lol good riddance

In short: SunTrust Park begins removing all traces of SunTrust identity on account of merger with BB&T and the re-naming of the company

I know that at the root of it, ScumTrust is not truly dead, but still in existence under a different name, merged with another company, but damn does it feel nice to know that the logo that I was so familiar with during my tenure and eventual layoff with ScumTrust is being wiped from existence.  Especially from the ballpark, of my preferred team, that I was so diametrically opposed to from the onset, for a variety of reasons, including the fact that they were named “ScumTrust Park.”

Despite the fact that ScumTrust isn’t truly dead, the fact that they’ve completely lost their identity and headquarters, ScumTrust is pretty much dead.  In short time, few people will remember the ScumTrust identity, and only the corporate stooges who have to take an orientation class will actually ever hear of the name ScumTrust in the future.  Even shorter will be the time it takes before cranky customers bitch about how shitty of a bank Truist is, and then it’s only a matter of time before Bank of America or Wells Fargo consumes them too.

I think my favorite part about the whole saga is that it wasn’t that long ago in 2014 in which ScumTrust signed a 25-year contract to the naming rights of the ballpark that would soon become ScumTrust Park.  Six years, in a 25-year contract, and although the terms of the contract have not been necessarily severed, the fact that ScumTrust’s name is coming off of the entire property might as well be the same thing as the whole contract being dead in the water.

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How to reflect on a decade

This year ending isn’t just an ordinary ending of a year, because it’s also the end of a decade.  Naturally, a sentimental person like me tends to want to reflect on an entire decade, because much like individual years, a decade is a nice round chunk of time that one might think it would be easy to reflect upon, but in the greater spectrum, it’s ten full years we’d be trying to look back onto.  Now I like to think I have a good memory, but even without the aid of my trusty brog, it’s difficult to really look back at an entire decade.

Regardless, that’s not going to stop all the self-important jobbers of the internet who will try their darnedest to speak with authority and copy and paste all the same milestones the major news outlets will when it comes to trying to summarize and reflect upon the entire decade.  The funny thing is that most of the internet savvy generations probably aren’t that much older or younger than I am, which means that in the grand spectrums of our respective lives, we’ve only really lived through 3-4 decades, whereas I’d probably estimate that 1.5-2 of them are pretty invalid, because we’re simply not articulate and/or educated enough to have the capacity to reflect on entire decades.

So combined with the advent and growth of the internet, and the notion that everyone has a voice, I’d wager this is probably, at the very most, the second real decade of the modern high-speed internet that people really care to really reminisce about; and I’m being generous by calling it the second, because DSLs and cable internet didn’t really flourish until nearly the mid-2000’s; I couldn’t imagine people trying to use streaming, auto-refreshing social media on a 56K modem, so frankly I see this more as the first real decade that everyone and their literal mothers on the internet are going to be writing about.

Anyway, I’m going to attempt to try to recollect from mostly just my own memories, and stick to things that are more relevant to my own little world, and not the big gigantic depressing one we live in.  If I had any readers, they can google any decade in review, and probably find more worldly and probably more high-profile shit than the things I have to say about the things going on in my own little life, like the start and finish of Game of Thrones, Pokemon Go, the sad state of American politics, all the endless mass shootings, and Bill Cosby being outed as a rapist.

And the reason that I disclaim the whole “if I had any readers” because one of the most devastating things that occurred for me is the fact that despite my WordPress going online in 2010, at nearly the very start of the decade, midway through the decade my brog went down indefinitely, when my brother relocated from one part of the country to another.  A lot of hardware changes meant no more place to host my brog, and despite having the supposed backups, I simply haven’t taken the time or allocated the funds necessary to get my site up and running again.

If I were the type to do New Years resolutions anymore, I think I’d resolve to get my site back up and running again in 2020.  TBD on if that will actually occur, and frankly with the things I have on my plate going into the next decade, I don’t want to commit and then fail to deliver.

In spite of the brog blackout, that hasn’t stopped me from writing.  Even to the day my site went down, I have been writing on a fairly regular basis, taking no more than two weeks off before the internal guilt gets my fingers flying across the keys again, and I’ve got at this point, hundreds of folders of dated and timestamped Word docs, all awaiting their day in which they can be posted retroactively to a brog.

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Unsurprisingly lame

BB&T and SunTrust banks choose their united name: Truist.

