Tag: fail

TIL: Mercedes Mone’s creative control clause

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I didn’t watch AEW’s Forbidden Door (3) pay-per-view because one, who in the world actually pays for a ppv anymore these days, two, the card seemed entirely way too predictable, and I called like 90% of the card correctly and 100% of the singles matches, and three, there were probably 3-5 other things that I’d rather have done with that time in my life instead.

Naturally, as stated, the card was ridiculously predictable, and much like the years before this one, almost all of the New Japan guys and all of the CMLL guys from Mexico took the losses in their matches, and for some reason, AEW keeps feeding Orange Cassidy to the next big thing in New Japan, with it being the very obvious Zack Sabre, Jr. who was one of two NJPW guys to actually come out with a W.

For obvious business reasons, it was a foregone conclusion that Jon Moxley was going to drop the belt to Tetsuya Naito, because fuck if NJPW would allow a guy in another promotion to continuously hold their top prize any longer than this, but good for Mox to be able to lay claim that he’s held World championships in the WWE, AEW and NJPW among numerous other titles he’s held in his career.

But if there were any other guarantees on the night, it was that Mercedes Mone was without any question, going to defeat Stephanie Vaquier and walk out with the NJPW Strong women’s championship, and be a double champion.  I mean really, I don’t like to bet on things, but if I knew of a safe and legal way to gamble, I would’ve felt comfortable dropping like $500 Mercedes was going to take the W in their match.  I mean the NJPW Strong women’s championship was basically created for her, and if not for a Shrek-green Willow Nightingale legit injuring her, she probably would’ve been the NJPW Strong champion when she debuted with AEW.

Back to the title of this post though, it was afterward through scuttlebutt did I learn that Mercedes Mone actually has creative control baked in to her AEW contract.  Obviously, this doesn’t look like anything to anyone who doesn’t follow professional wrestling, but basically it means that Mercedes Mone has legitimate legal veto power over the way she is booked in the company.

In other words, if she shows up to the arena one day, and Tony Khan says to her, “Hey Mercedes, I’m going to have you lose tonight to Kris Statlander and drop the TCM belt to her” she could actually say “no, that doesn’t work for me brother” and force TK to go back to the drawing board and book a better scenario for her, and there’s really nothing that he can do about it.  He can’t flex his position as owner of the company or that he’s the boss, because he gave her creative control in her contract.

For context, there are only two other instances I can think of where wrestlers had any degree of creative control in their contracts, which was Hulk Hogan during his time in WCW, where he had full creative control, and where he has been alleged and accused of various instances where he utilized it in order to maintain a high-stature within the company.  The other was Bret Hart, who had a degree of creative control baked into his WWE contract if he were ever to be on his way out, so that the company couldn’t bury him on the way out and make him look like a putz going to another employer.

Hart really didn’t get to use his control due to the Montreal Screwjob, but Hogan, as mentioned was alleged to have flexed his power numerous times throughout his WCW tenure, and there are many stories and accounts out there from former colleagues and wrestlers who claim that he did.

What I’m getting at is that it’s a really dangerous sword to give to just anyone, because there’s never any guarantee that someone with it, won’t just go into business for themselves and ensure that they’re always in a position of looking strong and prominent, and suppress the rise of any potential partners to draw money with.

And yet, Mercedes Mone has creative control in her deal.  I don’t care enough to dive deeper to find out just how much of it she has, or what if any conditionals exist with the deal, but the point is she still has it, and I can’t help but feel that that’s a really dangerous thing to give to a person like her, whom for all intents and purposes I do like as a performer, but I also think she’s kind of a spoiled entitled brat who has demonstrated a tendency to cry foul and walk away when things haven’t looked too great for her character’s portrayal.

I mean, even before I found out that she had creative control, I would’ve bet a large sum of money that she was going to beat Vaquier, but now the perception is murky on if it happened because it was the best business decision, or if it happened because she pulled her CC card and made it happen.

Even before finding out she had CC, I had already fantasy booked her future where she would undoubtedly go on a blet collecting saga, because that seems to be the well that AEW and TK seem to repeatedly dip into in order to cement guys as legends, like they did with Kenny Omega, and also did with FTR, and it seems like they’re doing the same with Mercedes Mone.

