Tag: sports

Who would’ve guessed that foreign travelers don’t want to get gauged either?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

WSB: Atlanta Convention & Visitors Bureau report that hotel bookings did not live up to the impact predictions that the FIFA World Cup would bring

Among some of the great content that came out of the FIFA World Cup, I particularly liked the local Atlanta material, about foreign visitors’ experiences in the Metro.  I really enjoyed videos about witnessing people wandering around in the hoods of College Park, the West End and East Atlanta, looking absolutely petrified at just how hood some of these neighborhoods were capable of being.

It’s obvious that they chose these areas because they were MARTA accessible, and they figured that instead of staying within a mile radius of The Benz and get gauged to death, they’d stay a little bit further out for less, but it’s aight because we got train access.

I’d never seen so many the sax is getting louder memes in such a short time, but they’ve all been entertaining to me, especially when I recognized some of the places of some of the videos.

But getting back to the article here, it brings me great satisfaction to see all the L’s the city is taking in regards to expected hotel occupancy versus what had actually happened.  It’s not that I want to see Atlanta getting laughed at by the rest of the world, but I’m diametrically opposed to flagrant price gauging and any act of trying to turn screws to the people of the world, that I feel like quantifiable evidence of failure like this is necessary in order for any sort of course correction to happen.

It’s pretty great:

FIFA once promised an impact equal to eight Super Bowls.

But then the numbers start coming in, and tax revenue, hotel occupancy and hotel occupancy within a 1-mile radius are all in the negatives, and it’s just one of those smug, gee, tf did you think was going to happen when you ask people to pay thousands of dollars to fly to Atlanta, thousands more dollars to get tickets into the matches, and think that they’d still have thousands of dollars left over to stay in overpriced hotels?

I especially like the Ls that all the nearby hotels took, because firstly, they’re all of the luxury, high-end name brands, of W, the Four Seasons, the Ritz Carlton, and then all the Dragon-con hotels that are all perpetually overpriced all the time.  They should be the least surprised that people who were dumping their life savings into these trips would prioritize lodging the last versus logistics and match tickets.

I am surprised to see that the general, umbrella Metro Atlanta hotel occupancy also remained in the negatives, which means that probably the AirBnB and short-term rental markets probably did gangbusters throughout the World Cup’s tenure in Atlanta, or perhaps people were staying in places like Newnan, Woodstock, Braselton and the way the fuck outskirts that might not fall into the Metro umbrella.

Either way, chalk this up as some satisfying tea to indulge in, because as much as I love sports, the politics that go behind it are as much full of shit as the nonsense that endlessly churns up in Washington DC.

When changing the words make it sound less sketchy

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I’m on the fence on whether or not I’m going to bother to try and game another temporary free subscription trial for SiriusXM upon hearing about how Howard Stern is changing his format yet again, dropping down to now just one show a week, along with the news that there have been a large number of layoffs within his camp, including some notable personalities that I’ve gotten to know throughout the years.  Change is inevitable, especially over a long period of time, Howard’s not getting any younger, and the finish line is inching ever closer, and without the King of All Media, I don’t see much point in indulging SiriusXM, even if I’m not paying for it.

That being said, when I feel the need for streaming music, I’m still an old head using Pandora, and much like most other streaming mediums, Pandora is no exception to being filled with gradually more ads, bringing their medium, one step closer to being no different than terrestrial radio.

One of the ads I’ve been hearing a lot of lately is for a sports betting service, because gambling available to everyone is totally not problematic in the world.  I’ve documented multiple times my lack of success in sports gambling and why I don’t imbibe in it anymore, and I should feel fortunate that I’ve taken such lessons to heart, because otherwise I’d probably be absolutely fucked in today’s world, where the persuasion to get into gambling is being inundated to the people like it were clean air and water.

The interesting thing about this particular ad is the boiler plate legal they blab out 1.75x speed at the end of the commercial about the dangerous risks of gambling, but the thing is how they’ve transformed the word “betting” into “predictions.”

The “prediction market” sounds a whole lot less scary than “sports betting,” as if one agency doesn’t have loan sharks, bookies and shady types behind it as much as the other does.  Also the prediction market doesn’t contain terminology that pigeon holes it solely to sports, because people can make predictions on all sorts of things that aren’t just sports, like betting on new Popes, what cities will land a large corporate client, what car manufacturer will release their new model next, etc, etc.

