Tag: fail

Would be hilarious if the patch affects player performance

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I love how the 2023 baseball season has barely started, and regardless of the fact that the Mets obliterated payroll records, they still can’t escape being the Mets:

  • Newly re-signed closer Edwin Diaz out for the season with injury incurred during the World Baseball Classic, still getting paid $19.5M
  • Justin Verlander, who will make $43.3M this season, already on the disabled list with a teres-major injury
  • Robinson Cano, who was released by the Mets in 2022, and is currently unemployed, will still make $20M from the Mets

But as the Mets have demonstrated, all that shit’s just money, and they don’t seem to care how much of it they burn if they think its going to lead to moar winz.  The Diaz money is covered by insurance, Verlander will probably still have the best games of his season against the Braves, and well, Cano is a sunk cost that deferred money guys always seem to slip under the cracks unless it’s Bobby Bonilla (also the Mets’ problem lol).

However, this new jersey patch to commemorate the union between the Mets and New York Presbyterian Hospital?  Now that’s some tragic shit, that I can’t believe for a second will actually make it through the entire season.

When it comes to fans roasting their own team, few are as more savage and creatively funny as Mets fans, and despite being division rivals to the Braves, I have always gotten along well with Mets fans on the internet and I respect their candor and creativity when it comes to slamming on their own teams.  And from what I’ve already seen, I can’t really top or better a lot of the shit I’ve seen them dumping on the team for the absurdly ridiculous size of this patch.

But at this mammoth size, I have to imagine that it’s going to be capable of affecting player performance, just because of the general feel and added weight it’s going to add to the sleeve.  Like, when a poorly screen printed t-shirt’s design feels hard on your skin instead of the softness of a cotton shirt underneath; it doesn’t absorb sweat and makes you feel wet flesh on a hot day, little things that can make you feel uncomfortable.

And as neurotic and superstitious as baseball players are, little things that affect the touch and feel of their baseball uniforms, yeah I think it’s completely plausible that these gigantic fucking patches would have the capability to affect player performance.  Being on the left sleeve, I imagine a lefty hitter like Brandon Nimmo is going to feel the subtle weight of it when he gets into his batting stance, and it’s going to take a minute for him to get used to it, but any abject performance that occurs in that minute could be the difference in a winning and losing a game, and considering the Mets lost the division to the Braves by just one game, all wins do matter.

Maybe a player on defense will be uncomfortable with there being this bigass stiff square on their arm instead of the light neutrality of no patch, and it fucks up their timing and they start committing errors.  Or knowing the luck of the Mets, somehow, the patch is going to come into play for an injury stint for one of their $40M pitchers.

Either way, the likelihood of such coming into play isn’t very high, because if players can adjust to all this pitch clock bullshit, the death of the shift and limited pickoff attempts, they’ll get used to a patch, even if it is the size of a Domino’s Pizza box.  But if it did, it wouldn’t be surprising, because only the Mets could be the team that gets derailed by something as silly as an oversized sponsorship sleeve patch.

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Everybody loses: YouTube prankster fucks with the wrong guy, gets shot; prankster in ICU, shooter in police custody

What caught my attention about this story is that it happened up in Northern Virginia, and at a mall that I’ve been to a few times before.  Dulles Town Center, at least when I was still living up there, wasn’t the bougiest mall or wasn’t a Tysons, but was still well shopped as it was way the fuck far away from the blight-spreading that had overtaken Springfield and Landmark malls and was on its way towards Tysons with the expansion of Metro.

But it was still an unfortunate story where a shithead who tries to cultivate internet popularity by performing pranks on usually unwilling participants, tries to pull a prank on the wrong guy, and ends up getting shot in the gut.  The wrong guy, who was just trying to mind his own business and pick up food for a DoorDash delivery, gets pushed into whipping out his piece, is now under arrest, and as said above, everybody loses.

I floated this story to a group chat of close friends, and the general consensus is that the shooter crossed the line by reacting with deadly force, but at the same time, I absolutely don’t think that the prankster is absolved of any fault at all.  Sure, I agree that deadly force should rarely be the answer to anything short of one’s life being threatened in the first place, but I can’t say I entirely agree that the prankster wasn’t asking for it either.

