Tag: greed

Profit ≠ Championships

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I feel like I’ve been in a little bit of a writing rut lately, but at the same time I never like to go too long without having written something at all.  When times like this, I tend to fall back onto topics that are easy for me to ramble about like wrestling, or in this case, baseball.

No, it’s not about the Astros and their cheating scandal, although it seems very foreboding for the franchise, due to the overwhelming amount of evidence that backs it up, not to mention the fact that former pitcher Mike Fiers literally tattled on them to the press.

I was reading this article about how a current president, CEO and investor stooge-slave of the Atlanta Braves, Mike Plant, is all optimistic about the future of the Braves and their future success, and as is often the case whenever I read bullshit like this, it makes my eyes roll, but at the same time, it occasionally inspires words to formulate in my head, and then through my fingers and then into a word doc.

Of course Plant is going to say a bunch of optimistic shit to quell investors.  Why would he say stuff like “ehh, the Braves are going to be a perfectly adequate .500+ team, but realistically speaking we don’t have the pitching to compete in the playoffs, nor the talent to carry us beyond the NLDS?”

Instead, he extols the positive bean counts of how well the attendance and television ratings were, and the sponsorship revenue, and the overall profits that the organization is raking in, but not turning around and spending on the team itself.

Somewhere along the lines, the Braves appear to have forgotten that success isn’t really measured in spreadsheets and profit, but in championship banners and Commissioner’s Trophies; and that succeeding with the latter typically results in massive successes with the former.  I would wager money that the Cubs blowing open the bank in 2016, the Astros ponying up in 2017, the Red Sox spending like they always do in 2018, and the Nationals paying their pitchers what the Braves spent on their whole team in 2019, result in way more ROI than the Braves have done, playing it safe and by their completely unnecessary corporate spending limits.

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Unsurprisingly lame

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

BB&T and SunTrust banks choose their united name: Truist.

I mean, I can’t say I’m the least bit surprised that this ended up being something as lame as this.  Fewer things in the world are as square and soullessly uncool as the entire banking industry.  I mean, it’s an industry that’s basically built on storing the money of people that are not themselves, and finding every single possible way to take cuts and slices from them in order to profit.

I even yawned heartily while typing out that line, that’s how lame the whole concept of banking is.  I can’t believe I worked in the industry as long as I did, and in some degree of retrospect, I kind of have to thank them for being the tools they are and laying me, as well as my entire department off, because they kind of did me a favor of getting out of the banking industry.  I mean seriously, it paid the bills pretty well, and I would’ve have free parking for years during Dragon*Con, but I have to say that it wasn’t a whole lot of fun saying I worked for SunTrust; as large as it was in Georgia and the eastern seaboard, it was still a regional bank and it was the equivalent of saying that I worked for like, Habib’s Fuel & Automotive in the grander spectrum of the world.

But back to the point at hand, with the name of the unholy union being established, that means that without any further question, the home of the Atlanta Braves is soon to become Truist Park.  I had to wiki it to make sure that it was going to be the de facto lamest name in all of Major League Baseball, but since I’ve completed my quest to visit all 30, I’ve fallen a little to the wayside when it comes to ballpark names.  And as gargantuan-ly lame as Truist Park is, I think there is some stiff competition when it comes to comparing to Guaranteed Rate Field (Chicago White Sox, replacing “The Cell” US Cellular Field (the worst park in MLB)) and RingCentral Coliseum (Oakland A’s, who are always plagued with bad names).  Ultimately, it’s like comparing herpes to chlamydia and gonorrhea, because no matter which name you have, it sucks.

Given the propensity of the Atlanta Braves to always go in the direction of profit > style, it’s no surprise that they’re going to be perfectly at home playing at a place called something as boring, vanilla and lame as Truist Park.  But damn if they aren’t going to get rich cashing in on those naming rights, despite the fact that the product on the field isn’t going to benefit one iota from said proceeds.  A bunch of old white guys need to take their slice of the pie first, as well as their seconds, before the Braves have any chance at possibly getting a little bit of forward investment to maybe succeed. 

