Tag: baseball

Baseball is awesome

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Somehow, the Atlanta Braves are in second place in their division.  Despite the fact that they’re five games under .500 and eight games behind the Washington Nationals, somehow there are three teams that absolutely refuse to compete more than the Braves and are somehow worse.

If the Braves were in just about any other division in baseball, they’d be in fourth or last place, but being in the NL East, they’re somehow a second-place team.  Wild card #2, look out!

This is the kind of shit why baseball is awesome.  Sometimes, you just never know how things pan out.  This is kind of like a double-win for me, because the Braves are sucking like I want them to suck while they’re disrespectfully tanking on purpose, yet at the same time, they’re still somehow superior to the Mets and the Phillies.

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Photos: A day in Phoenix, Arizona, visiting Chase Field

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[2020 note]: This is more or less lost content that is retroactively posted, a photo dump of my brief day trip to Phoenix, Arizona, so I could catch at a game at Chase Field, the home of the Arizona Diamondbacks, as well as being MLB ballpark 29 out of 30, on my ongoing quest to visit all 30 Major League Baseball cities.

Maybe after I retroactively get all of my posts up, I can revisit my old ballparks site, and flesh out something more relevant to ballparks, but until then, a photo dump that really nobody but me is going to care about, will have to do.

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Derek Jeter would make an interesting owner

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Impetus: Group which includes Derek Jeter has reached agreement to purchase the Miami Marlins for $1.3 billion dollars

Granted, this doesn’t mean anything yet because nothing in Major League Baseball is done at a reasonable amount of time, and there will need to be a laundry list of approvals and votes and other time-sucking tasks before anything can be made official.  But given the two options of keeping the Marlins in the hands of Jeffrey Loria, one of the most loathed personalities in baseball, or transferring them to for all intents and purposes Derek Jeter, one of the most beloved and revered players in the modern era, I think it’s a safe bet that Yeah Jeets is going to end up owner of the Marlins fairly soon.

I feel like I shouldn’t forget to mention that among the $1.3 billion dollar group is former Florida governor Jeb Bush, who is notably a member of the Bush family which included once-unpopular amongst the left former President George W. Bush, because he is a notable name, despite the fact that I’m fairly ambivalent when it comes to politics.  Jeb’s pretty well synonymous with failure and coming up short in his own right, but if there was ever anyone who has made his entire living of lifting the inadequate and carrying scrubs to victory, it would be Derek Jeter.

Ultimately, when Yeah Jeets ends up taking over the Marlins; the media can try to downplay his role in the group all they want, everyone knows that he’s the only one remotely qualified to make any sort of actual baseball decisions, it will be interesting to see what kind of owner he actually ends up becoming. 

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San Francisco Giants fans are kind of the worst

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

TIME TO DO THE FIST PUMP: Giants ace pitcher Madison Bumgarner goes on the disabled list with shoulder injury suffered from dirt bike accident on a day off, unhappy fans take to Twitter to passive-aggressively air out their disappointment through bad jokes

Most of the time, when it comes to sports teams, I can change my allegiances at the drop of a hat.  I can dislike a team because they always beat up on the teams I like, or I can turn around and like a team because they acquired a player that I think is a good guy, and I want to support them.  I used to be a Knicks fan growing up, and now I laugh at the Knicks and their futility today.  I once couldn’t stand the Chicago Cubs because their fans sold out Turner Field all the time, and I rooted fervently for demi-god Albert Pujols and the St. Louis Cardinals against the Tigers and Rangers in two separate World Series, but I cheered for the Cubs last season because they had David Ross and I wanted to see him go out a champion, and rooted against the Cardinals because I was simply over them and their constant “playing the right way” rhetoric.  I loathed the Houston Astros for the longest time, because they always seemed to be a thorn in the side of the Braves, but now with their roster including Brian McCann and Evan Gattis, I’m pulling for the Astros to succeed in the American League.

But if there’s one team that I’ve never liked, it’s been the San Francisco Giants.  I don’t really know where the animosity begun; maybe it was Barry Bonds in his more standoffish asshole days when he was a living steroid clobbering tainted home runs left and right.  I don’t even like the San Francisco 49ers either, maybe because of childhood memories of asshole friends picking them in Tecmo Super Bowl and causing legitimate beefs.  Honestly, I don’t really like the Golden State Warriors either, because I have a hard time not seeing the joke team of the 90s, that was always the forgotten fourth California NBA franchise behind the Lakers, Clippers and even the fucking Kings, and I resent that they’re now the darlings of the NBA now.

