Tag: baseball

JONNY VENTERS IS BACK

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

As the 2018 baseball season began to take shape, I had earmarked April 28th on the calendar.  Instead of jet-setting off to some other city to watch baseball somewhere else, or catching a Braves game at still-newish Racist ScumTrust Park, it was actually a minor-league game up in Lawrenceville that had my interest: The Gwinnett Braves Strippers Stripers versus the Durham Bulls, the triple-A affiliate of the Tampa Bay Rays.

It was kind of the best option of all worlds; I’m a baseball hipster that prefers minor league baseball over the majors, I could check out the newly enshrined Stripers and possibly get a new baseball cap to add to my collection, and I could check out the future of the Braves in uber-prospect wunderkind Ronald Acuña, who laughably was held in triple-A for obvious financial and team-control purposes.

Above all else though, it was actually a guy on the other team that I was more interested in: Jonny Venters, he of the former Braves all-star relief corps with Craig Kimbrel, but with the ridiculous power sinker from the left side that I had the luxury of watching for three straight years as he made MLB look like his own personal playground whenever he took the mound.  That is, until he got hurt, blowing out his elbow not just once, not just twice, but three total times in his long and arduous journey back to baseball.

Now he’s in the Rays organization, and at the start of the season, he was assigned to triple-A, presumably to keep warm and ready for whenever the Rays would need to get some reinforcements, he would be high up on the list.

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I think I’m a Trevor Bauer fan

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I don’t think I hide the fact that when it comes to baseball, as much as I like the broad stroke enjoyment of the game such as visiting new ballparks, seeing a power hitter clobber a home run, and seeing a walk off victory, I take a tremendous enjoyment in the smallest things as well.  Things that seem too small and insignificant that they hardly can be said to have occurred at all, but when you know what to look for and see it happen and know what might or might not happen as a result, it’s no less enjoyable.

In other words, there’s a tremendous amount of nerdy shit that I love about baseball that aren’t the flashy, most attractive things about the game like home runs, strikeouts and throwing 100 miles per hour.  That said, every now and then on the internet, there will be stories and articles about baseball that aren’t talking about the Boston Red Sox’s hot start, the home run potential of the New York Yankees, or the Los Angeles Angels of Orange County, Anaheim via Interstate 5 South’s Shohei Ohtani, but something more intricate and harder to comprehend for the casual baseball fan, and these are the ones that tend to pique my interest, or at least be reliable for a good 10-minute read.  Stories about like overlooked statistics and baseball skills, the intangible evidence of clubhouse chemistry, and some other real Moneyball Doctor Manhattan kind of shit.

Throughout the last few years, among the more interesting stories that have come and gone within the game of baseball, there’s been a name that I’d been seeing popping up sporadically: Trevor Bauer, a starting pitcher for the Cleveland Indians.  I’m pretty sure it started when he was in a game where he passively mimicked the batting stances of several of his teammates in a game, which was noteworthy solely for the fact that he is an American League pitcher having some fun with his at-bats during Interleague playing in a National League ballpark.  Baseball sometimes tends to take itself too seriously sometimes, so I could appreciate a guy like Bauer who manages to find some way to have some fun and bring some laughs into the glorified kids’ game.

Then there was this story about how a baseball player helped a baseball fan with her math homework over Twitter, and lo and behold, it was Trevor Bauer.  It was here did I learn that Bauer went to UCLA and was pretty much a pretty smart nerd, and if there were ever a type of player that I tend to favor, it’s the brainy types that embrace knowledge and learning as opposed to just believing that god and their natural talent can carry their careers.  And the fact that Bauer took the time to do something so simple and meaningful to a young fan, it’s endearing in my opinion.

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Would you rather have an awesome player longer, or an awesome player immediately?

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This is the age-old debate that resurfaces just about every single year, around this time during Major League Baseball’s Spring Training time.  Team X has a highly-touted prospect that has some hype behind their potential, and they get a substantial chunk of time with the Major League squad, getting to scrimmage against Major League players, and it turns out that they can not only hold their own, but excel immediately.

