PWI be drinking that blet kool-aid

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

SI: Pro Wrestling Illustrated drops their Top-250 women wrestlers, topped off by Mercedes Moné

I had to laugh when I saw this list, because not only do I disagree that Mercedes Moné isn’t the #1 female wrestler this year, I barely think she’s top-5, and mostly on account of industry impact and not necessarily strength of work.  Also, I always love how whenever people make all-industry encompassing lists, there’s always what seems like some forced integration of talents from promotions not in the Americas.

Obviously I can’t speak for anyone but myself, but I have this suspicion that short of having infinite time on your hands, there aren’t a lot of people who contribute to a North American publication are always up to the minute on all of the wrestling going on in AAA, CMLL, New Japan and in the case of this women’s list, Stardom.

Don’t get me wrong, any time I see Stardom highlights, they’re incredible, they’re intense, and Japanese women work with a level of stiffness that would make Fit Finley, Vader and Gunther wince and cringe while watching.  Their level of in-ring work probably eclipses a lot of the women on PWI’s or anyone’s top-women workers lists, but the problem is that most people aren’t on top of their product like they are with the mega promotions of the Americas, and I say all this to preface and cover the fact that when it comes to listing talent, I simply cannot factor them in, due to general unfamiliarity.

But if I were to make a top-5 or top-10 list, it all starts with Iyo Sky, whom not only is the best female wrestler of 2025 in my opinion, she’s frankly the best wrestler in general throughout the calendar year.  She’s had incredible matches all year long with Rhea Ripley, Stephanie Vaquer, Naomi and Bianca Belair, and I’m still hard pressed to think of a single match this year better than Iyo vs. Ripley at Evolution.

#2 is Toni Storm, because she’s not only the hard carry of AEW’s entire female roster, she’s arguably the most entertaining talent they have on their entire roster outright.  I know I get critical about AEW in general, but there’s no questioning my love for Timeless Toni, and she’s simply the greatest character to have emerged from that land of chaos.  But the main reason I don’t rank her above Iyo is that when it comes to in-ring work, Toni is nowhere close to Iyo’s level.  Which is ironic, because young Toni was an absolute technician in the ring, but over the years, she’s clearly put way more work into her character, and less in the ring, and maybe it’s just the general green-ness of AEW’s women’s roster, it’s harder to find high quality matches that don’t devolve too hard into props, weapons and gimmick, versus just straight great wrestling matches.

#3 goes to Stephanie Vaquer who had the year of all years, having won three* different championships throughout the calendar year.  She’s a counting stat monster, having won the NXT North American and NXT Women’s championships, and then moving up to the main roster where she eventually won the WWE Women’s World championship.  She’s also a master technician in the ring, and frankly in pure technical skill, she’s probably better than Iyo, but she also hasn’t been really tested into a real masterpiece, save for her match against Giulia in NXT.

*I don’t count the blood money Saudi blet as a championship

#4 would be Rhea Ripley, for whom was the main reason why Iyo is #1, because it takes two to tango, and her and Iyo are basically one of this generation’s rivalries that could be on the echelon of Stone Cold Steve Austin and the Rock or Ric Flair and Ricky Steamboat, because the two just have such nuclear chemistry where every time they get in the ring together, it’s brilliance, regardless of if there’s an extra player involved or not.  Frankly, the only reason she’s not higher is because she didn’t get as many matches, and with talents like Vaquer which helped push Iyo over the top.

And #5 is where I’d put Mercedes Moné, and like I said, it’s mostly on account of her impact on the business and not necessarily her strength in the ring.  She’s (still) horrible on the microphone, and staying on the train of AEW nerfing women’s technical skill, her in-ring work in AEW is nowhere as clean as it was when she was still in the E.  It’s ironic that AEW keeps spamming the narrative that it’s where the best wrestle, but that must apply to men only, because a lot of the women known for great talent, aren’t having their best work under the Turner banner. 

However, what Mercedes has been doing all year, touring the indies and getting out in the world and lighting fires, collecting blets not-withstanding, is unprecedented, and in a holistic sense, worth giving her some rank on a top-women’s list.  Bonus points for the rumored stories about how she’s donating a ton of her independent bookings to local charities of the places she’s touring, and despite my general critical skepticism of her, I do think she’s doing a lot of good with her platform, albeit while obnoxiously leaning into the heel persona, but deserves does deserve respect.

