Tag: racism

Good riddance, Pearl

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

TIL: the Atlanta Braves will be moving their Double-A minor league affiliate from Pearl, Mississippi to Columbus, Georgia.  They will also be ditching the Braves moniker and will hopefully be something chintzy and marketable

Not that I pay attention to every iota of Braves coverage as I once did at a point in my life, but as a fan of minor league baseball, and for lack of a better term, a fan of the Atlanta Braves, news like this piques my interest, even if this were reported way the fuck back in January of this year.

I mean, I knew that the Braves had relinquished control over all of their minor league squads back in 2021 like selling their debts, and I didn’t hate the news at all quite the contrary, because I felt that it opened the door for Braves affiliates to spread their wings and try to be something more in the spirit of minor league baseball, instead of the boring, stuffy and sterile branding of “The Braves.”

Gwinnett (AAA) had already switched over to becoming the Strippers Stripers, and Rome (A+) as of this years ditched being the Braves and became The Emperors, as in Roman emperor, and better yet, adopted emperor penguins to be their team’s mascot.  Not that I’ve been paying any attention, but for whatever reason, the Mississippi Braves had remained as such over the last two-plus seasons, and despite their freedom to do so, they didn’t appear to be in any rush to make any changes to the organization.

Until this season apparently, as it was announced that the club will be moving out of Pearl, Mississippi and moving to Columbus, Georgia, as well as ditching the Braves moniker and will be adopting a new name for the start of the 2025 minor league season.

At first blush, my thought was, oh great here we go again with a brand new fucking ballpark to build, but it turns out that there’s apparently a historic ballpark in Columbus, Golden Park, that will actually be renovated and used to house the future Columbus Braves affiliate, instead of building something from scratch.  Granted, a renovation isn’t cheap either, and I’m sure it will probably be something of a $65M tax burden for the people of Columbus to absorb, but that sure beats the $126M it took to build the Braves’ Spring Training facility from scratch in Sarasota.

Regardless of the financial burden of accommodations, this is actually a change that I don’t immediately just want to shit on upon hearing about it.  Having been to Pearl, Mississippi, solely to watch a M-Braves game, I have to say that getting the fuck out of that shithole in the middle of goddamn nowhere is nothing but good news for the Braves and frankly, all of Minor League Baseball in that nobody again will ever have to step foot in Pearl/Jackson, Mississippi after the 2024 season.

It’s the only place I’ve ever been to where I genuinely felt like I was whisked back in time at the casual ignorant racism that got in just a singular afternoon in town, from the moment I left the airport, to getting to the ballpark, and while simply getting food.  The cabbie who picked me up from the airport thought that I had to have been an actual player since I was headed to the ballpark, and upon arriving at the ballpark, I caught some kids staring at me and thinking I was Hideki Matsui.

It’s clear that Asian people aren’t a common occurrence in this chunk of the country, but god damn.  During the game, I was puckish so I went up to a concession stand where there were unsurprisingly chicken tenders and fries, and when I handed over my debit card to pay, the lady at the register examined my card and put down her bifocals, and then said to me, “oh that’s an easy one.”

Obviously having no fucking clue to what she was talking about, I asked her what, and she responded that it was my name, that it was one of those names that wasn’t too hard to pronounce.  Okay then

So needless to say, it seems like a monumental win for any person or any business or in this case, any team, to get the fuck out of Pearl, Mississippi, and head closer to somewhere that’s closer to their parent organization.  Columbus isn’t a tremendous step up from Pearl as far as not feeling like you’re in the middle of nowhere, but at least it’s a military town where people have had some etiquette and discipline beaten into them, and it’s only like a 2-3 hour drive to the Metro Atlanta area if anyone wants to feel some actual civilization.

I’m excited to eventually find out what the team will lean towards as far as a new team name, branding and identity will be.  I don’t know much about Columbus other than it being a military town, so I can’t take any snarky takes or come up with any sarcastic names to anoint them as, but hopefully the yokels out there will have the wherewithal to steer clear of the low-hanging fruit of Christopher, whom we all with brains have heard wasn’t exactly the best guy in history.

But hey, there’s always the Columbus Barves, wouldn’t that be some shit, to take the popularized typo-meme-unofficial sarcasm name for whenever the team fucks up, and make it official?  A guy can dream.

