Imagine if I actually got paid to share baseball ideas*

February 19, 2018August 5, 2020 ~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Not that anyone but me, or any other baseball geek that’s remotely interested in baseball statistics and the Moneyball game of salary management within the sport, would care, but Eric Hosmer just signed a free agent deal with the San Diego Padres.

This is not really major news, even by baseball standards. Hosmer seems like a pretty good guy, and I’ll always remember how synonymous he was for the leadership he exhibited in 2015, leading the woeful Kansas City Royals to their first World Series championship in like an entire generation. The team he signed with, the San Diego Padres, haven’t been good nor remotely relevant since Ray Kroc owned the team. The bottom line is, Eric Hosmer is a pretty low-key baseball star, and the Padres are a very low-key existing baseball team, so the union of them isn’t particularly groundbreaking news, even despite the fact that sheer lack of free agent signings has been a somewhat notable topic throughout this baseball offseason.

However, the thing that’s the most interesting to me is the structure of Hosmer’s deal with the Padres. The bare bones summary of the contract is that it’s an eight-year deal for $144 million dollars; but it’s not as simple as saying Hosmer will be getting exactly $18 million a year, because rarely will there ever be a long-term deal where a player simply gets the average number between the total amount divided by the length of the contract.

Typically, baseball contracts are often structured in a manner in which a player makes a pretty reasonable amount the first year, but then the annual salary of ensuing years typically ramps upward, and usually the last 2-3 years of a contract are where they peak, and you’ll see players making ludicrous Oprah-rich numbers of like $20-30 million dollars during those later years.

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The year in writing post, circa 2017

December 28, 2017August 9, 2020 ~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

As is often times the case when it comes to life, 2017 had its ups and 2017 had its downs. As much as people bemoaned just how tragic and shitty 2016 was, I honestly cannot say that I personally felt that 2017 was tremendously better. As I said, the year had its up and there were some most certainly good things that occurred during the last calendar year, but 2017 had no shortage of bad things that happened to people in general, people close to me, and people directly in my own life.

There may not have been as many notable celebrity deaths that have sent the internet abuzz with fake sympathy, bogus empathy and all the hollow fuck thoughts and prayers on the planet that were often the root of the angst towards 2016, but there was still no doubt that a lot of crappy things occurred regardless. At least with death, it’s definitive and final, and the repercussions are only as impactful to mostly immediate families and occasional organizational legacies. But take for example shit like the white supremacist uprising that plagued Charlottesville earlier in the year; this is very real, scary shit that’s easily hidden behind the façades of normal society, and can rise and hide on a moment’s notice.

Psychos who open fire on open-air concerts doesn’t change the frightfully abundant amounts of assault weaponry in the United States, and people still can’t stop arguing over conduct during the National Anthem and whether we have rights, or the rights to practice rights and other redundant arguments that just feed into the flames of people being miserable.

Frankly, given the direction that the world is headed, I couldn’t imagine death sounds like a terrible thing to more nihilistic types, dreading what the world is turning into as time passes. I don’t imagine I’m the only one who thinks that society is most certainly not going in the right direction and that things probably are not going to be any better in five years, in line with that old Jimmy Carter speech.

But that’s a shitty thing for me to say, because death is most certainly no laughing matter, and the world has seen its share of it this year, as it does every single year. Whether it’s numerous lives decimated by natural disasters like the hurricanes that ravaged Texas and Puerto Rico to the massacres by the hands of terrorists, domestic and foreign alike. Or the casualties of the unfortunate hands that life deals out to unlucky people who are taken from the world by cancer or other indiscriminate ailments.

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Only the Braves

December 11, 2017August 4, 2020 ~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Back during the summer, the Triple-A Gwinnett Braves announced they were going to change their name, moving forward. After sifting through the dank and salt for viable candidates, the final ballot was narrowed down to the following six options:

Gwinnett Buttons
Gwinnett Big Mouths
Gwinnett Gobblers
Gwinnett Hush Puppies
Gwinnett Lamb Chops
Gwinnett Sweet Teas

Obviously, none of these were particularly fantastic options, but I figured Buttons would’ve won easily, since it was the least over-the-top campy name, and that there was the historical element behind it, as Button Gwinnett was whom the entire county was named after as well as a signer of the Declaration of Independence.

Regardless, at the county level and those who were remotely interested in the distraction of a dumb story like this, there was much debate, but more pettiness when it came to the topic of renaming the Gwinnett Braves, that really could be summed up with the fact that all available options were pretty shitty.

So naturally, the winner of the contest ended up being the Gwinnett Stripers.

What’s that you say? It wasn’t an option? By golly, it wasn’t! The Braves blindsided the fans yet again, with the bat of no-transparency, and went ahead and made choices without the people that sign their paychecks!