And therein lies the increasing dangers of the world of gambling, because the prediction market name has opened the door for all sorts of official betting on things outside of just sporting events.  I had no fucking clue to what was being advertised throughout the World Cup with all those weird Kalshi ads starring Timothee Chalamet but when I remembered at one point to actually Google the name, that’s when I learned that it was just a betting service but being called predictions.

I’m not above gambling by any means necessary, I’m just way more cautious with my money than I used to be, primarily on account of the fact that I have a family that depends on me continuing to make it, and not piss it away betting on shit like a real degenerate.  If I were younger and still unattached and uncommitted to anything would be a different story, but as a generally risk-averse person in nature, I probably would’ve been able to resist, but in this day and age where the masses are usually still like gambling = bad, but the market has like 100 different gambling services being advertised down our throats.

It’s just funny that in spite of the negative stigma that comes along with excessive gambling, a rebranding of the whole concept, simply by calling it ‘predictions’ seems to have reinvigorated the whole industry, and I predict that there are going to be some seriously broken families and people in the near to distant future, whose lives are going to be completely ruined by, predicting problems.

There are probably predictions on such metrics available on some prediction platform, for people to bet predict on.

We all know that college football is mostly rigged, but goddamn

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

ICYMI: #16 ranked University of Michigan avoids getting upset by unheralded Western Michigan by virtue of refs allowing them to have a second chance at a Hail Mary in spite of them running out of time on the final play of the game

Throughout the history of sport, most sports fans have seen their share of bullshit finishes in just about every sport that they follow.  Questionable calls on hits or pitches, foot on the line in basketball, blatantly missed call in football, a phantom offsides in futbol or hockey, it really doesn’t matter.  If there’s any form of competition, there will inevitably be a controversial finish every now and then.

But this game, between Michigan and Western Michigan, is definitely up there as one of the more notable instances in modern history, because it’s not often that we see on a such a national level, flagrant favoritism and game-rigging, with their absurd ruling to finish out the game.

The television clock, the scoreboard clock, and even the clock shown on the camera operators all showed that time had expired, when Michigan failed to convert their initial Hail Mary game winner, which for all intents and purposes would have meant WMU defeated Michigan, and we’d have the upset of the year on Week 1 of the CFB season, calling back to about 20 years ago when Michigan lost to Appalachian State on the opening week of the season.

But instead, we witnessed one of the most blatant cases of game-rigging in the history of sport when the referees spun a masterclass of bullshit, citing all sorts of moonspeak about clock accuracy, some sort of grid, global time and space continuum and other nonsense, but the conclusion was that there was actually still one second left in the game, repeat second down.

In all fairness, Michigan did have to convert the Hail Mary, but given a second chance, QB Bryce Underwood clearly recalibrated his throw, and didn’t overshoot the end zone, and the Michigan receiver was able to haul it in, for the game-winner, but the obvious reality is that this attempt should never have been allowed to take place, without the obvious fixing of the game to ensure that Michigan was supposed to win.

I have no doubt in my mind that if Michigan failed to convert on their second attempt, there would’ve been a late flag thrown, probably for a phantom pass interference, and they would’ve gotten a third attempt, but 15 yards closer, since games cannot end on penalties, and probably a fourth attempt and a fifth attempt, and so forth, until the desired outcome was reached.

‘Ball don’t lie’ is a fate-based phenomenon where whenever a bullshit call occurs, an equally improbable occurrence happens not long afterward to rectify the imbalance of fairness; but is still dependent on there being game time available in order for the scales to balance.  In a perfect world, WMU immediately picks off Underwood and returns it for a pick-six to close out the game, but I think the situation was so egregious that even the mythical gods of sport were too busy cleaning out their ears and glasses to realize that Michigan had capitalized on their second chance before they could do something about it.

Unsurprising, the Big-10 and the NCAA have tripled down on their stance, absolutely denying all accusations of game-fixing, and have been trotting out all sorts of supposed experts and league officials and technology talking heads to try and explain to the rest of us peons why there was absolutely, irrefutably one second left in the game, in spite of just about every official clock in existence saying otherwise.  The masterclass of attempted gaslighting is crazy and impressive, and later on in the season, fans are just going to hit a point where they’re just going to say that nobody’s going to be mad, we just want to hear someone admit that the shit was fixed.

