Tag: comparison

The MLB All-Deferred Money Team 2023 presented by Bobby Bonilla

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

In honor of Bobby Bonilla Day, I took it upon myself to compile a list of all the baseball players earning deferred money for the 2023 season, and if possible, put together a lineup that could hypothetically have competed in an actual baseball game.

In total, there were 22 players making deferred money from 12 different teams according to Spotrac’s records, totally roughly $75M which is equal to the Pittsburgh Pirates and higher than the Baltimore Orioles and Oakland Athletics.

Seven players are still active, with six of them making money from their former teams while getting paid by their current teams.

Of teams to NOT have any players with deferred salaries, the two surprises are the Los Angeles Dodgers and the New York Yankees, two teams typically with the biggest pockets in the game.  The Dodgers lucked into not having the embarrassment of having any deferred payments this year, as they have been known to employ the tactic in the past, but the Yankees, much like House Lannister clearly believe in paying their debts and not getting themselves into any deals that involve paying for guys once they’re gone.

The team that was most surprising to see with a deferred salary was the Oakland A’s, the de facto cheapest team in baseball, with $5M still committed to pitcher Trevor Rosenthal, whom hasn’t played a game since 2020.  This accounts for nearly 1/12 of their dead-last $60M payroll.

The teams with the highest deferred monies are the Washington Nationals and Baltimore Orioles with $23.5M and $15.7M tied up to guys retired or not on their teams anymore.  These numbers account for 25% and 24% of their respective payrolls.

And of course, we can’t have a discussion about deferred money deals without bringing up the guy that relatively made the whole thing famous, Bobby Bonilla.  By now, most people are aware of the hilarious $1.2M he is paid by the Mets every single July 1, seemingly until the end of time, or at least it feels like it, but not as many people are aware that he’s also getting an annual $500K stipend from the Orioles as well.  That being said, Bobby Bo might not be the highest deferred payment on the list, but he definitely is the only guy to show up twice.

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Let’s talk about Black Mirror S6

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Lately, I’ve been taking a break from doing deliveries and using the time to completely unwind and watch television in my evenings, catching up on several shows that have been on my endless notepad document list of things I want to watch.  Where with every series that I catch up on, three more are added to the list, and it’ll probably never come close to being finished.

Regardless, I’m of the type that doesn’t really like to bounce around too much, and once I get locked into a specific series, I pretty much spend every available minute watching that series if I can help it.  I’m currently going through Better Call Saul (fantastic show, btw), but when I got wind that Black Mirror was going to be dropping season 6 soon, I knew that they were going to be an exception that got to jump the queue and interrupt my nightly binges of Saul Goodman.

The good part about seasons of Black Mirror is that they’re short, so there’s not a tremendous time commitment that needs to go to them.  It’s easy to finish a season in a week, over a binge-y weekend, or for those who have little else in terms of responsibilities, in a night if you’re ambitious.

The bad part about seasons of Black Mirror is that they’re short, and if you’re really enjoying all of the stories, it’s over in the blink of an eye, and just like that you’re back to the same place you were last week; in a world where there’s no upcoming new season of Black Mirror and wondering when it is until the next one.

At five episodes in total, it’s up to quality to determine how good of a season S6 was going to be, and when it comes to Black Mirror, I typically judge them on a three-part criteria, where the overall grade is mostly determined on the aggregate.  I judge each episode on: technology, writing and artistry, where the best episodes excel at all of them, where other episodes throughout the series have been up and down in some but not all.

So with all that in mind, let’s talk about Black Mirror S6, and there will probably be spoilers in this diatribe so be warned for all zero people who read my shit.

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Dad Brog (#114): Of course she picked the J’s

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Welp, this post didn’t age well: a long time ago, apparently back in 2017, I made a post questioning the existence of Air Jordan shoes, for toddlers.  Like, Air Jordans were developed to be Michael Jordan’s signature line of athletic shoes for when he was in the act of playing basketball, but almost instantly they became anything but athletic shoes to anyone other than MJ or any other basketball players who wanted to be like Mike or were also under contract to Nike.

They became status symbols, reasons why people were killed, eventually becoming acceptable as formal wear and/or a stylish option that could be paired with just about anything at all and be met with an approving nod.  Eventually J’s would be released for women, and much like it was back in like 1988, Jordans were about as popular as they’ve ever been, if not more than they were when they burst onto the scene.

And then I saw a kid that could barely walk, rocking some MJ 12s, and was like wtf, why does a toddler need J’s???

But this was six years ago, and now I have a three-year old enrolled in a hip-hop dance class for the next season of her dance school’s year.  No tap shoes or ballet shoes for this class, it’s about sneakers.  Now I’m probably a little bit more of a sneakerhead than mythical wife is, but she knows that J’s are still the cream of the crop when it comes to stylish sneakers, so naturally she trolls the shit out of my by deliberately steering my daughter into wanting some J’s of her own.