KOREA VERSUS EVERYBODY

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

BBC: South Korea wrongly introduced as North Korea at the Paris Summer Olympics

If anyone has ever been curious to why I have a chip on my shoulder when it comes to the treatment of Koreans, this is a perfect example of why.  The bottom line is that my general opinion is that Korea; Korean culture, Korean contributions to the world, and Korean things in general; gets no respect from the rest of the fucking world.

Everything Japan does is admired and revered by the rest of the planet, and all UN countries are so scared of China’s population numbers and economic potential, that they all kowtow to them, as if they were the grasshoppers from A Bug’s Life, after the ants had uprisen against them.

Meanwhile, Korea has historically been an exemplary ally to the UN, the United States and many other countries.  They haven’t enslaved or bombed anyone, they’re not always lurking in the shadows installing sleepers all around the globe to spy and disrupt.  Korean economy is stable, prosperous, and other than the fact that everyone is black haired and narrow eyed, Korean society really is a lot like American culture.

Yet, people can’t even put down Asian people without disregarding Koreans, like when racists mock Asian people, asking them if they’re Chinese or Japanese.  Saying any other country much less Korea usually results in the person asking having to grind gears in their brains to process the existence of any other Asian race, but the fact that Korea is lumped into that denigrating B-tier of Asian countries fills me up with piss and vinegar.

Just in general, Korea is overlooked and not shown the respect that I think that the entire fucking culture is worthy of.  It doesn’t matter how many global industries Koreans dominate, how competent and good at athletics or competitive events they become, because we’re not Chinese or Japanese, the rest of the world tends to gloss over us, and it leaves me feeling disgusted with the entire world whenever shit like this occurs.

I mean seriously, the fucking Olympics?  The announcers had one goddamn job to do, which was to just name countries, and they can’t even get the Koreas correct?  You know they have rehearsals and practices for putting on monumentally things like this, and yet on global television, they still manage to bungle it the fuck up and mistake the Koreas.

The thing is in America, there have been numerous announcers, news anchors and commentators who have been shitcanned getting caught on a hot mic saying things that were either flagrantly racist or perceived to be racist, primarily to black people.  I would, seriously and as objective as I could try to be, put this up there with that kind of mistake, and if I were the superiors to the both English and French announcers, consider dismissal for both of these ignorant fucks for one, not knowing their world geography for the fucking Olympics, and two, being a colossal embarrassment to the entire International Olympic Committee.

But seeing as the only party being denigrated by their mistake was “just” Koreans, I don’t really see much retribution occurring.  Twitter apologies are not sufficient, and on behalf of Koreans worldwide, I do not accept it.  It’s insulting and embarrassing, and Koreans deserve better than this.

I hope this slight lights a fire under the asses of the 159 Korean Olympians, North and South, and they squeeze out a few extra medal wins here and there out of vindictive spite alone.  Not that it would really matter or be noticed, since the only countries that ever really get any spotlight at every Olympics is the US, China, Japan, Russia and whatever host country.

But whatever, fuck it.  It’s just another day at the office for Korea versus Everybody.

It’s fun watching all the non-sport fan normies get up in arms over Caitlin Clark

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

It’s safe to say that I’ve been watching sports for a pretty long time.  My fandoms ebb and flow, and at various times it’s safe to say that it fluctuates on what sport I am favoriting the most, but when it comes down to it, I have spent an inordinate amount of time in my life watching sports.  Baseball, basketball, football and even a little bit of soccer and hockey, I’ve watched enough sports in my life to generally know what I’m talking about, as well as to have seen some things, that only other sports fans of an extended duration really know what I’m talking about.

If there’s one thing that’s been pretty consistent throughout the history of sports, is that whenever a hotshot player arrives at a new level of competition, there’s usually a degree of testing that they go through and endure, be it from their opponents, peers, rivals and even their own teammates, since peers, rivals and teammates aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive.

When Michael Jordan, Peyton Manning and Derek Jeter were drafted and reported to duty in their early years, all of them went through a period of time where they were physically and mentally tested by everyone.  In practices, scrimmages or spring trainings, their presence was a threat to veterans on their own teams, and ain’t nobody want to lose their job to any young guns whose ears are still wet from the showers.