Because I don’t want to give anyone acknowledgment to the shithead prankster and his dumbass YouTube channel I won’t use names or give any links and anyone really curious about this story can probably find it easily on their own, but the guy doing the pranks is a pretty big dude, and I feel like he takes for granted that his stature and the fact that he seems to target less-threatening individuals, probably prevents a lot of people retaliating on him for trying to get a rise out of them.  So when he pressed his luck on a guy who reportedly gave him fair warning as well as tried to swat his phone away from him, I can’t say I feel any modicum of sympathy for him when he got a gun pulled on him. 

Of course the shooter didn’t have to shoot, but we live in a world where there are more unhinged people than ever out there, and the prankster got unlucky to have found one of them with an itchy trigger finger that did the deed.

What’s obnoxious about this story other than the obvious shithead prankster, is that the guy’s dad and grandfather are coming out and trying to defend him for “just trying to have some fun” and other diluted rhetoric that coddles and justifies their shithead son’s bad behavior.  Like if I were the guy’s dad, I’d probably go on record that I don’t condone my son’s behavior, but I wish he’d just got decked instead of shot.

I actually feel sympathy for the shooter, because I’d wager he didn’t wake up in the morning thinking there was any possibility that he was going to end up in jail at some point.  Much less for an altercation that he didn’t initiate.  He was just trying to mind his own business, logged into DoorDash and wanted to make some money, and some shithead bro starts fucking with him, and won’t let up.  Obviously pulling a gun and shooting the guy was extreme, but at some point, people can only get pushed before they are forced to react.

Either way, it’s an unfortunate story where everyone comes out a loser, and I post about it because these are the types of stories that draw my attention when I don’t feel like writing so much and I need to inspire myself to in order to keep up with the habit and practice continuing doing it.

A feeling really old moment

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I went to Willy’s the other day to pick up dinner, and like most intelligent human beings who value their time, I placed an order online with the hopes of timing my drive just right to where I could arrive right at the expected time of ready to pick up, grab my food and be on my merry way home, with minimal waiting necessary for me, my kids, mythical wife and our au pair.

As if I can’t say more positive things about my de facto favorite eatery chain in Atlanta, Willy’s is usually really good about meeting their estimated times, and more often than not, whenever I place an online order, it’s ready and waiting for me whenever I do arrive, and whenever that’s the case, I’m satisfied and feeling smug at walking out with my food while there are a line of schlubs waiting to order.

Except for this one particular location, which ironically is the one closest to my home.  There was once a point where I could quite literally say that I’d been to every single Willy’s location, so I could say with conviction that this one is the worst Willy’s in their entire company network.  Now I know they’ve expanded a little bit since I was the Burrito King of Atlanta but I’d still wager that this specific location is probably still the worst of them all.

And it’s not because they’re in the hood or somewhere unsafe and sketchy, quite the contrary, they’re in one of the lily-whitest, upper-middle class parts of the Metro Atlanta area.  But the problem remains as predictably same as any poor performing restaurant, the fault of bad employees.

The thing is, the employees aren’t bad because they’ve got attitudes or are lazy, it’s just this particular Willy’s location is that they’re staffed from the pool of people in which they’re located in, which in this case is a bunch of mostly white, high school teenagers, whom mostly come from a place of privilege.  And it’s no more prevalent than how often this place is completely overwhelmed by basic orders, leading to long waits, mistakes in orders, and a whole lot of reasons why I should really stop going to this location, but I keep coming back because I like Willy’s, and I keep telling myself that things might have changed by now.

Anyway, the reason this brog post comes to fruition is because when I got to this Willy’s, I was right on time to the estimated time of readiness, and I enter the restaurant and walk straight to the shelf of online orders and lo and behold, there’s no bag with my name on it waiting for me.  In fact there’s no bags at all, but then again I’ve realized that I’m smarter than most people in my area by how much more I seem to utilize online ordering than others.

I stand around for a minute or two, hoping someone would emerge from the prep area with a bag bursting with my order, which doesn’t happen, so I put myself into the line of sight of the cashier who’s this blond, teenage-looking Chad.  At this point, I can see a couple of tickets hanging from a board.  Chad doesn’t say anything to me despite making eye contact with me, so I blink first and ask him about my order which was scheduled to be ready by now.  He has no answer to my query, and resumes making pre-made baggies of tortilla chips.  My eyebrow scrunches at this completely useless response to a simple question.

There’s a manager pacing between the grill, kitchen and the prep area, and when he sees me, he blurts out to Chad why he’s not helping me, and that I’m clearly standing in front of him because I need some help.  I explain that I’m waiting on my online order, and that I can see my ticket there, and it looks unfortunate that I’m behind what appears to be a fucking catering order and who the fuck makes a catering order at 5 pm on a Friday and why would they even take it much less try to fulfill it right before the dinner rush??