And as much as I didn’t want to plunk down the $60 for a pair of shoes that most likely won’t even be able to fit her by the end of the dance year, the idea of my own kid rocking her own J’s wasn’t entirely undesirable.  Naturally, when Nike opened their Disney vault and basically made every iteration of Air Jordans available and customizable to the Nth degree, the 9-year old in me that loved MJ 1’s got my own pair, and in spite of the price tag, I like the idea of my kid having a pair of her own 1’s, regardless of how absurd it is that there are J’s for toddlers in the first place.

So here we have it, it took some steering from the wife, but the seed was planted in #1’s head, and she picked out the MJ 1’s out of several options that she also picked, and through process of elimination, naturally landed on the J’s as her pick for hip-hop class.

$60 poorer, but at least I’ll have pride of having some matching kicks with my kid, doubly when she outgrows them, and bequeaths them to #2 to where they’ll get a second life.  And if I can take care of them well enough, maybe I’ll sit on them to where I can flip them on like StockX in the future for its original investment in like 15 years.

Let’s see if Philadelphia gets the same shit Atlanta did

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

TL;DR: a portion of I-95 in Philadelphia collapses from a tanker fire

Back in 2017, a portion of I-85 in Atlanta collapsed when a homeless guy set a couch on fire, the fire spread and ignited a bunch of flammable shit underneath a bridge, and then the bridge collapsed.  I-85 had a gaping interruption that caused a tremendous amount of logistical issues for everyone who needed the major vein, and was only fixed as quickly as it was because of more or less, a reward bounty being put on the completion of time of the repair. 

It was still months slower than the Japanese repairing a sinkhole the size of a lake, but in the time in which it occurred, Atlanta became the butt of bad jokes, memes and all sorts of opportunity for people to dunk on us, because for some reason, Atlanta is an easy punching bag for all the unfunny comedians on the internet.

Welp, the shoe is on the other foot now, and what we have here is an extremely similar situation, happened in another major city.  I-95 is obviously one of the most essential veins not just in Philadelphia, but across the entire eastern seaboard, so the impact of it being collapsed in Philly is about similar if not worse than Atlanta’s highway collapse.

I can’t say that I care enough to check, but I would be curious to see if Philly gets the same types of criticism, ridicule and memes poking fun at their situation as Atlanta did, or if, by virtue of not being Atlanta, Philly gets off easier than things were here.

Frankly, all government doesn’t do shit jokes aside, at this point, I’m curious how this could have even happened after the debacle in Atlanta.  I don’t work in a DOT or anything, but I would’ve thought that routine checking of structural integrity and examination of bridge construction probably should’ve leveled up at least a hair after Atlanta.  Sure, highways are meant to be resilient structures meant to support millions of cars and pounds of weight crossing over them endlessly, but come on now, fire shouldn’t be disintegrating bridges.

Someone somewhere in the PA DOT wasn’t doing their job, and for their troubles, they alleviate Atlanta from their own embarrassing bridge collapse, and I hope they pay the internet price of criticism and ridicule the same way we did here.

Identity crisis

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Just the other night mythical wife said that our household should be What We Do in the Shadows characters for Halloween.  And without any hesitation, she said that I should be Guillermo.

To the credit of that opinion, my face immediately made the same face Guillermo does whenever he looks at the camera after the vampires do something stupid.  But I wasn’t at all impressed at the knee-jerk association.

The lack of excitement of that was obviously noticed, and the back pedaling and explaining begins; he’s a badass vampire slayer, he’s the glue that holds the house together, he’s the guy that’s perpetually on the edge and verge of snapping being sick of everyone else’s shit, and I’m just thinking about the guy that’s fat, gets walked on by everyone around him, and is basically there for comedic relief but usually at his own expense.

Now I love the show, and it’s a fair comp, but the fact of the matter is that Guillermo is kind of the show loser, and it depressed me to be so immediately comped up to him.  He is an awesome character with a lot more depth than all the others, but when you take a step back and look at Guillermo as a whole, he’s a guy with no discernable identity, and spends the vast majority of his existence cleaning up after others and not at all doing anything for himself, much less forming an identity.  He’s the joke, he’s the doormat, he’s the comic relief.

But like I said, it’s not a completely unfair comparison.  I am the guy that keeps my house together; I’m the guy that maintains or manages the landscaping, the (attempted) cleanliness, tries to keep the house in working order and somewhat organized, with little or no help.  I take the vast majority of parenting duties, and any minute where I’m not working my job, I’m spending time with my kids while they’re awake, and it’s not until they are in bed that I have any semblance of downtime, that is when I’m not back to managing the home.

And I am, perpetually on the verge of losing my shit, because my life is not at all easy, I’m overworked, under-helped, taken for granted, and I’ve just been reminded of my general lack of identity in the world other than a dad or a housekeeper.  Both titles are undoubtedly important and I take them seriously, but when I try to picture anyone else thinking about me, I struggle to wonder what in the world words formulate in their minds when they think about me, other than those two things.