#6-10, I would put rank, in this order: Athena, Tiffany Stratton, Asuka, Naomi, Becky Lynch.

Toni Storm might be the hard carry of the AEW women’s division as far as presence and entertainment go, but Athena is honestly, the best pure wrestler that exists in the AEW/ROH ecosystem.  As far as my previous comment about how AEW nerfs talent, Athena has remained immune, and has demonstrated to have good, watchable matches with anyone she’s been paired up with, and her match against a motivated Mercedes Moné is probably the AEW/ROH women’s match of the year as far as I’m concerned.  The endless ROH Women’s champion might not have a large pool of talent to work with, but it’s not just for lack of better options that she’s been holding her title for nearly three straight years.

Tiffany Stratton, is one of those talents that as far as her character went, had a really quiet year in general.  After winning the WWE Women’s championship, cashing in on Nia Jax, she had one heated program with a 60%-ready Charlotte Flair for Wrestlemania, but really not much else throughout the rest of the year except repeated matches trying to carry Jade Cargill. 

I feel like one of the comps I think for Tiffy is that of Mr. Perfect, in the sense that her character work is still pretty uncomfortable and needs work, but once she steps into the ropes, she’s a natural in the ring.  She’s managed to pull off respectable carry jobs on Cargill, and didn’t get outclassed when in the ring with a master like Vaquer and frankly dropping the title in her fourth or fifth match to Cargill can only help her grow some more, now unburdened with the duty of having to be the champion.

As far as Asuka and Naomi rank for me, Asuka is very much someone on the upswing, having returned in the middle of the year, and has been one of the most entertaining and watchable character on television as she’s working the heel sempai role to Kairi Sane and gaslighting Iyo Sky, and if she pulls this off for a whole calendar year, there’s no doubt that she’s a top-5 next year.

Naomi on the other hand, would have been an easy top-5, as her heel turn, Money in the Bank win and cash-in, and rise to the Women’s World championship were all booked outstandingly, and she was really picking up steam and momentum to be the top female heel in the company, but ol’ Big Jim decided to derail her career once again, and she’s been knocked out of the ring for the next year on account of having gotten pregnant.  I mean there’s fewer better reasons to go on the shelf, but the unfortunate byproduct of it was that it happened right at the biggest push of her career.  But if she can come back and pick up where she left off, there’s little reason to believe that she couldn’t get back to that upper tier.

And #10 I have to give to Becky Lynch, even in spite of how unpopular she is among the unwashed masses of the internet.  Her character work has been upper-tier, playing the obnoxious, gaslighting heel, and her in-ring work will probably never be above a 6/10, but she’s one of the few workers, male or female, that still understands telling stories in the ring, working body parts and maximizing her skillset to work logical and digestible matches.  But she’s clearly accepting of what’s asked of her at this current juncture, which is to remain in the mid card, elevate the Women’s Intercontinental championship and bringing the best out of lesser talents, like her current endless feud with Maxxine Dupri.  As much as the internet pretends to hate her and call her shit like Becky Hogan, I think she’s a consummate professional and a team player and seems to be down and willing to do anything that is asked of her, and doing it well.  She deserves better than what internet fans and PWI think of her.

The point to this whole diatribe is that PWI’s women’s rankings are dumb, and they clearly put way too much weight in Mercedes’ blet count, and not nearly enough on the bodies of work and the impact of character development, ring talent and entertainment, and artificially injected some Stardom names to make them look worldly.

Only illegal because they got caught

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

WSB: North Georgia VFW post busted for hosting “illegal” gambling, including slot machines and table games

Over the last weekend, I took #2 to a birthday party that was at some Dave & Busters-clone type of joint, where they had bowling, laser tag, arcade machines.  Additionally, they also had a section of the place loosely cordoned off with some velvet ropes that had pool tables as well as, slot machines.

I don’t really care enough to find out the entire legality of the ability to have slot machines in the state of Georgia, but the point remains that at a place clearly geared up to be friendly to all ages, which is to say a place where you can bring young children to and not get judged too much by asshole bystanders, this place still had a row of slot machines, in plain sight for kids to see and potentially watch, along with the gamblers who could be playing them.

