Tag: comparison

This is what we statistic enthusiasts like to call, a small sample size

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

The Athletic conducted an anonymous MLB player poll, and among the topics was a query of where would you like to play if . . .

if money, rosters were not a factor

That’s a pretty big fucking if, if you ask me, because when the day is over, the only thing that matters to baseball players, much less 98% of professional athletes, is money.

But anyway, a whopping overwhelming majority of responders to the survey, said that they would want to join the Atlanta Braves, in a hypothetical world where money and rosters were not a factor.  Obviously, I say such with dripping sarcasm in case it’s hard to pick it out in soulless text, because only 86 total players responded to the survey and just 12.7% of players said that they would want to play for the Braves, which in doing the math, is just but 10.922 players who said that they would want to play for the Braves in a magical hypothetical world where money (and rosters) were not a factor.

All the same, that 12.7% was higher than all other teams in the league, so obviously the Braves who aren’t getting many wins on the field these days, is taking any W’s they can get anywhere else in the stratosphere, including a meaningless survey talking about fantasy realities.  Even if it is basically the mother of small sample sizes, which is a phrase that is often thrown around in the sports analytical community, like when a pitcher goes 5-0 to start the season and people start anointing them the Cy Young Award winner for the season.

That being said, I don’t buy it for two seconds that if the entire league were to be mandatorily surveyed, that the Braves would come out on top.  There’s a reason in reality why the lion’s share of marquee talents have gone to the Dodgers, Phillies, Yankees, Mets and anyone else who’s been shown to have a willingness to back up a Brinks truck to coveted free agents over the last few years, because when the day is over, money is a factor, often times the only factor, that determines where players in any sport, usually go.

The Braves are a notoriously cheap organization that is allergic to free agents, and the only ones who typically get the big bucks are homegrown talents that are often times seduced into signing early-big money deals that are often times well below the market value if they were to hang tight until free agency, preying on their youth, inexperience and promises of be rich now, instead of be fuck-you-rich later.

They’re an organization that has been historically funny with the money since Ted Turner ceded ownership to Liberty Media which reorganized to their very own Atlanta Braves corporation which clearly makes it way easier to hide their finances from prying eyes, and since this has been the case, the entire organization has prioritized fiscal goals over sport ones, ignoring the fact that nothing rakes in the big bucks than winning championships.

It’s a team that’s so drunk on their own Kool-Aid of tradition, lineage and history, that they’re handcuffed by their own doing to making any sort of change, or steps towards forward progress and trying new things.  It’s what makes them the mother of risk-averse, and they’re always convinced that the answer lies somewhere within the organization, as opposed to the idea that there just might be, some really talented players out there who exist in other organizations.

In the rare instances where players do consider variables like location, the City of Atlanta isn’t really the most appealing place to make a home of, unless you’re already born and bred country, and/or are guys at a stage of their lives where they want to actually think about things important to raising families, then maybe Atlanta, more importantly the bevy of suburbs north of the city like Alpharetta, Johns Creek and Milton where rich athletes tend to scurry up to, would be a positive.

But if I’m a younger cat like Trea Turner, Juan Soto, Mike Clevenger or Adley Rutschman, wanting a little bit of life in the city, I don’t think Atlanta would be really that appealing.

And the reality is that the Braves are a team that are so caught up in money and roster, that there’s no way any upper-tier talents that are on the edge of possibly making a move, would realistically consider the Braves, over organizations that are committed to winning and willing to open wallets, doors and opportunities, because lord knows we’ve seen in reality, just how many players have squeezed their way onto the Dodgers and Phillies over the last few years, like an Indian or Japanese subway car, and teams like that, always make things work, versus throwing in the towel at the 7th hour and saying we can’t compete.

Either way, this was a cute little sample size scenario that clearly triggered me into vomiting out a bunch of words of the disdain that can only come from a fan of the team, about how the Braves realistically couldn’t be the organization that randomly anonymous players in the aether would actually want to play for, on a grander scale.