Without question, she’ll probably collect one of the women’s titles from Ring of Honor, whether it’s taking down Athena for the ROH’s women’s title, or perhaps she’ll keep her sights on television titles, and be the one to part the ROH Women’s TV title from Billie Starkz.  And then when Stephanie Vaquier comes back for a rematch, she’ll probably demand that it can’t be for free, and that she needs to put her CMLL Women’s championship on the line for a shot to get the NJPW Strong women’s blet back, and then collect a fourth belt.

And as long as AEW has their open door policy with NJPW, this keeps the chances alive that Mercedes will go on to re-capture the IWGP Women’s championship, or maybe she’ll stealthily slide her way into the partnering Stardom promotion, and start hoovering up blets there too.

Eventually, it culminates with her setting her sights on Toni Storm and the AEW Women’s championship, and despite the fact that I think Storm has been the legitimately best thing in the entire company, all it takes is a little bit of flexing of that CC clause, and she’ll complete the god-tier run of collecting blets.

Would it be best for business?  Probably not.  But when you give an inmate creative control, you put yourself in a position to where that doesn’t matter if that’s what they want.

And as a fan, that wouldn’t work for me.  Brother.

Bobby Bonilla Day presents the MLB All-Deferred Money Team 2024

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

It’s that time of the year again, where Bobby Bonilla collects a paycheck of $1,193,248 from the New York Mets (as well as a cool $500K from the Baltimore Orioles), despite the fact that he hasn’t played a game of Major League Baseball since 2001. 

As easy as it would be to simply clown on the Mets for locking themselves up into such a legendarily bad arrangement (among other things), the game has changed, and deferring money has become a pretty commonplace strategy employed by all sorts of teams who utilize it to circumvent salary constraints, avoiding the luxury tax threshold, or simply to offer up more money than should be necessary to greedy free agents.

After all, fewer things exemplify the white man’s business world than promising money so far down the line that it’s realistically possible that the people writing up the offers could actually have died of old age when it comes time for the terms of payment to come into play.

That being said, in the 2024 MLB season, there are 25 players making deferred money according to Spotrac records, from 15 different teams.  This is three more players and three more teams employing the buy now-pay later method than the year before.  Which also is a convenient number, because that’s basically a 25-man roster without a 26th injured reserve player.

Cumulatively, they are making $78.3M, which is a higher than the Oakland A’s (shocker) total payroll of $63.3M.  The Pittsburgh Pirates and Baltimore Orioles upped their payroll this year, so they wouldn’t be outspent by squad of non-players for a second year in a row.  But as far as cumulative 26-man roster values, $78.3M is high enough to eclipse literally a third of Major League Baseball, costing more than what the White Sox, Marlins, Nationals, Reds, Pirates, Rays, Indians Guardians, Rockies, Brewers and A’s are spending on their daily rosters.

The Washington Nationals once again take the crown for highest amount of deferred money at $18.5M.  This is heavily weighted by the annual $15M chunks they owe SP Max Scherzer between now until 2028, so it doesn’t look like the Nats are going to be relinquishing this crown, at least until the Dodgers begin making their annual payments for Shohei Ohtani’s deferred salary.

By the way, $18.5M is more than what NL MVP Ronald Acuña, Jr. is making this year, but the Nats will be getting zero home runs and zero stolen bases for their spend.

The Nationals may be one of the most frequent users of deferred money, but they’re no longer alone in this tactic of gaming the payroll system.  The Orioles, Cardinals and Brewers each had three players making deferred monies this season, and there are teams like the Phillies, Dodgers and Padres are waiting in the wings that will have their own Bonillas in the future as well.

Continue reading “Bobby Bonilla Day presents the MLB All-Deferred Money Team 2024” →

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.

Those who are quick to judge the shopping cart mom probably aren’t parents

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I came across this story about this California mom who apparently enraged The Internet because she proclaimed to rarely return shopping carts when she went shopping. 