But then for the next few minutes, I watch as the poor overwhelmed manager has to basically hold Chad’s hand at instructing him to demonstrate some common sense and feel for the room, because it’s clear that Chad has absolutely no understanding of customer service work, and I’m feeling really old in thinking that the kids these days are fucked and spoiled and that the future is fucked for white America and it’s no wonder the food service industry’s reputation is in the shitter now.

  • Chad has to be told to stop bagging chips and to help customers in front of him
  • Chad has to be told to look at the growing row of completed burrito orders to locate mine.
  • Chad has to be told to use his head and not put a burrito on top of a bag of chips come on now.
  • Chad has to be told to count the number of items on the ticket and make sure it matches the number of items in the bag (he was wrong)
  • Finally, Chad has to be told how to arrange bags inside of a bigger bag to fulfill my order before handing it off

I get my order finally and leave the restaurant noticeably agitated.  What should’ve been a quick pickup took an extra 12 minutes of time that my kids could’ve been exploding in my car, and traffic could have been getting worse, seeing as how it was right at the top of the 5 pm hour.  I’m astounded by the sheer incompetence from Chad, and how this location just can’t seem to ever get any reliable help.  Seriously, no other Willy’s I’ve been to has been so poorly operated, and at this point I’m left with no other conclusion that they are as a result of the employment pools in which they operate in.

But I just felt really old because I remember my first jobs when I was still in my teens, and how I never seemed to get any heat from my employers because I had common sense and a work ethic, and beyond initial training, rarely ever needed to have my hand held as much as this fucking Chad needed to have his held.

And how I need to stop coming back to this fucking location, because they just suck.

Yeah I doubt this was an isolated incident

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Veteran maneuver: employee of the year-caliber teacher found to have alcoholic beverage on school premises during school hours

Considering mythical wife’s choice of profession, stories like this always catch my attention.  Frankly, even if she weren’t a teacher, it would probably still pique my interest because of how ironically funny and horrifically frightening it is at the same time.

The thing is, this teacher was caught very recently having booze in the classroom, but I would wager a substantial amount of money that this is far, far, faaarrr from an isolated incident.  Make no mistake, this teacher has probably been microdosing her alcoholism for years, and this was the only time in which she got caught.

It’s the classic suburban white Karen move, of carrying around an innocuous-looking reusable plastic cup with a straw that looks like it’s just water, green drink or some Karen-y shit like Crystal Ice, but it’s really one of those things plus three fingers of Dewars or Ketel One, or it’s straight up a screwdriver or a Sex on the Beach, and the lid helps obscure it.

Except that this broad was a teacher, and doing all of the above, on the clock while being in charge of at least 17+ children belonging to other people, and not smuggling her margarita out of TGI Friday’s in her kid’s sippy cup, which adds to the horrific revelation of this story.

Like I said, the scariest part about this is that there’s no question that she’s been doing this for a while.  Like a functioning addict, her justification to herself is that the booze is probably what makes her as effective of a teacher worthy to be an employee of the year, to where she feels justified to keep doing it.  But I guess she got a little too cocky, too complacent, or a little too tolerant, and she was a little heavier on the sauce than usual to the point where she slipped up and put herself in a situation where she was discovered.

Obviously, she’s gone, and no longer in charge of any other human beings, but the damage in trust has been done.  It’s bad enough there are schools in America that have metal detectors and bag searches for the students, I’m sure security protocols would be thrilled with having to add bottle sniffing onto their responsibilities, not just from the students, but the teachers as well.

The ownage just never seems to end for Patrick Ewing

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Oof: after a 75-109 record over the last six years, Patrick Ewing will not be returning to coach the Georgetown Hoyas

You know, back when the news broke that Patrick Ewing was going to become the new head coach for Georgetown, I actually thought hmm, this might actually lead to something interesting with the Hoyas.  After all, Ewing had spent the better part of the last 10+ years as an assistant coach in the NBA, even if Michael Jordan was cockblocking him repeatedly from getting a head coach position, surely he would have some experience and merit now and have something to contribute to someone.