Because I don’t know what words formulate in my own mind when it comes to trying to describe myself.  I think I used to be a sports guy, specifically a baseball guy, when I was super into baseball and talking about sports all the time.  I used to be a League guy when I spent so much of my life buried in the League of Legends community.  I used to be the wrestling guy, which might be the closest thing I’m still identifiable to these days, and I most definitely was the belt guy, but the thing is that I’ve gotten pretty much every blet I want and until I have an office again, there’s not much point in getting any others.  Ironically, the one thing that I have staunchly refused to ever give up, being my desire to write, is probably the one thing so few people actually know I do, because I have zero readers and I’m neurotic and don’t want to advertise that I do it, so being a writing guy or a brogger isn’t exactly something anyone would know me for.

But the thing is, other than the latter I don’t think I’m really any of these things anymore.  As my kids came into existence, and my personal time diminished into negligible amounts, all my hobbies and interests fell to the wayside as any time I had to myself was either staring at a wall or trying to motivate myself to write something, usually about how burned out and over my life in general I was feeling at the time, kind of like I’m doing right now.

And so, I don’t really have an identity anymore, I don’t think.  As often as I think I would benefit from a day or two completely by myself to actually rest and recharge, I really don’t know what I’d even do.  I’m so money conscious that I wouldn’t want to spend the money to go hide out at a hotel or something, and I’d feel guilty eating out and spending money that I know I shouldn’t be spending, but I also can’t really expect to get any recharge time when I’m around my kids, because I want to spend time with them, so I’m left in this spiraling swirl of indecisiveness and end up doing nothing but watching television and treading the waters of depression.

Really, I just need this funky emotional wave to pass so I can go about my life without the baggage.  Hopefully I won’t be reminded of how much of a Guillermo I am again any time soon.

What is leadership?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Overvalued.

Now I could be real nihilistic and period full-stop this post with just that and call it a day, but then it would sound like something traumatic had occurred, and I wanted to be vaguebooking about it or something, which is not accurate at all. 

This post stems from a conversation had over dinner a night ago where it was determined that I lacked ambition, because I don’t really want to strive for any leadership positions in my career. The thing is, I’ve been in positions of leadership already, and although I did take a lot of satisfaction in being the best leader I could and the relationships I cultivated with my reports, it really still amounted to a tremendous addition of stress that I feel is wholly unnecessary at this juncture of my life, and I would much rather just be given objectives and the space and means to do my job to the best of my ability and be for the most part, left the fuck alone.

The problem is that I feel that the working world we live in places a tremendously inflated sense of worth in leadership, and not nearly as much in the ability to get shit done, as in the people with the ability to actually move a company’s objectives forward.  I’ve made no secret that throughout my career, the most difficult people to work for are the people that I know can’t do my job in a moment of need, and I find it tremendously difficult to respect and accept any sort of judgment of my talent from those who have zero idea of what I do.

If I could rephrase my original statement, it’s not that all leadership is overvalued, but there’s just so much piss poor bad leadership exists out there that it just makes me feel like all of it is overvalued, overrated and feeds the narrative to how the working world is just so broken and misguided.

At my previous employer, I was promoted into a position of leadership, which I willingly went into, because I felt that I had reached a ceiling with my entry-level designer role, and I felt ready to move up and try to climb the ladder within the company.  But the thing is that even though I was in a position of leadership, it was always, always important to me that I still know how to do the jobs of my former peers now reports, because there was no way I could be any sort of leader unless I knew the job at the same granular level from those who have to do it.  But because I was promoted from within and I wasn’t brought in to abruptly lead people whom I didn’t know, I felt that I was very successful at being a leader on my team, because everyone knew me, knew my background, and knew that I was good enough to be a decision-maker.  It’s just that I had a massive cunt of a boss above me that actively made my life a living hell to where I had no choice but to cut and run, regardless of how much my team brought satisfaction to me professionally.

So that’s where I’m really going with this, is that it’s not that I lack ambition and don’t want to be a leader, it’s that my whole idea of leadership is that it’s something that grows organically and leadership rises and takes shape, and it’s definitely not something that can just be plugged into a team or a company, by someone who has fluffed up their resumes and qualifications in order to get the job.  That type of leadership is the leadership that I don’t want to strive for, even if it makes it look like I’m not ambitious.

I’d like to work a job where I’m paid well for the work that I do, and I want to get so good at it, that I organically rise to a position of leadership, to where I can lead in the best way that I think I can, which is typically by example, and typically in a servant leader capacity, and not some game-playing schmuck who only knows how to delegate and live in Excel and Outlook all fucking day and have no actual talent.

Unfortunately, like so much world, that’s just now how things operate these days, and short of me winning the lottery, it doesn’t seem likely that I’ll be a part of a working world that jives more with my ideals and ideas that work ethic and talent competency is what’s needed, instead of the ability to “play the game” and “it’s who you know” and other flaky bullshit that shapes the job market today.