My knee-jerk reaction was like, what a lazy Karen-ey bitch, but when I actually read a little bit about the context to the whole story, my stance softened, and I began to empathize a little bit of where she was coming from, because it’s come from the place of her being a parent, and if there’s one thing I’m observing in the world this day and age, is that at a glance, it feels like fewer people are having kids these days, therefore there are fewer parents as the generations move on, and therefore there are fewer people who can relate and understand to where this California mom is coming from.

Basically, her defense of her decisions to not always return carts to a designated area stems from the fact that when she’s out and about with her kids on her own, she doesn’t want to leave her kids unattended, even for 20-30 seconds, while she takes the cart back to a designated spot.  And as a parent, who definitely understands the abject horror of the reality that the world is full of a bunch of sick fucks out there whom you never know are ready to strike at any given point, I wholeheartedly understand where this mom is coming from.

Even with modern cars that auto-lock when the RFID chips in the keys or phone signals stray, there’s still a few second delay, and in this day and age all it takes is a few seconds for some twisted psycho to try to kidnap a kid, inflict harm or just be a plain sick fuck, and it’s my duty as a parent to protect my children from that kind of stuff, no matter how unlikely or one-in-a-million chances it might be.

Now personally, I’ve done both things, where I have not returned a cart to a designated spot, as well as returned my cart, while my kid(s) were in the car unattended.  When I didn’t return it, it’s not like I left it in the middle of the parking lot or have it cockblocking an entire parking space, I’ve typically moved it onto a curb or onto an island, out of the way as best as possible, and perhaps I’ve had been having a bad day or the weather is ass for why I didn’t return it, on top of the fact that my kids were secured in their seats and I didn’t want to leave them unattended.

And when I did return my cart while the kids were unattended, I would always be looking back ever two seconds keeping my eyes peeled for any prowling psychos, and I would only take my cart back as far as to where I could then heave it forward and make it into the galley before walking briskly back to my car to be with my kids again.

But the reality is that whether I’m at Costco, Publix, Target, or anywhere where I might need a shopping cart, I deliberately park away from other people, as well as often times, as close to a cart return as possible, so that I can return my cart conveniently close to my vehicle to where I don’t have to deal with the fear of leaving my kids unattended while I do something honorable.

Back to the point though, I have this feeling that all the white knights of the internet who are in defense of retailers and attacking this mom for her choice to not always return her cart, probably aren’t parents, specifically to kids of very young ages, like car seats and diapers or younger.

I can’t imagine that it’s not just Korea and Japan that are having falling birthrates, when I look at my own circles of people, and seeing people getting older, passing traditionally prime child-bearing ages, and making the choice to live on the rest of their lives without experiencing the journey of raising another generation of human beings.  I don’t fault anyone for making that choice, and I would appreciate the same courtesy for my own choice to have children.

But let’s face it, it’s people who don’t have kids who probably have more time than people who do have kids, to be on the internet and judging a mom who admits to committing the worst offense of history 1B, not returning shopping carts, because she’s afraid of the psycho world we live in, and doesn’t want to be the rare exception statistic where her kids get snatched because she’s trying to make some store employee’s life a little bit easier.

Her life could become a little bit easier by deciding to be more like me, and doing what I do, but sometimes that’s not always going to be the case.  Especially in a high-density region like California, and depending on when she goes to cart-utilizing stores, such parking options might not always be available.  But I for one am never going to judge a parent for doing something that might offend others, but stems from a place of being protective parent.

Now if she were to continue this behavior on excursions where she’s alone, then she’s being a lazy Karen-ey bitch, but as long as her mom hat is on, I’m not going to blow her up for it; I’d suggest she be more like me, but wanting to protect her kids isn’t something I will get up in arms over.

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.

I hereby propose Angel Hernandez Day

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

A rare day where every team in Major League Baseball got a win: oft-maligned, criticized and widely accepted as the worst umpire in MLB, Angel Hernandez declares retirement effective immediately

When it comes to baseball umpiring, if people know your name, it’s really not a good thing.  There’s a reason why baseball fans all seem to know the names of guys like Tim McClelland, Joe West, CB Bucknor, Laz Diaz, Eric Gregg and of course, Angel Hernandez; because these are guys who have at some point made such a colossal bad call or many bad calls, that they become infamous in baseball circles.