So it’s a little puzzling to read this story about how some VFW post up in the sticks of Georgia was busted and raided because they had gambling there, because there are a number of Kroger grocery stores throughout the state who also have slot machines, legally, in addition to the number of joints that have them in plain sight.

If I had to guess, the real issue is probably that it’s not so much the fact that the VFW post didn’t report their gambling activities, it’s probably the fact that they probably paid no tax on their intake, as well as any of their gamblers probably weren’t paying taxes on any of their winnings, even though I highly doubt that a VFW hall is going to be a place where guys are routinely clearing $10,000+, the general cutoff where one should expect a notification from the IRS for exceeding.

It’s just funny to me, because gambling is an ever-increasing problem in my opinion, throughout the United States, and as gambling has permeated through the internet, and states are relaxing their buttholes and pulling the anti-gambling stick out of them, and the act is hardly restricted to just Las Vegas, Atlantic City or indigenous lands anymore, it’s becoming really problematic, I think.

Underground gambling undoubtedly has been going on since the dawn of civilization, but if I had to guess, it has probably gotten absolutely worse throughout the last decade or so with the relaxation of gambling laws, and the increasing availability of gaming in general.  Like, people who weren’t gamblers to begin with have a greater chance of being exposed and introduced and apt to become them, and with enough drive and addiction, it’s only a matter of time before they’re pissing away their social security checks at the local VFW because they heard that they could play some hold ‘em for cash.

When Shohei Ohtani got busted for gambling and he and MLB threw his interpreter under the bus, there was a great meme about how the golden boy could have gotten into this gambling scandal.  And all Japanese guys being degenerate gambling addict jokes aside, there was this one meme that I always remembered and still refer to this day:

Welcome back to SportsCenter presented by ESPN Bet, for more on the Ohtani situation, we go to our FanDuel MLB Insider Jeff Passan at our DraftKings Studio in Los Angeles, brought to you by Caesar’s Sportsbook.  Jeff, how could something like this happen??

That’s how I feel about the VFW gambling hall that’s supposedly illegal.  Sure, they probably weren’t paying any taxes on the cash money circulating around the joint, but at the same time, I can’t imagine anything remotely close to a casino’s liquid was sloshing around the joint.

Plus, probably all of them are veterans who have served the country in some way shape or form, leave them the fuck alone.  I’m not saying they should get full-on Armageddon don’t ever have to pay taxes ever again, but for fuck’s sake, turn the other cheek on some casual entertainment gambling, they’re not hurting anyone.

Instead, Uncle Sam gets to fuck over these guys a second time around, by shutting down their social gathering spot, and being colossal assholes in going after a small pissant operation, in the grand spectrum of illegal gambling operations throughout the country.

Way to go, Georgia.  Way to go, ‘murica.  Sure is great here

I get it, but I really really don’t like it

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

ICYMI: John Cena defeats Dominic Mysterio, wins the Intercontinental championship for the first time in his career, becoming a Grand Slam Champion with less than five appearances left in his career

Lord, I always heard that this was a possibility during the whole John Cena retirement tour, and it was always something that I had hoped really wouldn’t happen.  And with the clock winding down, I thought we had hit the point where it couldn’t possibly happen on account of the lack of time remaining on Cena’s tour in order to make the handoff of the IC title remotely meaningful.

But, the WWE is all about creating moments, and short-term bursts of dopamine for fans, and long gone are the days where openly outgoing talent would eat a shit ton of losses on the way out, including the last one, to really drive home the notion that nobody is bigger than the business, and to metaphorically pay back the industry by booting future stars by taking losses.

I’m not saying John Cena hasn’t been taking his share of L’s over the last calendar year, and for the most part, I’m of the opinion that the retirement tour has been handled pretty well and I’ve found a lot of it to be enjoyable, but I have to say that the most recent development in the tour is one part, that I absolutely disagree with and do not like, at all.

Dominic Mysterio has been so carefully curated all year long, protected and booked so brilliantly, winning the Intercontinental championship at Wrestlemania, and then Mexico’s AAA Mega Campeonato, all while navigating through Liv Morgan’s injury, the Judgment Day’s tumultuous camaraderie, and being chased by guys like AJ Styles, Rusev and Penta.