And to think I thought week 1 of this CFB season was a snoozefest with absolutely no upsets, with all the notable teams just blowing out scrubs by Madden scores.  Even the James Franklin era beginning for Virginia Tech where they hung 70 points on VMI was so boring I went to bed early, and have little to say about it except I was disappointed that they still allowed three points.

Hopefully, the Ball Don’t Lie gods are quite disappointed in this situation, and we see Michigan falter to some unheralded team later this season, because WMU was screwed and Ball demands the scales be balanced.  Would be funny if Michigan gets bounced by like UTEP or Rutgers as retribution for this farce, but with the higher powers clearly on their side, it’ll take some Herculean scoring and evidence to make sure they’re irrefutable.

lol, suck it LA

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

TL;DR: Atlanta Braves pitcher Chris Sale pitches complete game shutout to finish sweep of the Dodgers, winning 1-0

These days it’s not often where a baseball game is so good it inspires me to want to write about it, but here we are.

Despite being the worst baseball fan in the world, I know I still care enough about the Braves to where I try not to be on too much social media during games, because I don’t want to be spoiled by the scores of any games in progress.  Long gone are the days where the fate of my mood depends on the wins and losses of the team, but it still brings me ten seconds of disappointment whenever they lose, especially to teams that they probably shouldn’t be losing to, especially when it’s a period of struggle and the offense is not producing, costing Chris Sale a near countless amount of wins despite his prolonged pitching excellence.

I knew enough to know that this current stretch of games that they were in was going to be the gauntlet that would make or break the season, seeing as how their opponents would the first-place Brewers and the first-place Dodgers, with a make-up game also in there against the White Sox who were also in first place at the time of their game. 

Naturally, the Braves would start their last road trip, getting swept by the underwhelming Twins, before going into the stretch of 7 games against first place squads, where they somehow won an ugly affair against the White Sox, before dropping two to the Brewers, salvaging a win in neutral ground Williamsport for the Little League Classic, and it was back home for three straight against the defending champion Dodgers.

Obviously, not much needs to be said about the importance of competing against the big bad evil spending Dodgers, and considering how much the Braves had squandered their division lead, there was a mathematical chance that the Braves could have completely lost the lead outright with a poor performance against Los Angeles.

But because baseball is a mysterious game, not only did the Braves go toe-to-toe with the Dodgers, they fucking swept them, taking all three games, in competitive fashion.  Game 1 was led by the oft-criticized and polarizing Bryce Elder, who turned in his 15th quality start of the season, keeping the Dodgers mostly neutralized for six innings, en route to winning the series opener.

Game 2 was also tighter than a Korean person’s wallet, as the game went into the 9th inning deadlocked at 5-5.  And of all the guys in the world to hit a walk-off winner, it would be the much maligned Kim Ha-Seong, who smacked the critical base hit that would win the game for the Braves, and I’d like to take credit for this happening, because I just recently wrote about his season’s woes, wrote him off as someone who’s MLB career is pretty much over, and the Braves would have been better off eating his salary and cutting him loose in order to preserve his roster spot.

Yeah, this guy just had to be the one to hit a game winner against the big bad Dodgers, that effectively took the series, and put the most hated team in the game on the brink of getting swept.

And then Chris Sale in game 3, pitches an ultimate statement game, going all nine innings in an era where people give standing ovations for starters who can muddle through five.  But Sale goes truly old school, notching the progressively harder to get and rarer CGSHO stat with his truly marvelous 11 strikeout performance, completely dominating the Dodgers.

Sale had been on somewhat of a streak of terrible luck, where he’d been pitching lights out baseball over his last few starts, but because the offense has continuously gone completely inept during those starts, he’s still been tagged with losses on his record.  And as incredible and boner-popping his performance was tonight, the fact of the matter still remains one-run of support is still pitiful, and a guy like Sale absolutely deserves better than the support he’s been getting.

But back to the game, it really was a marvel of a game, because the game effectively ended in the first inning.  After Sale got out of the first with no damage, Drake Baldwin swings at the very first pitch thrown by Yoshinobu Yamamoto, crushes a home run that makes the game 1-0, and then it was pretty much nothing but pitching for the whole rest of the night.