But Angel Hernandez, that guy was truly on a different planet when it came to bad umpiring.  As a (terrible) baseball fan myself who’s seen his share of live baseball games, once I realized who Angel Hernandez was, his name alone, when hearing that he was behind the plate, or even umping anywhere on the field, elicited a feeling of dread and concern that he was most definitely, going to fuck something up.  The real question was which team he was going to fuck it up for, and I could only hope that it wasn’t going to be the Braves or whatever team I might’ve been pulling for in a particular matchup.

Without fail, when he was on the bases, he would completely blow a check swing check, and call a strike on a batter who did not get the bat head past home plate, regardless of how much instant replay could refute it.  He’d call balks on pitchers who were as still as statues, and at least one line drive would land foul but he’d call fair.

But it was behind the plate in which Angel did the most damage, calling way more pitches than most of his peers, inaccurately balls or strikes.  Just searching for “Angel Hernandez” on YouTube would result in a parade of montage videos of him blowing calls, indiscriminately, and as the years have passed and vigilante watchers have been doing everything in their power to hold umpires more accountable, actual factual evidence of how bad Angel Hernandez was at his job has been materializing and painting the Picasso of just how terrible he was at umpiring baseball.

He has widely been regarded as the worst umpire there is not just by fans of baseball, but by the players themselves, whom there have been multiple years where Sports Illustrated takes anonymous surveys of umpire reviews, and it seemed like every time they did it, Angel Hernandez would be rated the worst.

Regardless of the ire, it’s widely believed that Angel himself loves the attention, and that he seems to be a proponent of the ideology that there’s no such thing as bad press, because the man has remained impervious throughout the decades of just how much he has been reviled by fans and players alike.

So needless to say, the recent development that Angel Hernandez is calling it quits and will cease to take anymore baseball fields immediately, has been widely regarded as the biggest win for MLB since like, returning from the 1994 strike.  You’ll never see a day in which fans of rival teams will collectively come together in sheer solidarity at their general happiness that Angel Hernandez is gone.  In locker rooms throughout the country are hitters who are overjoyed in knowing that Angel Hernandez won’t ever be behind the dish ready to call a pitch in the dirt, or a slider 8 inches off the plate a called third strike and ding their batting average.  Pitchers are exhaling with relief knowing that they won’t have one out of every pitches right down the middle called a ball because Angel was thinking about money instead of focusing on the pitch on hand.

So with all this being said, I would like to propose that every May 27th in Major League Baseball season moving forward, should be acknowledged as Angel Hernandez Day, in which everyone in baseball celebrates the departure of the worst umpire in history.  Like they do on Jackie Robinson Day where everyone wears #42, on Angel Hernandez Day, everyone could wear #55, or whatever his primary umpire number was.  Or shit, even just retire the #55 for umpires in honor and good riddance of Angel Hernandez.

Obviously, this would never happen, because MLB is too high-horsey to allow themselves to get a little petty, but if there were ever a guy they’d like to dis-honor, it would be Angel Hernandez, who has attempted to sue his employer numerous times, claiming racial discrimination.  Obviously, the man never brought any real evidence to prove it, and the suits have always been thrown out, but considering as part of his retirement, there’s a cash settlement, I think realistically speaking, Angel has been continuing to work over the last decade, solely to stay in the game of trying to sue MLB, and with all of his suits losing, and with the increasing scrutiny of umpires and umpire performance monitoring, Angel saw fit to take the settlement and take his leave, before he ultimately gets the axe in a mass layoff in the future.

Ironically, in doing so, Angel has manage to steal the spotlight one more time, and ultimately he wouldn’t really have it any other way.  Dis-honoring him with his own day would probably be something he’d actually enjoy, which nobody wants to know, but if baseball really wants to become fun again, I’m sure there could be a tongue-in-cheek compromise to where everyone could be made happy and remember the joyous feeling of the day that Angel Hernandez left Major League Baseball, once and for all.