Not a fuckin’ chance.

There are poor teams, teams that spend, and The Braves Way™

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I was thinking one morning before I started making breakfast for the kids, about how the Braves had lost yet another game to the lowly Nationals, while the Phillies had won another game, adding one more game in the standings over Atlanta.  There’s no shortage of shady remarks I could spout, that only come from the type of fan who loves a team to where they have absolutely nothing but snarky vitriol for them, but instead, I actually had what I thought was a great visual representation of how I felt the Braves operated in the MLB landscape.

There’s a scene in the Game of Thrones television show, where Littlefinger smugly tries to educate Cersei Lannister that knowledge is power, only for her to immediately command her guards to grab him and slit his throat, before calling them off, and retorting that power is power.  Littlefinger is an arrogant smarmy fuck throughout the series, and it’s always a treat to see someone put him in his place, because it unfortunately does not happen that often.

The Braves are Littlefinger.  They operate in this insulated bubble where they think they’re smarter than all the other teams in Major League Baseball, and are quick to congratulate themselves on irrelevant accolades such as profit, revenue and all things that pertain to how much money they make from all the schmucks who throw money at them.  The unspoken part is concurrently how little they re-invest back into the team itself, that ultimately is the product that is meant to generate all that currency in some shape or form.

They are always convinced that the organization has all the parts they need in order to contend for a World Series, despite the fact that they only have the one from 2021 that was the mother of hot streak luck but then again what World Series winning squad isn’t the same?

The Braves are tremendously risk-averse to the point where they basically take no risks at all, mainly in the arena of paying a free agent or trading some prospects for a sure-thing good player, and year after year, their biggest weakness is exposed, and they get bounced from the playoffs in the NLDS.

Meanwhile, all the other contenders in baseball are Cersei and her guards, who represent teams that have their own intelligence in their own rights, but are either less risk averse, or are willing to open up their copiously overflowing wallets because baseball is a massively fucking profitable business venture, or worse off for the Braves, both.

Non-fans of teams like the Dodgers, Yankees and Phillies are quick to criticize how much money that these teams are spending on free agents and contract extensions, but the proof is in the pudding; all of them are at the top of the standings currently, and are leaps and bounds in the best positions to reach the World Series.

Sometimes you have to just stop trying to outsmart everyone, because when everyone is playing chess at the same time, you just have to brute force and fuck everyone else with some money and demonstrate that power is power.

As much as I criticize the Braves, the truth of the matter is that they are a great organization.  General manager Alex Anthopolous is a sharp guy who has lucked into some really fruitful moves that didn’t really sound impressive on paper, but paid out in dividends when they worked out, but it’s obvious that even he’s working with his hands partially tied behind his back, from the stingy purse strings closing the wallet that he’s denied access to.

With the knowledge that the team does have, they’re competent at fielding a team that’s routinely good enough to make the playoffs, especially now that there are two wild cards, but they constantly run out of gas and/or have their weaknesses exposed, and crash out at their routinely low ceiling.

But imagine just how great the Braves could routinely become if they just stopped being so fucking Braves-ey and sobered up from the bullshit The Braves Way™ Koolaid they remain so drunk on.  As soon as Spencer Strider went down for the year, pick up Trevor Bauer for the peanuts he’s asking for just for a chance to pitch in MLB.  As soon as Ronald Acuña went down for the year, pick up the fucking phone and start making some calls, and not assume that an outfield of Jarred Kelenic and Adam Duvall at the corners could cut it.  If the team had Bauer, then Schwellenbach or Waldrep could become a valuable trade chip to get someone useful now.

Fire someone; on any other team in any other sport, a slump like the one the Braves are going through usually results in someone getting fired, regardless of the obvious fact that it’s out of their control that the players aren’t playing well.  If the team doesn’t want to axe Brian Snitker, then fire Kevin Seltzer, the hitting coach.  Strong arm Chipper Jones to be the interim hitting coach that fans have wanted to see the hitting savant become since the second he retired from the game.