I mean, I can’t say I’m the least bit surprised that this ended up being something as lame as this.  Fewer things in the world are as square and soullessly uncool as the entire banking industry.  I mean, it’s an industry that’s basically built on storing the money of people that are not themselves, and finding every single possible way to take cuts and slices from them in order to profit.

I even yawned heartily while typing out that line, that’s how lame the whole concept of banking is.  I can’t believe I worked in the industry as long as I did, and in some degree of retrospect, I kind of have to thank them for being the tools they are and laying me, as well as my entire department off, because they kind of did me a favor of getting out of the banking industry.  I mean seriously, it paid the bills pretty well, and I would’ve have free parking for years during Dragon*Con, but I have to say that it wasn’t a whole lot of fun saying I worked for SunTrust; as large as it was in Georgia and the eastern seaboard, it was still a regional bank and it was the equivalent of saying that I worked for like, Habib’s Fuel & Automotive in the grander spectrum of the world.

But back to the point at hand, with the name of the unholy union being established, that means that without any further question, the home of the Atlanta Braves is soon to become Truist Park.  I had to wiki it to make sure that it was going to be the de facto lamest name in all of Major League Baseball, but since I’ve completed my quest to visit all 30, I’ve fallen a little to the wayside when it comes to ballpark names.  And as gargantuan-ly lame as Truist Park is, I think there is some stiff competition when it comes to comparing to Guaranteed Rate Field (Chicago White Sox, replacing “The Cell” US Cellular Field (the worst park in MLB)) and RingCentral Coliseum (Oakland A’s, who are always plagued with bad names).  Ultimately, it’s like comparing herpes to chlamydia and gonorrhea, because no matter which name you have, it sucks.

Given the propensity of the Atlanta Braves to always go in the direction of profit > style, it’s no surprise that they’re going to be perfectly at home playing at a place called something as boring, vanilla and lame as Truist Park.  But damn if they aren’t going to get rich cashing in on those naming rights, despite the fact that the product on the field isn’t going to benefit one iota from said proceeds.  A bunch of old white guys need to take their slice of the pie first, as well as their seconds, before the Braves have any chance at possibly getting a little bit of forward investment to maybe succeed. 

I hear winning is pretty lucrative, but the risk-averse Braves don’t really seem the type to risk possibly finding out.  But misery loves company, and I think it’s pretty safe to say that pretty much any team not the Houston Astros seems pretty content on sitting on cruise control and cashing in on revenue sharing, and if they happen to win, great, but if not, that’s perfectly okay as well.  Fuck that, and fuck Truist Bank.  Need to figure out a simplistic and punny name for the new park, because “ScumTrust” is running out of time.

Plopicana Field

TL;DR: The home of the Tampa Bay Rays, Tropicana Field, decides to close off the upper decks due to paltry attendance

As an expert on baseball parks,* this story interested me, or at least made me think that I could barf out some words about the topic and call it a brog post.

*someone who has been to every MLB city

To cut to the chase, the Plop (a derivative of the actual nickname “the Trop”) is kind of a shitty place.  It’s an old and dated structure in a city full of old and dated people, the architecture of the place makes very little sense, the ceiling isn’t actually high enough to where it doesn’t occasionally come into play, and it’s overall a really lousy place to watch baseball.

It’s kind of ironic too, because the Tampa Bay Rays are one of those teams that I kind of lean towards favoring, because they’re a franchise that has relied on outsmarting the competition because they certainly can’t compete with the payrolls of everyone else in MLB, and has actually succeeded a lot more than they’ve failed over the last few years, yielding somewhat respectable win-loss records since the magic switch was flipped in 2008 where they decided to stop sucking, and made it all the way to the World Series.

They’re a team that I think is kind of cool in the sense that they’re never really a threat to my lukewarm Braves fandom, and I always have respect for teams that rely on smarts and analysis over just haphazardly signing free agents and hoping for instant results.  And it’s a shame that they play for such a disinterested fanbase, inside of a ballpark that’s amongst the worst in the Majors.

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Just because “cool” is in the name doesn’t make it such

lol: Braves’ new spring training home unveiled to be CoolToday Park

Leave it to the Atlanta Braves to always put salary over substance, and until 2040, their future Spring Training home will basically forever, be called CoolToday Park; named after a local Sarasota HVAC company.  And despite the undisclosed financial details of the deal, naming rights aren’t cheap, but CoolToday somehow had a couple ten million dollars in order to secure the rights to a baseball stadium for an actual major league club.