I love 1-0 games like this, because the opponent has all night long thinking, ok all we need is one and it’s a brand new game, but then as the innings progressively advance, there’s less and less time, and suddenly that 1-0 score ends up becoming an mountain that can no longer be surmounted.  But the fact that Baldwin homered on the very first pitch of the game, off of a guy as talented as Yamamoto, this is the shit that I absolutely live for.

When the dust settled, the Braves have completed arguably their most challenging stretch of the season, winning 5/7 games against first-place squads.  It figures that stretching the parameters back further, things look worse, because for whatever reason, the Braves get swept by the fucking Twins, and lose 2/3 to the Diamondbacks, but that’s baseball in a nutshell, and why the games are still played.  The division lead remains intact, and with seven remaining against the chasing Phillies, it’s going to be an interesting race to October.

Regardless, this night stands out, and I can safely say that this is probably going to be the regular season game of the year for Braves Country.  Chris Sale throwing a complete game shutout against the hated Dodgers, statistical anomaly of first pitch homer being the only scoring of the game, and even Kim Ha-Seong got another hit tonight.  As the old saying goes, how can you not be romantic about baseball?

But of course, the Barves

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

BaseballWRLD: Braves’ shortstop Kim Ha-Seong is statistically basically having the worst baseball season in history

I really hate that it’s a Korean player, on the Atlanta Braves, that is having this unfortunate distinction, but the proof is in the pudding and the numbers don’t lie.  I know that all over the internet, there are couch statisticians and homers who are going to cry that ~85 plate appearances is too small a sample to make this kind of judgment, but those individuals probably aren’t really seeing the bigger picture, nor have they actually watched any Braves games in which Kim has actually been in this season.

Man has been the very definition of a free agent flop, and one more thing that sucks about this whole thing is that this is the kind of free agent signing example that will further make the Atlanta Braves corporation even more gun-shy and risk-averse skittish about free agent signings in the future, than they already are.  One-year pacts are pretty low-risk as they come, albeit at high price tags, but considering the return on investment Kim has provided, or didn’t, the $20M he is making in the 2026 season has been particularly brutal.

Like with most Korean players in MLB, I supported Kim and have been such, even when he signed with San Diego and was playing out there.  I was proud of the guy when he was putting up 5+ bWAR seasons for the Padres, with him being so good in 2023 he was even notching some low-end MVP votes and a Gold Glove. 

Injuries derailed his time in San Diego, and he was shipped off to Tampa Bay where he couldn’t ever get back on track, and I was really excited when the Rays made him available and the Braves being the Braves did the Braves-iest thing and managed to buy low on him, picking him up at the waiver-deadline last year, which is the second trade deadline, the one nobody ever talks about, because that’s the one that’s like C-rated CDOs and there’s rarely any notable talent ever exchanged.

And that initial gamble paid off, and fed into my hypothesis of how much playing environment matters, with Kim’s numbers improving noticeably going from Tampa to Atlanta.  It’s like going from sleepy Tampa with white trash and no Korean community to Atlanta, that sure, still has its share of white trash, but has a robust Korean community mattered, and across the board his counting stats all improved in roughly the same amount of plate appearances.

The union proved to be mutually beneficial enough to where the Braves actually spent money and spent money on a Scott Boras client, two things that the organization normally hasn’t done a lot of historically, but it was a good opportunity for the Braves to get a reliable shortstop, and a good opportunity for Kim to possibly flex a season of being healthy and playing in a good environment, which he could then hope to parlay into a larger, more lucrative deal, likely away from Atlanta afterward.

But then he just had to go to Korea in the offseason, where the winters can be brutal, he slipped on some ice and fell and fucked up his hand, and before even reporting to Spring Training, the Kim deal had already begun to go tits up.  He missed all of Spring Training, and it’s evident that the lack of preparation put him in a miserable place to play catchup with, and when he returned to the Major League squad, he was joining the team that was contending and facing real pressure, and Kim just couldn’t get going.  He was a black hole in the lineup, and it went from it’s too early to tell to okay, maybe he does suck now.

A setback that put him on the disabled list was kind of a convenient excuse to remove him from the roster and start getting some production from other players, and fans began to bemoan his inevitable return, because the Braves being the Braves always demand ROI, and they would undoubtedly be determined to recoup anything at all from the $20M they were paying him.