Stop being so afraid of fucking rentals.  Stop being so fucking cheap.  Stop believing The Braves Way™ is the only way, because rest assured, it is not.  No matter how much I’d prefer power to be power over knowledge, at the very end of the day, baseball, much less any sport, is a crapshoot, once playoffs begin.  But if I’m a betting man, the teams that employ more power, tend to be the ones primed to be standing once the postseason begins, and with the way things are now, the Braves and all their Littlefinger knowledge sure as fuck don’t seem primed for anything other than an even earlier postseason exit, in the wild card series; if they even make it at all.

It’s fun watching all the non-sport fan normies get up in arms over Caitlin Clark

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

It’s safe to say that I’ve been watching sports for a pretty long time.  My fandoms ebb and flow, and at various times it’s safe to say that it fluctuates on what sport I am favoriting the most, but when it comes down to it, I have spent an inordinate amount of time in my life watching sports.  Baseball, basketball, football and even a little bit of soccer and hockey, I’ve watched enough sports in my life to generally know what I’m talking about, as well as to have seen some things, that only other sports fans of an extended duration really know what I’m talking about.

If there’s one thing that’s been pretty consistent throughout the history of sports, is that whenever a hotshot player arrives at a new level of competition, there’s usually a degree of testing that they go through and endure, be it from their opponents, peers, rivals and even their own teammates, since peers, rivals and teammates aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive.

When Michael Jordan, Peyton Manning and Derek Jeter were drafted and reported to duty in their early years, all of them went through a period of time where they were physically and mentally tested by everyone.  In practices, scrimmages or spring trainings, their presence was a threat to veterans on their own teams, and ain’t nobody want to lose their job to any young guns whose ears are still wet from the showers.

Against opponents, they were bullied, fouled, tackled, cheap shot and went to verbal warfare from their opponents, who wanted to see if they could exert some power of intimidation or get inside their heads and throw them off their games.

And they would go through these types of rituals and experiences numerous times throughout their early years, until they earned the general respect of those around them, to which the behaviors would taper off mostly, unless they were weak-willed and demonstrated that they could be rattled.

In other words, everything that Caitlin Clark has been going through since the start of the WNBA season, with the hard fouls, the shit talking, the snipes from opponents in the media; this is not racism, this is not jealousy, this is not any form of discrimination.  This is normal, this is ordinary, this is nothing that professional athletes in any sport of any gender have not had to endure themselves at early parts of their careers.

But let’s not tell that to the legions of media and overnight women’s basketball fans who have never been sports fans in their lives until Caitlin Clark had ignited their imaginations, and are up in arms over the supposed rough treatment that she’s getting in the WNBA.  It’s partially their fault that they’re so blind to it, because it really hasn’t been since Caitlin Clark that this many people have been interested in the WNBA at all, and for everyone who is now claiming to be fans of women’s hoops, where they fuck were they when Lisa Leslie and Rebecca Lobo were launching the entire league, and when Britney Griner and Sabrina Ionescu were leading the quiet charge of the current generation?

Caitlin Clark is undoubtedly the most important player the league has come across in a long time, and this generalization is not lost on all the other girls in the league who have had to deal with the ridicule and general disrespect people have had for the WNBA in all the years prior to the arrival of Clark.  It’s natural for them to want to welcome the rookie with some tough love, and size up the nuclear hot shot who’s being unofficially hailed as the flagbearer for the entire gender’s sport, because if she demonstrates any weaknesses, then perhaps she’s not the right person for the job.

The hard fouls and the criticism have nothing to do with racism, and nothing to do with any general discrimination.  There may be some jealousy involved, but I can’t blame anyone for being jealous at least a little bit, considering the league has been around for over 20 years, and it wasn’t until Caitlin Clark that people have been taking notice.

And if Caitlin Clark endures the season with a modicum of grace, respect, and an attitude of shut up and play ball, she’s going to be just fine, and the rest of the league will take their foot off the gas at trying to break her for the sake of breaking her, and entrust her with the hope that she can help bring growth and positive change to the league and sport as a whole.