He has defeated all challengers throughout the year, and has shown tremendous growth in character, and honestly, has been one of the only male performers I really bother to keep tabs on.

Feeding him to John Cena, and losing the Intercontinental blet at this stage of the game is something that disappointed me tremendously as a fan, and really makes me wonder if E Creative™ really has a good idea where they’re going with this, or if they’re just eager to check off that very last feel good accolade for John Cena, as to make sure he has every single honor there could be, even if it meant coming at the expense of one of their most valuable long-term assets in Dominic Mysterio.

It also takes a big crap all over all of the guys who have been chasing Dominic Mysterio throughout the year, like AJ Styles, Rusev and Penta, because Dom has been going to war with them all year, cheating and beating them dirty, but then he takes a 10 minute loss to John Cena like it was 2013 all over again, and there’s something about the whole act that makes me feel like a year’s worth of booking has been disrespected and peed on just a little bit.

Like, the Intercontinental championship doesn’t benefit John Cena at all.  He literally has no time to boost it or elevate it beyond what Dom has done with it, because last time I checked, he has three appearances left.  And I doubt that his last match will also be for the Intercontinental championship, so that means he has to drop it within his next two appearances, and in my opinion, fewer things erode a title’s prestige than rapid changes, at least not without a good narrative behind it, and I feel like the E is really pigeon-holing themselves right now with this not-well thought out Cena IC run.

Basically, no way it’s going to any of the 16 guys in the Cena Last Match Tournament, because it defeats the purpose for having a tournament in the first place, if one of them is going to suddenly get to have a match, a title match, against him before the last match.  And outside of them, there’s really not a lot of names that are just spontaneously ready for the Intercontinental title much less worthy to get a win on John Cena, genuinely one of the greatest talents in the history of the industry, which is a topic I may touch on in a future post.

I feel like the only real option is to drop it back to Dominic Mysterio, where Dom will win on account of there being a metric fuckton of interference from the rest of The Judgment Day, the Americanos, and he’ll win dirty with an obvious foreign object, but at that point the question is why they had to have him drop the title in the first place, other than to placate a superficial career milestone?  They derail an extremely strong title run and snuff out its momentum.  Even if he wins it back, the mystique of his first run is completely reset, and it’ll feel like a holding pattern until the next contender is ready, instead of like the run Gunther had with it, where it just felt like nobody was ever going to beat him.

Either way, as much as I have enjoyed the John Cena retirement tour, I will die on this hill that him taking the Intercontinental title off of Dominic Mysterio was not the best idea, and smells more of pandering and fan service than being a careful and calculated choice that would be worthy of being in the next season of UNReal.

Dad Brog (#158): I’m not ready for anything prefaced by “adult”

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I’m in the middle of one of those weekends where I’ve sparsely had any time for myself; even more so than usual.  The kids are still in this weird adjustment period of daylight savings as well as simply adapting to their general schedules, and this particular morning, they were up at 7 am, not long after I had gotten up to begin my day, and I was completely unprepared as far as having breakfast ready, but it didn’t matter that my kids were ready to begin their day.

Instead of a 60-90 minute quiet time reprieve in the middle of the day, this was a day in which there were two concurrent birthday parties happening at the same time, so mythical wife and I decided to divide and conquer and take each kid to a different party, in different parts of town.  I watched #2 plow through three slices of pizza, a ridiculously gargantuan slice of cake, and a bowl of dipping dots, all while playing a bunch of really shitty games at Chuck-E-Cheese where kids are lucky to get maybe 15 seconds of game time before the credits expire and I can’t imagine paying actual money for gaming time with such absurdly unfavorable math, and I felt fortunate to be on a timed party free-play.

Needless to say, with the kids down, instead of relaxing, I found myself playing catch-up on things that I didn’t get to do on a typical Saturday, which meant hopping on the treadmill to get some exercise, while simultaneously doing my daily Duolingo that I typically prefer to do early in the morning before everyone else is really up.  And then I decided to go run some errands while some stores were still open, all for the sake of not having to them during Sunday, when I would inevitably have to have a kid in tow while trying to do them, and by the time I’m sitting here it’s past ten, and I don’t feel like I have adequate time to really watch something from my endless list of crap that I want to watch, so I bring myself to sit here to write in my brog that nobody knows exists.

