rain in Florida – the Gwinnett Braves suffer average attendance drop for the fourth straight year

Sometimes I wonder at what point will people see beyond all the rah-rah rhetoric about how the Atlanta Braves and all their owned affiliates are good for economies, communities and are actually burdens and ballasts to towns that weren’t exactly unanimously ecstatic about their presences?  Will a player have to kill someone?  I mean, Braves players have been busted in various forms of domestic abuse, and nobody seems to sour on the organization.  The organization has fleeced pretty much every small town in which their minor league affiliates exist in, as well as the future home of the big club.  When will people realize that baseball isn’t just America’s Pasttime, but also a cold, calculated, greedy, money-grubbing business that often acts like a leech on the places they invade?

But anyway, about as sure as the sun rises in the morning, the Gwinnett Braves are struggling to draw people to their ballpark.  I mean, who would have thought a minor league ballpark that’s barely 60 miles away from the major league parent, with ticket costs equivalent to major league prices and has a staunch no-outside food policy unlike the parent, would suffer weak attendance numbers?  I mean, who wouldn’t want to see Sean Kazmar instead of Freddie Freeman, or whenever a superstar visiting player like Clayton Kershaw or Andrew McCutchen comes to Turner Field?

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Oh boy, twenty whole minutes!

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Game-changer: Atlanta Braves change start time for weeknight games at Great White Flight Park from 7:10 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. intending to help alleviate traffic

This is hilarious.  The Braves actually think twenty whole minutes is going to make a modicum of difference when it comes to traffic in and surrounding the I-75/I-285 intersection.  The top end of I-285 is already the worst traffic in the city on a regular basis, and maybe starting the game at 8:30 would be when traffic actually might die down, but there’s no guarantee then either.

There was this one time I was working in Sandy Springs.  I dawdled into later hours on a regular basis, so that I could milk extra hours, and I was interested in a girl that worked there.  But I would leave the office routinely around 7:00-7:30, because I already knew how bad the traffic was around 5-6 p.m. after work, and I figured it wouldn’t be as bad then.

Combining the asinine metered on-ramps and the fact that I-285 is I-285, it would take me over 20 minutes just to get on the highway, much less crawl the six miles from entering the highway to get to where ScumTrust Park is going to exist.

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