And being the Georgetown legend he is, who better else to make a union with than his alma mater that he led to a National Championship back in 1984?  He’s still an NBA legend, and often times, young, impressionable prospects tend to look up to former players, especially with the pedigree of a Patrick Ewing.  I thought that maybe Ewing could usher in a new generation to Georgetown, where his name could easily boost recruiting, and maybe we’d see a new era of college hoops where the big man reigned supreme once again.

Well, we certainly did see a different era of Georgetown basketball over the last years, under the tutelage of Patrick Ewing; one of colossal failure, unfulfilled expectations, and save for one freakish Big East championship run out of nowhere, just a whole lot of what Patrick Ewing has been best known for: getting owned.

How naïve of me, or blindly optimistic I was to think that Patrick Ewing would deliver anything else.

Seriously, Georgetown was always one of those teams where their name alone could draw some recognition.  John Thompson, Jr. built a program whose reputation alone probably won more games than they should have, where the reputation alone boosted performance long after the level of talent probably existed there.  Thompson III continued a fairly consistently good program when he took the reigns in 2004.  They were pretty much always a lock to be in the NCAA tournament, and just about every time I saw their name in the bracket, I’d at least give them a win in the first round, because usually they were reliable for at least that much.

I can’t say I blame the Hoyas for going in the direction of Patrick Ewing, being an NBA legend as well as a John Thompson product, but man did they ever whiff on colossal proportions with that choice.  75-109 is pretty horrendous, and that doesn’t illustrate some of his more punctuated lowlights, like where there was a stretch where he went 0-29 in conference play.  I mean really, Villanova, Xavier and St. John’s were some tough draws over that stretch, but Ewing was also losing to schools like DePaul, Providence and Butler, school most people probably don’t even know are even in the Big East.

His tenure was so bad, Ewing was trying to get the tradition of the post-game handshake line abolished, because after 29 straight conference losses, I think I’d be sick of having to congratulate the winners during all those losses too.

Anyway because this doesn’t need to be a novel like I so often try to remind myself when it comes to my brogging habits, yet another chapter in the book of Patrick Ewing comes to an end, with failure, unfulfilled expectations and just plain getting owned.  Seems like all those times MJ refused to promote him to a head coaching position are validated, considering Pat couldn’t even shape young, moldable talents into winners, so god forbid he have any better luck with a bunch of boneheaded knuckleheads like the vast majority of the NBA is today.

The DeVanzo Shift lives

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Brilliant: the Boston Red Sox employ a new defensive strategy that’s basically the shift, but still falls within the rules that were altered to attempt to kill the shift

When MLB banned the shift after the 2022 season, the baseball internet had all sorts of jokes about the players who were ripe and prime to breakout, with infielders being neutered to where they could position themselves to neutralize low-skill, pull-happy batters.

The one name that emerged the most was first baseman, Joey Gallo, who was about the most predictable hitter in history, seemingly completely incapable of hitting the ball to anywhere on the left half of the field.

Over the years, opposing teams have employed the most ridiculous shifts on Gallo, going so far as to having just one left fielder to be the sole safety blanket in case he had a bad pregame meal, and was all gassy and clenched and accidentally tapped something to left, while every other single player on the field shifted hard to the right.

This is a tactic called the DeVanzo Shift, named after the new defensive strategy employed by Manganelli’s slow pitch softball team in Artie Lance’s Beer League.

Joey Gallo is not a particularly smart fellow who doesn’t seem to realize that a bunt to right is an automatic double, or just not really that good at baseball, had been victimized for years by the shift, and his numbers and general employability have dwindled throughout the years.

And because there are lots of other guys like Gallo who can’t/won’t practice and learn to hit it the other way, they all collectively bitched and moaned to the MLB player’s union to where they managed to get the tactic outlawed.

The problem is, they were too granular with their explanation of the rules, and teams filled with smart guys like the Boston Red Sox have already figured out ways to exploit the loopholes in the rules, and just like that, when Joey Gallo walked into to spring training expecting to have a monster spring and not having to look at the teeth of the shift again, bam, is suddenly facing the shift again. 

Except it’s not the third baseman who’s wandering way the fuck out of position, it’s the left fielder who’s wandering even way more the fuck out of position, to help keep the DeVanzo Shift alive for at least one more season, to push oafs like Joey Gallo closer to madness and/or early retirement.  The rules state that infielders can’t go out of position or leave the infield dirt, but ain’t nobody said anything about the outfielders.

So owned, Joey Gallo, and long live the DeVanzo Shift!