And as for all the normies, welcome to sports.  This is nothing out of the ordinary.

#TRYHARDSZN2024: Catching unicorns

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Avdohnk: Teen from Modesto, California goes 21 for 34 in college applications, including four of the Ivies

Seeing as how the general culmination of #TRYHARDSZN acceptance days are now in the past, all that’s really left is to just scour the landscape of the world, searching for #TRYHARDs who are standouts in a very competitive field.  In other words, schools and the news are mostly looking for kids that can help fill their Affirmative Action-like quotas of trying to represent diversity, but not realizing that by deliberately being so selective and obvious, that they’re kind of being more racist than if they weren’t #TRYHARDING so hard.

But what we have here is interesting, because we have a #TRYHARD that is a female of Iraqi descent, which I have to imagine is probably something of a unicorn when it comes to schools in America getting to put a checkmark next to in their diversity results.  It probably definitely helps that this student’s family immigrated to the United States some 30 years ago, which most likely helped them get their foot in the door before America got really, really afraid of brown people.

All the same, she’s still a female of Iraqi descent, which is impressive coming from a culture that basically sees females as third-rate, and of less importance than like, fourth-cousins from their uncle’s side, or cows, and I’m surprised that she didn’t go 34 for 34 in her college applications, because I imagine the pool in which to pull Iraqi females from is probably not even shallow, but a damp spot on the asphalt on a sunny day.

The funniest thing about this particular story is her narrative of opening of response letters from all the colleges, and how her family deliberately saved Harvard for last:

We opened up all the Ivy Leagues one by one and my parents were like, okay, save Harvard for last. We opened Harvard and my mom started crying and she was like telling all of her friends in Iraq, like, my daughter just got into Harvard,”

So it sounds like Harvard was the ultimate goal, as it is for basically every Asian parent on the face of the planet – but then the article goes to explain that she’ll be headed to Yale in the fall instead, with no context or justification for why she’s switching so abruptly like that.  It’s not that such is really any of our business, but it does come off as shoddy journalism to tease the whole wanting to go to Harvard angle, but then to just drop that she’s going to Yale instead.

Either way, another thing that’s interesting is the fact that this story actually mentioned the failure rate of this student; most of the time, these #TRYHARD stories are quick to round to the nearest high number, or just say the number of acceptances flat, but despite the fact that this girl got into 21 schools, she also failed to get into 13 of them.

Considering four of them were Ivies, other than perhaps the other four Ivy League schools, it leads to wonder what schools would turn this girl down, not knowing that they had already gotten into Harvard and Yale among other prestigious schools.  Like it would be funny if like Cal State-Fullerton or Long Beach State were all like “ehhh, nah, pass” while Stanford, Yale and Harvard all said yes.

Anyway, at this point, I think I’m done with writing about #TRYHARDSZN2024.  I think I’ve proven my point that there are a tremendous amount of #TRYHARDs that come out of the woodwork nowadays, and that most of them seem to be doing it not so much for genuine consideration for their futures, as much as it’s just a big dick Keeping Up With the Joneses competition to see who can get into the most schools, amass the most amount of scholarship money, and generally be the most obnoxiously insufferable overachievers there are, when the vast majority of these #TRYHARDs are exploiting some unfair advantages that not everyone in the country would be entitled to.

Short of some exceptional stories, we’ll mark the female Iraqi Unicorn as the closing chapter to #TRYHARDSZN2024.  Until next year (maybe)!

X-Men ’97: the speedrun for those with ADHD

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I just finished watching X-Men ’97 on Disney+ and hoo boy do I have a lot of opinions.  I don’t quite really know specifically where I stand on it on how good I thought it was, but this is where I’m hoping that writing out my thoughts might help me come to a conclusion.

This is also where I disclaim that there is the possibility that I give some things away by virtue of feeling unable to avoid specificity but hopefully I don’t, but it’s not like I have any readers at all, so this is just old habit of trying to be courteous when I really don’t have to be.