Really though, come on now, CoolToday?  And with a logo that makes it look like it’s right out of the 1970’s?  Clearly, the effort doesn’t match nearly the dollar amount spent in order to get these naming rights, but when the day is over, who really cares because of, money?  But to those of us on the outside judging in, it’s a sad and mundane opportunity squandered to get something remotely cool out of the whole charade of the Braves fleecing yet another town in America for another ballpark the country does not need.

But again, leave it to the Braves to ignore everything with any substance in the pursuit of money.  I guess Publix or Red Lobster didn’t want to put in any bids, or be associated with a perpetual loser like the Braves, but damn would I have been excited had either of these native Florida businesses decided to slap their name onto the Braves’ ballpark.  Dare I’d say, it would definitely improve my enthusiasm to know that the company with the immortal chicken tender subs and bakery, or a company with LOBSTER in the name, would be the official home of Braves Spring Training.

I guess it’s no surprise that the Braves settled on some lame HVAC company to name the ballpark after, though.  I mean, from a business standpoint, if any company is going to survive for 20 years, it’s definitely going to be an HVAC company in Florida, and there will probably be no chance that they end up like Denver’s Sports Authority Field, where the naming company went under, but the venue was stuck with their name until it had to be legally changed.

Come on though, “CoolToday Park” sounds about as exciting as a sermon.  But considering how corporately stiff and rigid the Braves management from top to bottom, this is no surprise at all.

Good thing my ballpark journey is for the most part complete.  I can’t say I’d be particularly enthused about having to add an entry for CoolToday Park into my travels.

Eleven years later

After the Texas Rangers hung five runs on the Colorado Rockies in the first inning, it seemed like the home team would prevail on my first trip to The Ballpark in Arlington, or whatever Globe Life corporate name that’s attached to it now.  However, the Rockies would proceed to answer back immediately scoring six-runs in the second inning to take the lead, and then tack on three more unanswered runs throughout the rest of the game, all while holding the Rangers to effectively a two-hitter the remainder of the way.

I suspect that my divine blessing by visit isn’t going to work this season, and that the Rangers probably won’t make the playoffs in spite of my well-documented history of personally ushering teams into the postseason.  Then again, at the time I’m writing this, the Rangers have won five in a row, and there’s a lot of season left to be played, so who really knows what’s going to happen?

Anyway, the point really is that with my trip to Texas and having seen a Texas Rangers game in their ballpark, I have effectively finished a life’s goal of visiting all 30 Major League Baseball ballparks.  Sure, since the time I started in 2007, several parks have closed and been replaced with ones that I’ve yet to visit, but for all intents and purposes, the goal was really to catch a home game at every team’s park, regardless of which it was when I visited.  I have successfully been to every team’s city, watched baseball, and often times, ate a fuckton of food along the way, sampling the local cuisines all across the country.

One of these days, I’ll have a baseball park site up again in some way shape or form, so I’m not going to straight up review Globe Life Park outright here, but I have to say that I’m very excited and left in a state of disbelief that I’m actually finished with the journey.  I mean, after 11 years, it felt like one of those things that never felt like it was ever going to end, despite there being a very finite number of 30 teams to visit, and that I was gradually chipping away at the remaining total.

Although it averages to like three parks a year, the fact of the matter is that my general fandom, despite still loving the game itself, I’ve just grown less gung-ho of feeling the necessity to be physically at games these days.  And it’s never been more evident in the fact that the last few parks have been some of the only games I’ve been to over the last few seasons, and I’ve literally hit Texas, Arizona and Cleveland solely in the span of the last three seasons.

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Photos: Globe Life Stadium, home of the Texas Rangers

[2020 note]: this is unposted content back from 2018, of my trip to Dallas, Texas, to visit my brother, but also to knock out the last ballpark in my journey to visit every single MLB team.

It only took 11 years to accomplish, and by this time, my fandom was pretty unenthusiastic due to the Braves sucking all the enjoyment out of baseball over the last few years, but I wasn’t about to give up on a quest that was so close to being completed.

When I started, it was still called The Ballpark in Arlington, but as is often the case with modern baseball parks, corporate naming rights swoop in and take all character out of these venues, and Globe Life was no exception to the rule.  But for what it’s worth, it was a fine baseball establishment, nice scenics, good backdrops, and most importantly, a pretty epic $27 chicken sandwich, and I enjoyed my time there spent with my brother and his wife.

I think I made the right call by having this one be last in the journey.

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