But hey, at least I got to go be on top of the drop of Vince Gilligan’s Pluribus, and watched the first two episodes on Friday night, and the show was as good as I would have hoped it would be, so that’s something remotely positive amidst feeling buried by life and looking out the metaphorical window of the world to see the United States completely at peace with itself forcibly starving its own citizens but this post wasn’t meant to be political as much as I just wanted to take that dig in lieu of making a dedicated post about how fucked America is.

However, getting to the point of this post, the biggest occurrence to happen over this weekend was undoubtedly the fact that #1 lost her first tooth, and I’m just not ready for this at all.  Because when it comes to teeth, most everyone knows that the vernacular for them are baby teeth, and when they fall out, they’re supplanted by your adult teeth, and I am so not fucking ready to hear the word “adult” at all, associated with my five-year old child.

It’s crazy, it was just like a few weeks ago in which #1 pointed out to mythical wife and I that she had a wiggly tooth, and we were both having the same reaction about how, wtf has all this time flown by to where our kid is now having her baby teeth starting to fall out.  A cursory internet search confirms that five is a fairly common age for the first teeth to begin falling out, and I have memories of my own childhood of when I had my first loose tooth, where my dad tied a piece of floss around it before yanking it out, and the vague memory of feeling like I’d been punched in the mouth, with a similar result of there being a lot of blood.

But as unfortunate as it was that I couldn’t be there when it happened, there wasn’t really much blood when #1’s first tooth came out.  I had literally just taken her to the dentist just says prior, and I saw the X-rays showing the adult teeth rapidly growing underneath and how to anticipate the first tooth to come out soon, and it was still a harrowing moment seeing those photographs of all these adult teeth starting to grow beneath the baby ones, and again I’m struggling to hear the word adult at all when it comes to my kid, because she’s still just five freaking years old.

Inevitably, like the Korean blood in her body demands, questions about the Tooth Fairy and the whole concept of getting money for teeth came up pretty immediately, and now I’ve got to start ponying up cash to put under her pillow and hope to not wake her along the way.  Plus there’s the whole question of just how much money to give for a tooth; when I was a kid, it was $2 a tooth, but my parents quashed the whole mythos of the Tooth Fairy real quick and just gave me cashmoney on the spot after an extraction.

It’s going to be a tricky next few years, given the fact that I have two kids of close age who will be inevitably be periodically dropping teef throughout the next 8-9 years, and me having to keep up with needing adequate cash to fund all these damn teef and keep up with inflation.

But heaven help me that there are anything at all in my little girls’ bodies that are considered adult, even if they’re pretty much right on schedule when it comes to the first teeth falling out.  They’re always going to be babies to me.

Real talk: my head hurts

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I don’t know why I feel like I should write about this, especially since it’s coming from a place of fear and apprehension of the worst, but I guess that if things do go tits up in regards to this, there’s a part of me that I guess wants to chronicle it for the sake of chronicling all of the things in my life that might be a big deal, whether or not they’re bad or good.

But for the last few days, I’ve had a pain in my head, and not the metaphorical kind that comes from a lifestyle of being stressed all the time, compounded with varying degrees of depression and anxiety.  Like an actual dull rolling ache that pulses along the back left part of my skull.  It’s not the worst pain in the world by any stretch of the imagination, but because it kind of throbs and rolls through when it happens, it sometimes catches me off guard and causes me to really wince or if I’m in the midst of doing something, causing an interruption.

It kind of hurts to the touch, but only the first time, and subsequent rubbings of the area don’t really hurt, so I’m not entirely sure if it’s a topical thing or if it’s something going on underneath the skin.

I’m aware that this could be many different things, many of which are no real big deal at all, but me being me, my mind tends to go towards the worst possible scenarios, and given what my family has been through over the last few years as far as people having to deal with different things, I have to ask myself, and hope that it’s not my turn for something bad to happen to.

Needless to say, old single childless me would have just continued to gut it out longer and waited for it to get worse before acting on it, but the married dad me of today doesn’t want to run the risk of it being something that could’ve been prevented from getting worse if it’s something that I can get in front of.  It’s only been a few days, where I had just hoped it was maybe daylight savings-related old man body adjusting to the time change, or just the elevated level of stress in which I’ve been running on, on account of the issues I’m dealing with, with my own dad, as well as a high workload at work, on top of being an active and hands-on dad dealing with my own kids on the regular. 