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“Bakayarou” is Japanese for “dumbass”

December 4, 2017August 4, 2020 ~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

See also: Shohei Ohtani, who basically tanked all potential earning leverage by showing his hand that he does not want to play on the east coast, thus eliminating the deep, deep pockets of the Yankees, Red Sox or Mets from contention of acquiring his services.

I sure hope he’ll be happy winning no more than 87 games a year for the Seattle Mariners for the next 4-5 years, because that’s pretty much the only team remotely close to checking off of the majority of the lengthy number of prerequisites his camp has provided to MLB teams.

Sure, the current MLB collective bargaining agreement has killed off the days of guys like Daisuke Matsuzaka and Masahiro Tanaka getting Oprah-rich as soon as they arrive in the United States, but it’s still a really stupid move for Ohtani’s camp to so quickly eliminate the biggest spenders from contention, just because their client has some preconceived preferences already in place. There’s still tons of deferred and hidden money and perks on the table that teams from New York or Boston could have been used for to offer up to create leverage and raise the stakes from other teams.

It’s almost like nobody on Team Ohtani has ever bought a car in their life or something. You never reveal what your true intentions are, and most certainly never show your hand, until the best possible offers are on the table, and then the next round of negotiations can begin with increased wagers. Once the best shit is out in the open, the buyers can make up whatever bullshit they want or be as transparent as they want to start revealing their end game, but by then, it doesn’t really matter once the offer sheets are printed and presented.

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Fulfilling destiny

November 2, 2017August 4, 2020 ~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

It wasn’t as nail-bitingly exciting as the finale of the World Series last year, but I guess it seems kind of fitting that the deciding game of an otherwise insane World Series would end in such a mundane and anti-climactic manner, with the Astros jumping all over Yu Darvish in the first two innings, and then basically just holding on for two and a half hours, counting down 27 outs.

But in the end, the Houston Astros stand triumphant, winning their first ever World Series in franchise history, and I am pleased. Contrary to the belief that I’m solely happy because it validates a moon shot of a pre-season prediction and makes me feel like I actually know a thing or two about baseball and how to make an educated guess, there are lots of other reasons why the Astros winning is a good thing in my opinion.

I’m happy for Carlos Beltran, whom I felt was one of the missing pieces for a championship-caliber squad, and it’s nice to know that such a talented star throughout a long career will get his ring. I’m happy for Brian McCann, Evan Gattis and even Charlie Morton, as former Braves players who additionally filled out the Astros roster and contributed big-time performances throughout the playoffs with clutch hits and big innings; I always wanted McCann to be a Brave for his whole career, but such notions are pipe-dreams today, especially with a tightwad organization like the Braves. But I’ve always rooted for McCann, and I’m happy to see him reach the peak, even if it’s for someone else.

I’m happy for the organization, who went through The Process and actually hit pay dirt in the end; all the years of living in the basement of both the National League as well as the American League when they moved, netted them numerous high draft picks whom most have developed and matured into stars like Carlos Correa, Alex Bregman and the World Series MVP George Springer, who absolutely went nuts throughout the series. So many teams go through The Process, because there’s really no other alternative unless their organizations have massive payrolls, and so many fall short, because baseball is ultimately one gigantic crapshoot anyway. But the Astros stuck with it, and with nothing more than good development, and smart acquisitions like McCann and Beltran, the team ascended up the mountain as contenders, and come out on top as champions.

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Tarnishing my Astro hopes

October 28, 2017August 4, 2020 ~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

It’s no secret that I’m pulling for the Houston Astros in this year’s World Series. After all, I predicted them to go all the way long before the season got started, and when it comes to sports fans, fewer things are more gratifying than being right, so it’s exciting to me that the team I called in December actually has a legitimate shot to fulfill my prediction.

But I have to say that even if the Astros pull off the victory, it’s going to be somewhat of a tainted victory, marred by naturally, some off-the-field shenanigans that the media has snowballed into a gargantuan deal that goes viral on social media and overshadows the event in which it took place, regardless of just how good of an event the actual event is turning out to be.

Because that’s what social media does, it ruins everything.

So the Astros’ first baseman, Yuliesky Gourriel AKA Yuli Gurriel to the hordes of people who don’t actually give a shit about baseball but have heard about this unfortunate story and want to be outraged by it anyway, was caught on camera making a supposed racist gesture towards the Dodgers’ pitcher Yu Darvish, whom everyone seems to be identifying as solely Japanese despite the fact that he’s actually half Iranian.

The thing is, I saw when this happened live, because I actually like baseball and was actually watching the game when the event occurred: Gurriel hits a home run off of Darvish, and then is back in the dugout. Because FOX loves to pan cameras back to the person of the moment, they’re repeatedly panning back on Gurriel who is now back in the dugout, smiling and laughing with all of his present teammates, ecstatic at giving the Astros a lead on the Dodgers. The offensive moment is all of 0.5 seconds, before Gurriel is back to quaffing his doofy bouffant hair.

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