He hit well in his rehab assignment, which the team was milking to the absolute maximum to keep him out of the Majors, but when push came to shove and they were forced to bring him back up, they did the predictable thing and brought him back up, while releasing one of the guys who was filling in for him, and doing it better than he was.

But the fact that Kim can’t hit Major League pitching goes to show that this is probably where he realistically is now, as a player.  Capable of doing well against Triple-A talent, but unable to be competent in the Majors.  As much as I support Kim personally, the reality is that his MLB career is more than likely done after this season, and he’ll probably go back to Korea to where he can hopefully salvage a lucrative career out in the KBO.

Regardless, we’re back to square one, where Kim is still sucking, and sucking to the magnitude of being on track to having the literal worst offensive season in MLB history, no hyperbole.  bWAR is kind of a catch-all statistic, loosely used to measure player worth, and Kim is currently sitting on -1.0 bWAR, which doesn’t sound like that much considering there are guys with worse, but it’s the fact that he’s gotten there in much shorter time that shows just how bad and detrimental he has been. 

Google estimates the cost of one bWAR in 2026 is roughly $11M, so the fact that Kim is sitting on -1.0 bWAR, and is getting paid $20M to get there, his financial impact to the organization is -$31M dollars.  That’s nearly two not-retired Prince Fielder seasons, but the difference is that Fielder wasn’t in the dugout adversely affecting a batting lineup, or on the field being fat, immobile and hurting the team defensively.

Most anyone with a brain knows that at some point, the roster spot is more valuable than a bad asset, and the smart play would have been cut Kim, eat the $20M, and to have kept Jorge Mateo, who at the time I’m writing this, had contributed +0.7 bWAR to the Braves before he was ungratefully released.  But like I said, the Braves are so corporate and so predictable, that everyone unfortunately knew that they were going to keep Kim and demand to get any modicum of ROI.

Again, I hate that this is happening to Kim, because this will undoubtedly make the baseball public continue to question Korean baseball players while still fetishizing Japanese ones, and I hate that it’s happening to the Braves. This will further cloud their willingness to use the free agent market, and I’m not going to hold my breath that I’ll ever see a day where there’s a standout Korean player on the Braves.

When the inevitable day comes where the Braves are bounced from the playoffs, many are going to be pointing their fingers at Kim, who sure, isn’t undeserving of it, but the team is also culpable for keeping him, when more optimally strategic options were available the whole time, due to their obsession with ROI and getting their money’s worth clouding optimal strategy.  That part, wouldn’t be on Kim.

Braves Job Alert: mid-tier Latino pitchers pls

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

A few weeks ago, I saw a news article about how a former Atlanta Braves pitcher, Carlos Carrasco, had signed with the LG Twins of the Korea Baseball Organization.  This tingled my spider-senses because it was about baseball, it was about a guy who had been on the Braves, it was about Korea, it was about the KBO, where I had just seen a game for the first time, and it also just so happened to have featured the LG Twins; who lost to the Doosan Bears in spite of being the team with the better record when they play, but hey that’s why the play the games.

Anyway, in spite of my general ambivalence and distance from the Braves and just sports in general, I am familiar with Carlos Carrasco, because he was a guy on the team that it seemed to be notorious that he was cut from the major league roster pretty much every other week, before being re-signed by the Braves, pitch in a game or two, before being designated for assignment again, and the cycle would repeat itself, seemingly over and over again.

That’s not the kind of distinction any player should want, but for a bad sports fan like me who is more often times fascinated by the weird and interesting happenstances of sports, it’s how I remembered who he was.

It was in the 2025 season that I first noticed the pattern of Carrasco being jerked around, because it seemed to happen a lot, way more than I’d noticed it happening to any player before.  I mean, Uncle Jesse Chavez got a similar treatment in prior years, especially by the Braves, but not to the frequency in which it was happening to Carrasco.

According to Gemini, Carrasco’s 2025 season actually was, the most extreme case of revolving door roster ping-ponging for any player in history, as the poor guy was released and brought back an unprecedented seven times throughout the season. 

My knee-jerk reaction was that this had to have been related to the cheap-ass Braves wanting to save money and that the small gaps in between his cuts and re-signings, they’d be absolved of having to pay prorated daily wages, but I’m pretty sure that’s not how contracts work and that he was still due his contracted amount, and that his roster spot was more valuable and the chief reason for constantly shuffling him around. 