1.
First of all, regardless of where I land on my overall opinion, one thing is very clear in my opinion: the show operated at a breakneck pace, and there was basically no time to breathe throughout the season as the show went from storyline into the next into the next and into the next without any pauses in the action, minus one specific Jubilee mini-arc.

The show tackled numerous actual storylines that I could recall from the days when I was a massive X-Men reader, but it was almost laughable at just how little time was dedicated to what were epic arcs in the comics, rendered to literally 5-6 minutes in the show.  Like for example Inferno, with Madelyne Pryor becoming the Goblin Queen; this was an epic event that transcended the X-universe and even bled into other Marvel properties, but in X97, Inferno literally starts and ends within a ten minute window, leaving me with this great big feeling of, wtf.

One of the most iconic moments from the Fatal Attractions storyline was tucked into one of the last episodes of the season, and given the sheer lack of context and time given to everything else, honestly probably didn’t even need to occur, but by this point of the show, they were clearly so determined to cram in as many X-storylines as possible and using as little airtime as possible to do so, so here we went.

The best way I would describe X97 is exactly what the title of this post is – it’s X-Men comics presented in a medium that caters to those most likely with ADHD and are incapable of sitting through multiple seasons worth of storytelling to get around several epic story arcs when they can all be crammed into the confines of a ten-episode season.  I used to think that when I was a kid, I probably was an undiagnosed ADD kid because of my sheer struggles to pay attention and listen and follow directions, but after watching X97, I don’t really think that that could’ve been the case.

2.
The X-Men, and mutants in general seemed to have been nerfed as fuck throughout this show.  All throughout the season, mutants were getting their asses handed to them by humans that had Sentinel tech, as well as Sentinels themselves, in contrast to the original 1992 series where Sentinels were about as capable as the Putty Patrol from Power Rangers at neutralizing their intended targets.

Continue reading “X-Men ’97: the speedrun for those with ADHD” →

MLB’s Japanese Player Fetish

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

This has been a topic that I’ve had on my list of things that I wanted to write about, that I just haven’t really been able to bring to fruition.  Either I burn myself out on writing about high school tryhards applying to every school under the sun, or I just don’t feel like I have sufficient time to write about it, but it’s definitely a topic that I feel like I could go off about, but for whatever reason, I just haven’t had the chance to do so until now.

But it’s been something that’s been brewing over the last few years, and this year it’s definitely come to a boiling point about just how cringey MLB has become when it comes to their obvious opinion and feelings when it comes to Japanese players.

Sure, Shohei Ohtani is an incredible specimen of a baseball player, and I do think there is legitimate argument that we might be able to call him the best player of all time (for this generation), and that he’s more impressive than Babe Ruth, Hank Aaron, Albert Pujols, combined.  Statistically he does bring a lot to the table, but one thing that he does not bring to the table that MLB insists that he does, is the fact that he is, Japanese.

His ethnicity has nothing to add to any argument over his place in baseball history, but MLB is so rapid quick when it comes to injecting it into the narrative, and it’s not like those who follow baseball aren’t already aware that Japan is the de facto #1 country in the world when it comes to baseball talent, seeing as how they’ve won the vast majority of Olympic golds and World Baseball Classics when it comes to international competition over the last 20 years.

But MLB does it anyway, because for whatever reason, over the last 20 years, they’ve become an organization that is definitely going through a serious weeaboo phase in their history where Japan = #1, and everything, including their own assets are inferior in comparison.  Ohtani is definitely a worthy blue pill to cause this phenomenon within the organization, but the ensuing trickle-down effect when it comes to the yearly migration of a handful of Japanese players and the hype and fanfare they get when they come to America is downright cringey.

Yoshinobu Yamamoto making more money than Roger Clemens and Nolan Ryan ever made in their careers, combined is an egregious overpay and fellating sign of kowtowing to their Japanese overlords. 