But then right about this time every year, citing some sort of bullshit excuse along the lines of “they need more seasoning” or “they need to work on hitting breaking balls on Monday night games with 75%+ humidity,” Team X, Team Y and every other team that has a hotshot prospect, reassigns them to minor league camp, where they will inevitably start out their seasons in either Triple-A or Double-A minor league baseball.

And then right on cue, the internet explodes up in arms about the fallacy of the so-called “abuse” of the “system,” how young prospect players are artificially held back in the minor leagues, regardless of how ready they are, so that the teams can manipulate their service clocks in a manner that would give them the maximum amount of time they are allowed to employ the player at the most minimal financial commitment.  How it’s crooked, and abusive to the players, and this and that concerning themselves over money that is hardly their own, and concerns that are curious to why people care so much about how a private business operates.

This year, the Atlanta Braves are the de facto Team X of 2018 Spring Training that is embarking on this journey, as they have just recently assigned 20-year old phenom outfielder Ronald Acuña to minor league camp, where he will remain and begin his season with the Triple-A Gwinnett Strippers Stripers.  Despite the fact that he had a blistering Spring Training up to this point where he literally led the big league squad in hitting, batting .432 with 4 home runs and 11 RBI, the Braves have stated the fluffy excuse of how he needs to “work on his flow,” to which not a single person can comprehend what that actually means, but whatever, Acuña is in the minor leagues, and just about any educated baseball fan with a brain would have guessed, was going to happen with 150% certainty.

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Can David Wright surpass Ryan Howard for worst MLB contract?

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I was skimming baseball news recently, when I came across this article about how the Mets’ third baseman, and the Face of Major League Baseball™, David Wright has suffered some physical setbacks, and has been shut down for eight weeks, thus missing out on Opening Day and likely all of April.

For the record, David Wright has had a laundry list of physical ailments throughout the last few years, such as spinal cord stenosis, a hernia in his neck, rotator cuff surgery, and another undisclosed back injury.  Over the span of the last three seasons, Wright has played in a grand total of 75 games, with a big fat zero in 2017.  Needless to say, it’s been particularly challenging for Wright to stay healthy, and I can only imagine the frustration of a guy who makes his living playing baseball, being so physically incapable of actually playing it.

Here’s the thing though: baseball contracts are guaranteed, unlike in the NFL.  If your contract states you make X over Y number of years, you get exactly that much money, regardless of if you play or not.  David Wright signed an eight-year contract back in 2012 that dictated that between the years of 2013-2020, he would be paid $138 million dollars.

Considering the fact that he’s played in 15% of games over the last three years, you might be able to see why this is a problem for the Mets, and a legitimate question to whether or not his contract just might be the worst contract in baseball history.

Among baseball nerds, the debate is endless on who really is the worst contract in baseball history.  But for the sake of ease, and the fact that I dislike the Phillies, we’re just going to go with one of the more popular options, as the de facto current worst contract in MLB history: Ryan Howard’s five-year, $125 million dollar contract he signed with the Phillies in 2010.

How does David Wright’s current, and still active deal stack up to The Big Piece’s albatross that hamstrung the Phillies for five years?  Let us compare.

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Baseball’s Dwyane Wade

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

In short: MLB third baseman Mike Moustakas re-signs with the Kansas City Royals on a one year for $5.5 million dollars

If anyone were to read that line, it doesn’t seem like much of a big deal; grown-ass man getting paid millions of dollars to play a kids game, who cares, fuck that lucky motherfucker, etc, etc.

But it’s the background of the journey that ultimately makes the story as a whole more entertaining, because it’s reveals that it’s the story of a professional athlete who took a gamble on himself, but instead of triumphing in securing a long-term, way-more-multi-million dollar contract, he ends up falling on his face and has to sign for a fraction than he could have made had he not taken the gamble.