But at the same time, I don’t think the cheap-ass Braves’ payroll department was complaining about the lack of logistics and per-diem envelopes they were saving by the occasional absence of his physical being, so fuck those cheap bean counters all the same.

But the thing is, and I touched on it a second ago, with Jesse Chavez getting a similar treatment before Carrasco, is that I’ve come to the scientifically proven conclusion* that the Atlanta Braves seem to require the need to have a Latino pitcher of the mediocre, swingman variety, that they will jerk around back and forth on the roster and give them absolutely no chance to breathe, settle in, or genuinely feel like a part of the team.

*As much as I don’t want to have to explain that this is tongue-in-cheek, and that I have zero readers, I’ve been dealing with a lot of astonishingly stupid people on the internet and that’s my bad for engaging communities in the first place

So, it started, or rather I actually noticed this, in 2024, with the aforementioned Jesse Chavez; the man was already beloved in Atlanta, and prior to 2024, already had four prior stints with the Braves, including being a member of the 2021 World Series squad.  But after his championship contributions, the team didn’t get caught up in recency bias, let him walk, and he signed with the Cubs in 2022, where he did not start well, and in April, was traded back to the Braves, where he suddenly turned back into good Uncle Jesse, and pitched so well that the team was able to sell high on him and traded him to the Angels that August.  Apparently, changing out of his Braves uni made him suck again, and not even a full month later, the Angels cut him, and take a guess who was waiting to pick him back up?  The Braves.  Naturally, he pitched well for Atlanta again, and there was a funny narrative that was born about how he sucked for everyone except the Braves.

Uncle Jesse would sign and stay with the Braves for the entire 2023 season, and because he was on the Braves, he pitched well, enough to where he parlayed it into signing with the White Sox for more money the following season.  He bombed out in Spring Training and the Sox were forced to cut him, and naturally the Braves would pick him back up, and with someone else picking up half of his salary, would deliver again.  And then he’d sign with the Texas Rangers, suck, and of course the Braves would snatch him up again.

Which brings us to the 2025 season, where at 41, the magic was wearing off, and even in the magical Braves uni that gave him so much strength in the past, Chavez had become the next victim to the undefeated Father Time, his ERA ballooned up to 9.00, and the revolving door roller coaster began.  Two times he was cut and picked back up, with the second one of those he wasn’t even used, but it was at his third cut on July 17, 2025 that Chavez would declare his retirement from the game outright.

And on July 31, 2025, Carlos Carrasco was called up from the minor leagues.  I don’t know if he realized it, but he was basically going to be filling the void that Jesse Chavez had left behind, and he would remain on the squad for two weeks before getting his first cut, and then be brought back to finish out the season, literally one day later.

November 6, 2025, Carrasco would be cut by the Braves which is funny because the season was already over, but this would effectively be start of the 2026 season, where he would be about to make history:

11.06.25: cut by Braves (1)
11.08.25: signed by Braves
04.30.26: cut by Braves (2)
05.01.26: signed by Braves
05.07.26: cut by Braves (3)
05.08.26: signed by Braves
05.31.26: cut by Braves (4)
06.02.26: signed by Braves
06.12.26: cut by Braves (5)
06.15.26: signed by Braves
06.26.26: cut by Braves (6)
07.05.26: signed by Braves
07.09.26: cut by Braves (7)
07.22.26: signed by LG Twins

The scary thing is that this was just half of the season.  Imagine how many more times Carrasco would have ping-ponged in the months of July and August alone, before September call-ups would have probably done him in.

My knee-jerk reaction was naturally of amusement, and how Carrasco was probably thrilled to be getting a steady paycheck and probably have a consistent locker to use for the remainder of the 2026 season, even if he had to pack all his shit and go to Korea.  But the results speak for themselves, in his first start, Carrasco pitched seven perfect innings against the Doosan Bears, setting himself up to look like a demigod in Korea after being a training dummy in MLB.

Which brings us to the third guy in the picture above, Elieser Hernandez.  He’s no spring chicken at 31 years of age, and his MLB experience is nothing to sign about, having around 300 innings over six years of MLB experience, pitching in a variety of roles.  His career ERA was 5.10 prior to coming to the Braves. 