Unfortunately, the occurrences of the occasional pulsing aches has not really subsided, so I reached out to my doctor for their opinion, and we’ll go from there.  What I’m hoping is that I’m just dealing with excessive stress, compounded with likely blood pressure elevation that I’ve learned runs in my family, and that I just need to chill the fuck out more often than I do, and that it’s not like some aneurism or blood clot or tumor risk I’m running and that I need immediate surgery and utilization of shitty American health care insurance to fuck my family over for the next few years.

However, the point remains that it does have me a little nervous about what it could be, and I’m eagerly awaiting response from my doctor, so I can have some piece of mind of what needs to come next.  It’s the waiting and the unknowns that truly are the killers, but in spite of it all, I do pat myself on the back for breaking old habits and mentalities and just trying to gut things out and hope they go away.  Having one’s own family definitely helps with that, and understanding that my life isn’t just my life, so much as it belongs to others whom I wish to be around for as long as I can.

Daylight Savings blows, 2025 edition

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

At around 5:20 am, I heard #1 outside my bedroom door, panicking in the dark about how she couldn’t find her sister.  The fact that my child was out of her room in the pitch black of the morning was enough to get me to pop out of my bed, but upon hearing that my other child was allegedly missing immediately put me into a state of panic myself.

Worse off, for some reason there was a light on in my sunroom, which I knew wasn’t the case when I went to bed because I’m neurotic and always make sure all lights are off prior to going upstairs; I would later discover that there was a power surge during the night, and since that room’s lights are controlled via remote control, it light switch is usually in the on position permanently, and stuff like power surges or outages usually result in lights coming on upon reconnection.  However, I didn’t know this, and it immediately put the fear of god into me that #2 was in some sort of danger.

I walked #1 back into their (we let them sleep in the same room on weekends sometimes, on the unfolded futon) room to have her wait for me while I would investigate downstairs, but upon entering the room, there’s #2 snuggled up like a little taquito on the futon already, still sleeping.  Relieved, I set #1 back onto the futon as well, covered her, gave her a kiss on the head, reminded her that it was the middle of the night and hope she bought it, and implored her to go back to sleep; she didn’t need to know her circadian rhythm was correct at thinking it should be 6:20 am, when she’s normally up for school on weekdays, because obviously I really wanted to get some more fucking sleep.

Nope, by 5:30 am, I can hear activity on the baby monitor, both girls are now awake, and it’s only a matter of seconds before I hear doors opening and shutting, and #1 is marching back into my bedroom, with moments later, #2 freaking out in the darkness of the hallway, wondering where everyone is.  I bring them both into the master, and get them into our bed, in between mama and dada, hoping they might actually go the fuck back to sleep for a little bit longer.

Naturally, that doesn’t happen, and by 5:40, I give up, get out of bed, usher the kids downstairs, and concede that the day is now beginning.

The thing is, I actually had a tentative plan about this morning, because I figured there would be some monkey business with the time change, and the chances of me having breakfast ready for awakening kids wasn’t going to be high, which was that we were definitely, going to go to Waffle House because who doesn’t love Waffle House?

It’s just I was not anticipating them to be getting up within the 5 o’clock hour, but here we were.

It actually wasn’t that terrible, I got them dressed and we were at Waffle House by like 6:30 adjusted time, and I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that we were not the only customers there.  They were definitely the only kids there, and a part of me was hoping to have seen some other parents under similar circumstances having the same plan that I did, but alas, it was just me who was carting my kids out at this ungodly bullshit adjusted time.

But the point remains, daylight savings remains the antichrist, and it’s abundantly clear that the people in the BC years who came up with the idea were a bunch of selfish fucks who either did not have children, or had the privilege or were bad parents enough to not take into consideration the effects of the time change on parents who did have children.  And I hate them for all eternity and hope their descendants are wholly unimpressive pleebs who have nagging gastrointestinal issues.

I like to imagine that if the originators of daylight savings actually had any children, that they were obligated to actually care for, ranging from ages 0-7 years of age, they would think twice about the whole concept of rolling clocks back and fucking with their circadian rhythms and suddenly having to deal with them at ridiculously early AM hours, while people under most other circumstances would still be getting to sleep, regardless of what hour it actually was.