Everytime Shota Imanaga throws another scoreless inning, bean counters for Elias and MLB blow their loads at being able to throw out another tweet about how low his ERA is, seemingly completely ignorant to how the league will adjust on him harder than the stock market once the scouting report on him is complete. 

Seiya Suzuki is by-and-large a perfectly good, above average player, but the way MLB expounds his occasional positive contributions is like they’re talking about the second-coming of Ichiro.

The season is barely a quarter of the way through, and there’s already talks about the next Japanese overlord, some guy named Munetaka Murakami.  But few outside of the diehard fans of their respective teams are bothering to get excited over any prospects on their own farms.

The point of all this is that it’s extremely clear that MLB has a pretty raging boner fetish on Japanese players right now.  I can practically hear the gong and racist Asian theme in my head every time I see an MLB channel or MLB beat writer lose their shit over something a Japanese player does, as if their mythical powers from the magic Orient were why Yamamoto had a 5.2 inning outing where he gave up no runs, while Max Fried throws a complete game shutout in the middle of an era where complete games are becoming as scarce as no-hitters.

Much has been made of Ohtani’s 2024, and how because he doesn’t have to worry about doing any pitching at all, he can focus on being the demigod of hitting he’s believed to be.  Every single home run he hits, is answered by some god-awful MLB tweet fellating him for doing what he’s going be paid $700 million dollars to do; meanwhile, Marcell Ozuna of the Braves is leading the majors in home runs currently, when just a year ago, fans were clamoring for him to be cut from the team and eat the salary hit, and MLB barely takes notice when he maintains his home run lead.

It’s just funny how an entire organization like Major League Baseball becomes no different than myself and lots of my nerdier friends in my life have been at certain points of their lives, when it comes to going through a Japan #1 phase.  I look back at that time of my life with rolled eyes and a little bit of embarrassment, but the difference is that I’m not a publicly known, forward facing, billions of dollars organization, looking like a collective cringey weeb in front of the rest of the world, and I look forward to the day when MLB grows out of it, because it’s really fucking embarrassing watching them spooge all over themselves over Japanese players.

#TRYHARDSZN2024: When going 11/11 just doesn’t seem special anymore

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Sauce: Michigan high school senior gets into all eleven of the schools she applied to, including 5/5 on Ivies

Okay, so I’ve been doing this for this #TRYHARDSZN and I’ve gotten to the point where success stories like this just don’t really seem like that big of a deal anymore.  Regardless of the fact that she got into five Ivy League schools, all I really think about is why she only applied to five of the Ivy Leagues and why not all eight of them?

What did Penn, Columbia and Dartmouth not do to make this #TRYHARD omit them from her applying spree, because I have to imagine that someone who’s applying to five Ivy League schools may as well shoot for all eight of them, and hedge their bets and go for among the rarest of feats, which is getting the Ivy Sweep which is an actual term borne from the fact that there are so many #TRYHARDs on a yearly basis that try to get into all of them, presumably for the bragging rights and not because of anything else.

But other than the fact that I’m getting tired of stories of #TRYHARDs and am tiring of writing about them, frankly a story like this one where a chica goes 11 for 11 in applications and among them are five of the Ivy League schools, just doesn’t really seem special anymore.

No feigned arrogance for me to dissect, no reports of cumulative scholarship money earned for me to point out that the schools they applied to must’ve been low-tier, just a hard working teenager who only abused the application system just a little bit, and got into all of the schools she applied to.  Sure, I could say that in a real-world scenario where she had to pay for her own application fees, she’s probably looking at somewhere around $3,000 if I had to guestimate, but I’ve already made that observation about 15 other times from all the other #TRYHARDs I’ve chronicled this #SZN.

They’re planning on going to Yale.  So was Zack Morris, and look what happened there.

So we’ll leave it at that, congratulations to a #TRYHARD for getting into all these high-tier schools, but in the grand scheme of the game of trying hard, she’s but a mere blip in the bucket of #TRYHARDs applying to everything under the sun and probably not paying anything for it.