However, with the departure of Carrasco, Hernandez was called up on July 19, 2026, and he made his presence felt for Braves fans when he came out of the bullpen in a slugfest with the Baltimore Orioles on July 24, 2026, and pitched three innings of one-hit ball, getting the win.

He was promptly rewarded for his heroics by getting cut by the Braves on July 27, 2026, but he would re-sign with the team one day later.  Three days after that, he’d pitch three innings in a win against the Washington Nationals, notching an old-school three inning save, and I’m sure there’s some obscure stat where Elieser Hernandez is the first guy in MLB history to have his first two appearances with a team getting a Win and a Save, with a DFA in between.

Guess what happened two days ago?
August 3, 2026: Elieser Hernandez released by the Braves.

But then guess what happened one day ago?
August 4, 2026: Elieser Hernandez signed by the Braves.

Obviously the game is different now than it was five, ten, and twenty years ago.  Roster management is more important than it’s ever been, especially for poor teams and crying-poor teams who need to maximize their processes and efficiencies as optimally as possible to hope to have a prayer at competing against the Dodgers and their billion-dollar payroll of superstars that don’t have to be micromanaged.

And I’d be naïve if I didn’t assume that this is the kind of behavior that every team does to a degree, and that it’s not just the cheap-ass Braves doing it.  But it funny to conclude with the narrative that the Atlanta Braves have this mandatory requirement to have a Latino pitcher to be repeatedly spinning through the ringer, cutting and re-signing over and over again, and frankly it’s probably this kind of front office bullshit that will surely be a bullet point of contention this off-season when the owners and MLB players union embark on their collision course for next season’s inevitable strike.

Welp, time to become an A’s fan

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

JoongAng: Oakland Sacramento Las Vegas The Athletics receive large investment from Team61, a group led by former great Chan-Ho Park, making him the first Korean to have a stake in a Major League Baseball team

If there were ever a more tailor-made story for me to want to write about, here it is.  Much as the Dodgers have basically sold themselves to Glorious Nippon, it seems fitting that Korea is attempting to gain control over an MLB organization as well, with the team formerly known as the Oakland A’s, eventually going to be landing in Las Vegas one of these days.

But it’s not just the simple fact that Koreans are entwining themselves with an MLB team, it’s who.  Led by the ultimate Korean pioneer into MLB history, Chan-Ho Park, the first Korean-born player to make it in Major League Baseball, and his investment group Team61, Park once again finds himself making firsts in MLB, becoming the first Korean to have ownership stakes in an MLB team.

Obviously it’s completely relevant to mention all of his baseball statistics and serves as more than adequate justification to why he is qualified to become a part-owner in an entire club, but it’s not just Park that makes this whole thing so entertaining to me.

Among the other names that comprise of Team61, are notable Korean celebrities, such as Suga from BTS and actor Daniel Dae Kim, but the one that really got me, aside from Chan-Ho Park, was comedian/actor Ken Jeong.  Like, I love Dr. Ken as much as anyone else, but it’s just hilarious and tickles me to think of the notion of him having anything to do with the ownership of an MLB team.  But Koreans like making money, and it doesn’t seem like there’s any easier way to make money these days than with investments, and all four of these members of the Korean Avengers probably aren’t hurting for capital, and good on them to get in with sports franchise ownership, which has proven to be as endlessly inflating as much as gas prices.

I really wish there were a good photograph of the four Korean Avengers together, all wearing A’s jerseys, but in the spirit of timeliness I can’t find any.  So the one with Park, Jeong and some generic looking bald old white guys whom I’m assuming one is John Fisher, the hated owner of the team, will have to suffice, for now.

All the same, whilst I will remaining rooting and being a shitty worst fan ever for the Barves of my city of residence, if there were ever a time for me to be a real shittier and worst-er fan ever and pledge a modicum of allegiance to another team, it’s time to become an A’s fan.  Not that I had any beef with them in the first place, I just never cared about their existence, until now.

Future A’s vs. Dodgers games are about to become lit, and hopefully being in Las Vegas one day will make it really easy for the A’s to book Korean hotties to throw out first pitches, and combined with his degenerate gambling addiction, absolutely cripple Ohtani and his teammates whenever they take the field against my new team.