Against opponents, they were bullied, fouled, tackled, cheap shot and went to verbal warfare from their opponents, who wanted to see if they could exert some power of intimidation or get inside their heads and throw them off their games.

And they would go through these types of rituals and experiences numerous times throughout their early years, until they earned the general respect of those around them, to which the behaviors would taper off mostly, unless they were weak-willed and demonstrated that they could be rattled.

In other words, everything that Caitlin Clark has been going through since the start of the WNBA season, with the hard fouls, the shit talking, the snipes from opponents in the media; this is not racism, this is not jealousy, this is not any form of discrimination.  This is normal, this is ordinary, this is nothing that professional athletes in any sport of any gender have not had to endure themselves at early parts of their careers.

But let’s not tell that to the legions of media and overnight women’s basketball fans who have never been sports fans in their lives until Caitlin Clark had ignited their imaginations, and are up in arms over the supposed rough treatment that she’s getting in the WNBA.  It’s partially their fault that they’re so blind to it, because it really hasn’t been since Caitlin Clark that this many people have been interested in the WNBA at all, and for everyone who is now claiming to be fans of women’s hoops, where they fuck were they when Lisa Leslie and Rebecca Lobo were launching the entire league, and when Britney Griner and Sabrina Ionescu were leading the quiet charge of the current generation?

Caitlin Clark is undoubtedly the most important player the league has come across in a long time, and this generalization is not lost on all the other girls in the league who have had to deal with the ridicule and general disrespect people have had for the WNBA in all the years prior to the arrival of Clark.  It’s natural for them to want to welcome the rookie with some tough love, and size up the nuclear hot shot who’s being unofficially hailed as the flagbearer for the entire gender’s sport, because if she demonstrates any weaknesses, then perhaps she’s not the right person for the job.

The hard fouls and the criticism have nothing to do with racism, and nothing to do with any general discrimination.  There may be some jealousy involved, but I can’t blame anyone for being jealous at least a little bit, considering the league has been around for over 20 years, and it wasn’t until Caitlin Clark that people have been taking notice.

And if Caitlin Clark endures the season with a modicum of grace, respect, and an attitude of shut up and play ball, she’s going to be just fine, and the rest of the league will take their foot off the gas at trying to break her for the sake of breaking her, and entrust her with the hope that she can help bring growth and positive change to the league and sport as a whole.

And as for all the normies, welcome to sports.  This is nothing out of the ordinary.

I hereby propose Angel Hernandez Day

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

A rare day where every team in Major League Baseball got a win: oft-maligned, criticized and widely accepted as the worst umpire in MLB, Angel Hernandez declares retirement effective immediately

When it comes to baseball umpiring, if people know your name, it’s really not a good thing.  There’s a reason why baseball fans all seem to know the names of guys like Tim McClelland, Joe West, CB Bucknor, Laz Diaz, Eric Gregg and of course, Angel Hernandez; because these are guys who have at some point made such a colossal bad call or many bad calls, that they become infamous in baseball circles.

But Angel Hernandez, that guy was truly on a different planet when it came to bad umpiring.  As a (terrible) baseball fan myself who’s seen his share of live baseball games, once I realized who Angel Hernandez was, his name alone, when hearing that he was behind the plate, or even umping anywhere on the field, elicited a feeling of dread and concern that he was most definitely, going to fuck something up.  The real question was which team he was going to fuck it up for, and I could only hope that it wasn’t going to be the Braves or whatever team I might’ve been pulling for in a particular matchup.

Without fail, when he was on the bases, he would completely blow a check swing check, and call a strike on a batter who did not get the bat head past home plate, regardless of how much instant replay could refute it.  He’d call balks on pitchers who were as still as statues, and at least one line drive would land foul but he’d call fair.

But it was behind the plate in which Angel did the most damage, calling way more pitches than most of his peers, inaccurately balls or strikes.  Just searching for “Angel Hernandez” on YouTube would result in a parade of montage videos of him blowing calls, indiscriminately, and as the years have passed and vigilante watchers have been doing everything in their power to hold umpires more accountable, actual factual evidence of how bad Angel Hernandez was at his job has been materializing and painting the Picasso of just how terrible he was at umpiring baseball.

He has widely been regarded as the worst umpire there is not just by fans of baseball, but by the players themselves, whom there have been multiple years where Sports Illustrated takes anonymous surveys of umpire reviews, and it seemed like every time they did it, Angel Hernandez would be rated the worst.