And as I’ve said before, I didn’t care much for it prior to children, but now that I do have kids, I fucking loathe it, and I like to think I’m pretty serious about sticking to my claim that I’d vote for absolutely anyone who prioritized the abolishment of this bullshit antiquated concept, including, those Somali pirates.

The complaining will likely happen yearly, until either this bullshit program is killed off, or my kids get to the age where they want to sleep in, and therefore my entire house can actually benefit from the rollback instead of bemoaning it.  Not going to bet on the former, though.

I can’t ever be mad about Freddie Freeman

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Trust me, bro: Freddie Freeman becomes the only player in MLB history to have more than one walk-off homerun in the World Series.  That’s it.

When the day is over, I couldn’t give two shits over who wins the World Series.  Obviously, I would prefer it to be the Blue Jays, but as I’ve said before, the Dodgers are inevitable, and prior to the start of the series, I had flippantly predicted that it would be the Dodgers in five, and so far, my prediction is still in play.

Yoshinobu Yamamoto is pitching like a man possessed, with two straight complete games, playing like a man who was worth a $330M contract, and the golden boy Shohei Ohtani seems to have figured out playoff baseball, and over his last few games, has been hitting home runs in every single one and OPSing like 5.000 or so it feels.

Oh and make no mistake, the MLB media machine and all of its stage-six clingers are absolutely all the fuck over this Japanese invasion, and it’s getting to a point where I feel like I’m going to resent MLB so much I’d swear it off, by just how much weeb-worship they’re jizzing all over the internet like they’re watering a garden with a hose.  I get it, Yamamoto and Ohtani are playing phenomenally right now, but it’s not like nobody else in the history of Major League Baseball has ever caught fire in the midst of the playoffs and carried their teams to some hot streaks.

But MLB media has become more weeby than 76 anime conventions put together and they just can’t help themselves with how much spooging they’re doing over every little thing a Japanese player does, and there’s no length too great to stretch out in order to make all sorts of convoluted stats or combination of stats to fit the narrative that only Shohei Ohtani is the only person in history to accomplish, so they can cliché-ly end with “that’s it.”

Thankfully, last night was a reminder that there are stalwart baseball players in existence that aren’t from glorious Nippon, and that the Dodgers true captain is the one who bailed them out of an 18-inning purgatory with once again, calling game in the most dramatic of fashions, the walk-off home run.

Freddie Freeman became the ONLY PLAYER in MLB HISTORY to have multiple walk-off home runs in the World Series, now having done it in 2025 a year removed from when he walked off the Yankees last year. 

That’s it.

And I know that I’m rooting against the Dodgers just like the the vast majority of the world outside of Los Angeles and entire country of Japan, but there is no part of me that is capable of hating Freddie Freeman, even if he is on the team.  I am happy for his second walk-off homer in the World Series, and I’m happy for his family to have been able to witness him once again bail the entire team out and be Mr. Hero, the only one genuinely worthy of such, on a roster full of guys that MLB really wants to be Mr. Hero instead.

Despite the fact that he plays for the Dodgers, an act of heroism by Freddie Freeman, at least to me, is still kind of a big middle finger to MLB, their media machine and all Dodgers fans that overlook his own greatness because they’re all too busy drooling over Ohtani or Yamamoto or even Roki for no other reason than that they’re shiny Japanese imports.

Lest everyone forgets, Freddie, and Mookie Betts, were guys who had their own championship rings before last year, and knew how to win without a $1B payroll and malleable management to make a cultural shift to cater to players, and it’s not a far stretch to say that without their leadership and guidance, they wouldn’t have won last year, where Ohtani had to be carried across the finish line by Freddie Freeman who went gangbusters in mauling the Yankees all series long.

I still want the Dodgers to lose in the end, which doesn’t really seem like a likely possibility, but I’m at peace if Freddie Freeman snaps out of his general postseason underperformance, and it subsequently helps the Dodgers win, because like I said, it’s impossible for me to be mad about anything that Freddie Freeman does, because he’s just that good of a human being that even him playing on the most reviled of teams doesn’t change my appreciation of him one bit.