I miss Dan Uggla

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I heard about this story about how the Braves ended a spring training game in a tie, because a player got the game-ending third strike on account of not being in the batter’s box in time, because 2023 marks the start of the pitch clock era, where every single pitch now has a timer attached to it in an effort to speed up the pace of games because society’s ever-growing ADD has declared that baseball games are too long and nobody likes them anymore as a result.

No sport gets fucked with structurally as much as baseball does.  Aside from some rule changes to discourage defense because offense is sexy, basketball is by and large the same game as it now as it was back in the 1950’s.  Football’s primarily changed in order to try and reduce concussions and protect quarterbacks, but pretty much everything else goes as it did in back in 1920. 

But baseball?  Any strategy that seems too effective is neutered or outright banned (the shift), pitching mounds are raised, lowered, the physical baseballs themselves are altered, bats are regulated and banned, and there are rule changes practically every year.  One of the lasting anecdotes about baseball was that it was the game with no clock, and as a result, every single pitcher-batter matchup was potentially important, and that there was no strategic milking of the clock, and that every out had to be recorded in order for a team to be declared a victor.

Now, there is an actual clock, which effectively puts the romanticism of baseball having no clock and that every out must be earned to rest, because now baseball has embarked on a path where games really can have a finite time limit now.  With rules in place that prevent managers from spamming pitching changes in order to play matchups, and rules in place that prohibit excessive checking base runners by pitchers, MLB has basically closed the walls around old school baseball strategy and effectively put a hard time limit on every game, flexible solely by the need for extra innings or managers milking pitching changes to the most of their limited new abilities.

The Pedro Astacios who took practically an entire minute in between every pitch, and the Bruce Chens who once trolled an entire stadium by checking a runner at first like 14 times will all be phased out and rendered extinct, regardless of how capable they are throwing a baseball, and future Moneyball will probably be cultivating pitching staffs with wildly different pitch preparation speeds, with the intention of throwing off batter timing throughout games.

With all these changes to the game, I just think about the times in the past where I think about having loved baseball the most and lately, the name that pops up the most as someone I really miss, is Dan Uggla.

He was kind of like the anti-stat geek player that the rise of the stat geeks baseball culture absolutely abhorred, but teams themselves still coveted because of his sheer ability to hit home runs when he actually made contact with the ball.  His defense was below-average, he wasn’t a threat to steal bases, and being a second baseman it’s not like he had much of an arm.  But again, the guy hit home runs, and that’s a talent that every team wants, whether they wanted him as a starter, or a designated pinch-hitter, or an actual designated hitter.

There was once a season where he hit .179 on the year which is abysmal, but he still clobbered 22 home runs, which is still noteworthy.  My friend and I made the joke that all he hit were home runs, and with just 80 total hits on the year, he really did hit home runs over 25% of the time.

I take it back about not having much of an arm though, the guy had more physical arms than just about anyone else in the history of Major League Baseball, because pound-for-pound, Dan Uggla had to have been the most jacked player in history.  The guy was 5’11 which isn’t that tall as far as professional athletes go, but the guy had massive, massive arms, with most people making the comparison that his arms looked like Popeye.

Additionally, Dan Uggla also wore the tightest, most form-fitting uniforms as he could, throughout his whole career.  I’m not sure if it were deliberate, or if across the board there were some sizing issues for a man of his stature combined with his musculature, but my friends and I declared that his uniform size was “smedium” and made the comparison for any time anyone was seen wearing a tight-fitting shirt in order to attempt to make their musculature look impressive deliberately.

All in all, Dan Uggla was kind of the perfect poster boy for ironic baseball player fandom.  He was hated by nerds, but still loved by teams, and basically always had a job as long as he kept hitting home runs, all while wearing his ridiculous smedium uniforms and looking like he had professional wrestling as a post-career option.  But more importantly, he was kind of like this totem of simpler times, where there weren’t so many oppressive rules, fans bitching about game duration weren’t heard, and players had to deal with the shift.  No matter his numbers, relievers and closers in his time, still had to face Dan Uggla with the game on the line and although the numbers may have favored them most of the time any mistake they let loose was probably going to end up in the seats.

Man, I miss Dan Uggla.  Even more now, with the game itself undergoing so many dramatic changes.  It’s going to be weird when I eventually actually watch a baseball game again, and seeing shit like pitching clocks on the HUD, and I imagine they’ll feel noticeably faster in speed, which in some cases might feel pretty convenient, but at the same time, very much not like the baseball that was what I grew to love and enjoy.