Regardless of the ire, it’s widely believed that Angel himself loves the attention, and that he seems to be a proponent of the ideology that there’s no such thing as bad press, because the man has remained impervious throughout the decades of just how much he has been reviled by fans and players alike.

So needless to say, the recent development that Angel Hernandez is calling it quits and will cease to take anymore baseball fields immediately, has been widely regarded as the biggest win for MLB since like, returning from the 1994 strike.  You’ll never see a day in which fans of rival teams will collectively come together in sheer solidarity at their general happiness that Angel Hernandez is gone.  In locker rooms throughout the country are hitters who are overjoyed in knowing that Angel Hernandez won’t ever be behind the dish ready to call a pitch in the dirt, or a slider 8 inches off the plate a called third strike and ding their batting average.  Pitchers are exhaling with relief knowing that they won’t have one out of every pitches right down the middle called a ball because Angel was thinking about money instead of focusing on the pitch on hand.

So with all this being said, I would like to propose that every May 27th in Major League Baseball season moving forward, should be acknowledged as Angel Hernandez Day, in which everyone in baseball celebrates the departure of the worst umpire in history.  Like they do on Jackie Robinson Day where everyone wears #42, on Angel Hernandez Day, everyone could wear #55, or whatever his primary umpire number was.  Or shit, even just retire the #55 for umpires in honor and good riddance of Angel Hernandez.

Obviously, this would never happen, because MLB is too high-horsey to allow themselves to get a little petty, but if there were ever a guy they’d like to dis-honor, it would be Angel Hernandez, who has attempted to sue his employer numerous times, claiming racial discrimination.  Obviously, the man never brought any real evidence to prove it, and the suits have always been thrown out, but considering as part of his retirement, there’s a cash settlement, I think realistically speaking, Angel has been continuing to work over the last decade, solely to stay in the game of trying to sue MLB, and with all of his suits losing, and with the increasing scrutiny of umpires and umpire performance monitoring, Angel saw fit to take the settlement and take his leave, before he ultimately gets the axe in a mass layoff in the future.

Ironically, in doing so, Angel has manage to steal the spotlight one more time, and ultimately he wouldn’t really have it any other way.  Dis-honoring him with his own day would probably be something he’d actually enjoy, which nobody wants to know, but if baseball really wants to become fun again, I’m sure there could be a tongue-in-cheek compromise to where everyone could be made happy and remember the joyous feeling of the day that Angel Hernandez left Major League Baseball, once and for all.

#TRYHARDSZN2024: Catching unicorns

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Avdohnk: Teen from Modesto, California goes 21 for 34 in college applications, including four of the Ivies

Seeing as how the general culmination of #TRYHARDSZN acceptance days are now in the past, all that’s really left is to just scour the landscape of the world, searching for #TRYHARDs who are standouts in a very competitive field.  In other words, schools and the news are mostly looking for kids that can help fill their Affirmative Action-like quotas of trying to represent diversity, but not realizing that by deliberately being so selective and obvious, that they’re kind of being more racist than if they weren’t #TRYHARDING so hard.

But what we have here is interesting, because we have a #TRYHARD that is a female of Iraqi descent, which I have to imagine is probably something of a unicorn when it comes to schools in America getting to put a checkmark next to in their diversity results.  It probably definitely helps that this student’s family immigrated to the United States some 30 years ago, which most likely helped them get their foot in the door before America got really, really afraid of brown people.

All the same, she’s still a female of Iraqi descent, which is impressive coming from a culture that basically sees females as third-rate, and of less importance than like, fourth-cousins from their uncle’s side, or cows, and I’m surprised that she didn’t go 34 for 34 in her college applications, because I imagine the pool in which to pull Iraqi females from is probably not even shallow, but a damp spot on the asphalt on a sunny day.

The funniest thing about this particular story is her narrative of opening of response letters from all the colleges, and how her family deliberately saved Harvard for last:

We opened up all the Ivy Leagues one by one and my parents were like, okay, save Harvard for last. We opened Harvard and my mom started crying and she was like telling all of her friends in Iraq, like, my daughter just got into Harvard,”

So it sounds like Harvard was the ultimate goal, as it is for basically every Asian parent on the face of the planet – but then the article goes to explain that she’ll be headed to Yale in the fall instead, with no context or justification for why she’s switching so abruptly like that.  It’s not that such is really any of our business, but it does come off as shoddy journalism to tease the whole wanting to go to Harvard angle, but then to just drop that she’s going to Yale instead.