2017 was the walk year for Mike Moustakas, which is sports nerd-speak for a professional athlete in the final season of their contracted agreement with the team they play for, before they become a free agent, where they hope to sign a contract with the highest bidder, and secure hundreds of millions of dollars over the span of the next several years. 

Professional athletes have developed this infuriating practice of suppressing their talent until they reach walk years, where they can unleash their full potential at the time in which potential suitors will be watching the most intently, thus creating an inflated sense of demand, and get maximum dollar, before they begin the whole cycle all over again, loafing early in their deals before ramping it back up as they approach free agency again.  All will deny this, but it’s pretty undeniable if people take the time to look at professional statistics and see the blatant correlation with inflated production in the years prior to free agency.

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Ichiro is going to kill someone someday

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

You heard it here first: Ichiro Suzuki, the baseball player, is going to kill someone.  Be it his wife, his father, his mother, or even himself – there will be death by his hands in some way, shape, or form, one of these days.

ESPN has been getting a lot of praise recently for this story they just dropped about the tumultuous winter of 2017, where the 44-year old Ichiro was not sure whether or not his professional baseball career was over or not.  But because he’s this machine-like creature of habit, trained and conditioned since he was a kid to play baseball, he doesn’t know what else to do, other than train and prepare for the next season, regardless of his employment status or not.  Completely on his own, no less, away from his wife and his parents, whom it’s revealed he has a completely fractured and broken relationship with the dad that put him on the path that made Ichiro into Ichiro.

During the span in which the article is being written, Ichiro is signed by the MLB team in which his career started, the Seattle Mariners, and the prodigal son is returning home, for what is in all likelihood his final season.

But it’s the journey of uncertainty in which Ichiro embarks on that really makes me question his grasp on reality, and paints a picture of a kind of sad existence of a person whom has achieved greatness and immortality in the world of baseball, but is apparently completely out of touch and a total stranger to what the real world outside of baseball is actually like.

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BIG DICK SWINGING SPORTS POST

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It’s busy season at work.  Life itself has been pretty busy too.  Ironically, as busy life has been transpiring, things have been happening all around that have made me feel like writing, but I simply haven’t really had any time to sit down and do any writing.  There’s no downtime at work for me to slop together some words, and by the time I get home, I’m usually burnt out and not wanting to look at any screen other than my phone for my routine-like playing of Fire Emblem: Heroes.

Typically, whenever things seem brog-worthy, I jot down a quick blurb or note in a Google document for me to revisit whenever I have more time to write about them.  However, due to the busy, I simply haven’t had the time to revisit anything, but the list continued to grow and grow, leaving me feeling anxious about the passage of time to brogging dynamic that I’ve been feeling has been slipping out of my grasp lately.

So now that for the first time, I’ve found that I have a moment to do some writing, I thought I’d save myself as well as my 0 readers the trouble of doing a little consolidation, so that I don’t feel like I should be dumping 1,000 words per topic, but instead go for some quick hits that I’ll do my best to get the point across while covering all of the topics that have piqued my interest over the last week and change. 

This makes even more sense, considering that this particular conglomeration of topics all conveniently happen to be sports related, and since pretty much nobody I know except for me actually cares about sports, it’s a win-win for me, that I get to do some writing, and for the zero who will inevitably glaze over this when it’s eventually published for realsies.

And so we start off with the most notable of events, with the boys in Blacksburg, Virginia Tech taking down yet another ranked ACC powerhouse in men’s basketball, defeating the unholy and reviled #5 Duke.

For those keeping track, this marks the fourth ranked ACC opponent that Tech has defeated this year, with wins against (at the times) #10 North Carolina, #15 Clemson, #2 Virginia.  Now as much as I would much, much, much rather see a football season in which the Hokes took down Clemson, UVA, UNC and Duke, I’m genuinely pleased with the basketball program which has pretty much guaranteed a spot in the NCAA Tournament; where they will get likely get bounced in the first round, but making it to the dance is always important.

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