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lol Braves #835

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Impetus: Days before the official first-ever Opening Day at ScumTrust Park, where Atlanta traffic will be put to the ultimate test of futility, Interstate 75 is temporarily crippled when a truck carrying boxes of Atlanta Braves foam tomahawks, spills some of its contents onto the highway, forcing closure of two lanes in an extremely congested section the highway

Oh, I can feel the excitement in the air.  The AJC, Atlanta Magazine, WSB, any and every outlet in Atlanta, trying to drum up interest in the impending grand opening of ScumTrust Park.  Trying their best to accentuate the newness of the park, all the things around the ballpark, and doing their best to hide the fact that the traffic will be Snowpocalypse bad, and nothing around the ballpark is actually open.  Not to mention the Braves, who started the season on the road are 1-6 at the time I’m writing this, and are the worst team in the National League and tied for the worst team in the Majors.

Yup, didn’t see any of this coming.

But one thing I didn’t expect to see, but am not the least bit surprised, because “Braves” and “fucking up” seem to go together these days like peas and carrots, was like, a soft opening of shitty traffic, when some boxes of foam tomahawks fell onto I-75 and shut down two lanes in literally the worst possible spot where I-75 and I-285 intersect.

Sure, it was mostly harmless and no foam tomahawk is remotely capable of physically damaging any motorists’ vehicles, but it still provided a nuisance to anyone on the road, and is a nice reminder of the shitshow that the Cobb Braves and their corruption-fueled new ballpark are all about.

lol Braves: Ryan Howard, really?

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SMH: Braves sign Ryan Howard to minor league deal

I can only imagine the things the talking heads said to themselves/one another to justify thinking that this was a fantastic idea.

“This guy has killed us for years.  He’s hit 52 home runs against us.  We should get him!”

“This guy has killed the Nats/Mets/Marlins throughout his career.  We should get him!”

“This guy is a former rookie of the year, MVP and a World Series winner.  We should get him!”

None of those are wrong statements, but they’re mostly applicable to the first half of his career, before a torn ACL pretty much destroyed his career after 2011.  The reality of the situation is that since that injury, he’s been a shell of his former self, batting .226 and hitting an average of 19 home runs a season, which isn’t terrible, but this is also a guy that once clubbed 58 in 2006 and 284 in his first six full seasons, regularly putting the fear of god into opposing pitchers and fans of other teams.

In all honesty, this really isn’t a bad signing.  It’s a minor league deal, which basically means that Ryan Howard is basically getting a set minor league salary while he’s playing in the minor leagues trying to prove that he’s still capable of playing baseball, and if he gets called up to the majors, he’ll get a pro-rated major league minimum salary, minus any incentives worked into the contract.  It’s a very low risk, high reward deal for the Braves, and if they didn’t pull the trigger, undoubtedly someone else would have.

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Maybe fourth time will be a charm

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I don’t pay nearly as much attention to baseball as I once did, despite that we’re living in kind of the era of the immediate, where tweets, alerts, push notifications and other means of instant communication exist to stay on top of things very easily if one really wanted to, like baseball news.  Often times, I miss out on Braves news much less any news around baseball, because I simply am not that deeply involved like I once did, and everything that happened in the baseball landscape was something I wanted to know.

However, among the things that I regularly Googled and checked on from time to time, was one of the pitchers that I really, really enjoyed watching and was a fan of: Jonny Venters.  Long story short, he was once an unhittable relief pitcher on the Braves, utilizing a left-handed power sinker from another planet, and even achieved All-Star status for his immense talent.  But the injury bug struck, and he underwent the dreaded Tommy John elbow surgery, and eventually he was released by the Braves.  Didn’t matter where he went, I knew that I was going to root for Jonny, and so I always kind of kept an ear to the ground even when he was signed by the Rays, fully knowing that it was going to be some time before he was cleared to pitch again.

Last summer, things looked really optimistic, and Jonny Venters made his way into the minor leagues to work his way back up.  Personally, I was stoked to see him taking the mound again, and I grew excited at the prospect of him getting back into game shape, and then getting called up by the Rays, who would unleash the power sinker from the left side onto the mostly unsuspecting American League.

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