Either way, another thing that’s interesting is the fact that this story actually mentioned the failure rate of this student; most of the time, these #TRYHARD stories are quick to round to the nearest high number, or just say the number of acceptances flat, but despite the fact that this girl got into 21 schools, she also failed to get into 13 of them.

Considering four of them were Ivies, other than perhaps the other four Ivy League schools, it leads to wonder what schools would turn this girl down, not knowing that they had already gotten into Harvard and Yale among other prestigious schools.  Like it would be funny if like Cal State-Fullerton or Long Beach State were all like “ehhh, nah, pass” while Stanford, Yale and Harvard all said yes.

Anyway, at this point, I think I’m done with writing about #TRYHARDSZN2024.  I think I’ve proven my point that there are a tremendous amount of #TRYHARDs that come out of the woodwork nowadays, and that most of them seem to be doing it not so much for genuine consideration for their futures, as much as it’s just a big dick Keeping Up With the Joneses competition to see who can get into the most schools, amass the most amount of scholarship money, and generally be the most obnoxiously insufferable overachievers there are, when the vast majority of these #TRYHARDs are exploiting some unfair advantages that not everyone in the country would be entitled to.

Short of some exceptional stories, we’ll mark the female Iraqi Unicorn as the closing chapter to #TRYHARDSZN2024.  Until next year (maybe)!

#TRYHARDSZN2024: Uganda be kidding me

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Binyebwa: Oakland teenager accepted into 122 colleges and amassed over $5M in scholarship dollars; chooses UC Berkeley because he wants to be a musician

I’ll be honest, I actually don’t know what Berkeley is actually famous for, but I didn’t think it was a place for aspiring musicians.  It’s a reputable enough school to be known by name, but I’m a bit puzzled on why it would be a school where an aspiring musician would name drop to be where they want to go to pursue their career.

Apparently, Berkeley is known for its mathematical science, as well as the Space Sciences Laboratory, according to Google, and some light digging doesn’t show anywhere where music is a viable path to thriving  as a student there.

But then again, if I wanted to pursue my architectural design degree, and for some reason, Berkeley were among the schools that I were accepted to, and I could go to for in-state tuition as well as the fact that I wouldn’t be too far off from home if I’m from nearby Oakland, it would be something to consider going there, solely for the name value alone, because it still is a reputable institution regardless of what I’m attending there for.

Either way, despite the fact that we have a queen of #TRYHARDs anointed this #SZN for her 200+ college acceptances, I would say that we should all rise for the king of #TRYHARDs this #SZN, the Ugandan boy from Oakland who has collected 122 college acceptances and amassed $5.3M in scholarship offers.

Thanks to him and the queen, all the other pleebs who only got into 30, 50 and 60 colleges seem like common peasants now.

But it is pretty funny when I think about this particular #TRYHARD; boy wants to be a singer, an entertainer of some sort, which most people in the world of entertainment would simply respond to a kid saying they wanted to get into the business with a stern and nihilistic, don’t.  However, that’s not stopping this one kid from chasing his dream, considering he survived immigration into America and is probably living a slightly better life than if he were still living in Uganda.

At some point he realized that he could still chase his musical dreams, but when the day is over, it’s still important to have an education, so he starts flinging college applications out like Gambit throws playing cards, and because of his obvious attributes, the acceptances start rolling in and next thing you know, he’s got 122 of these things.

Obviously despite the fact that he picked Berkeley, it’s a safe bet that many of them were probably the UC-campuses that are not Berkeley and are less known or reputable.  Hell probably among them were some actual music schools, but when the day is over, entertainment is really, really, really hard to break into, and it’s probably for the best that he’ll have a Berkeley degree to fall back onto instead of some shitty wannabe Julliard of the west coast.

Overall, it’s just funny.  Guy wants to sing, but still wants to fulfill obligation to go to college.  Fires applications out like crazy, gets into a ton of them, including a well-reputable school. It’s like accidentally became the 2024 King of the #TRYHARDs.  Uganda be kidding me!