I hear winning is pretty lucrative, but the risk-averse Braves don’t really seem the type to risk possibly finding out.  But misery loves company, and I think it’s pretty safe to say that pretty much any team not the Houston Astros seems pretty content on sitting on cruise control and cashing in on revenue sharing, and if they happen to win, great, but if not, that’s perfectly okay as well.  Fuck that, and fuck Truist Bank.  Need to figure out a simplistic and punny name for the new park, because “ScumTrust” is running out of time.

It’s hard to care about a team whose management doesn’t care about it either

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

At the time I started writing this, the Braves had just finished getting swept by the Phillies to open the 2019 season.  Prior to the start of the season, Braves fans were treated to an offseason where the Braves performed their standard song and dance of crying poor and pretending like they don’t have the necessary money in order to pursue logical free agents and improve their chances at winning baseball games, but then business reports emerged that showed that the Atlanta Braves organization as a whole, had raked in record profits throughout the 2018 calendar year. 

In typical Braves fashion, instead of just coming clean and admitting that the ownership has little interest in investing money into the team, they sent their stooges out blab a whole bunch of corporate-ese about the importance of financial responsibility, and extol their profits as if Bubba in Habersham, Cletus in La Grange and Ricky Bobby in Valdosta are going to give a flying fuck about the organization’s financial standing, when the team is losing games that they’d have a better chance at winning if they had some competent players.

And basically, personally, I’m at my wit’s end with it.  As much as I feel like I’m always on the cusp of swearing off the Braves and declaring a disdain for them, I never really fully pull the trigger, because I like having a local team to root for, and when the day is over, I do want to see the Braves win and find success, even in spite of the fact that the organization itself is flagrantly ambivalent and doesn’t appear to care whether they win or not, just so long as they’re making investors money.

But as for this year, all it took was three games for me to confirm that this team is dead in the water, and to not really hold too much hope that there’s going to be anything remotely better than a first-round playoff appearance, at the very, tippy top best possible scenario.  The Braves Way, an agonizingly cliché phrase the team uses to applaud the team’s tendency to favor and acquire over-the-hill veterans or post-injury reclamation projects at reasonable costs is the modus operandi of the team, and has pretty much been the case in almost the entire time that I’ve followed them, and they rarely drop any big money on anyone.

I understand that the last few times they’ve done so, they’ve ended up with stiffs like BJ Upton and Mike Hampton, but the unfortunate truth of professional sports is that every single team on the planet has dealt with free agent busts, and that it’s more of a surprise when a free agent deal doesn’t go sour, and that at least from a WAR standpoint, they don’t lose too much money in the life of a deal.

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Does Batista get his job back too?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

About as surprising as celebrities that pay to get their children into college: Disney reinstates fired and disgraced director James Gunn for Guardians of the Galaxy vol. 3

I think the only real question marks that come remotely close to being something of surprises, was when this was going to occur.  Considering the firing, which if you need a refresher, revolved around the fact that James Gunn was smart enough to tweet jokes about pedophilia, rape and other inappropriate subject matter on Twitter like a decade ago, which naturally stays on the internet for eternity, was unearthed, and therefore Disney shitcanned him; even though he received a tremendous amount of support from the entire Guardians cast, namely Dave Bautista who threatened to walk away from the series as if he thought anyone thought he was completely indispensable.

Naturally, the firing was as stupid as American politics, because really, who hasn’t said stupid shit, much less stupid shit on the internet at some point in time?  It’s just the fact that James Gunn was in an elevated position societally that made him a target for the trolls that actually spend time looking for inflammatory things once said to bring to surface because that’s the kind of world we live in now which totally sucks.  But Disney being the gozillion dollar company it is, seemed to think they can’t afford to have someone who made a careless innocuously insensitive series of tweets when he was young and stupid, felt that they had to do it anyway.  Did everyone also conveniently forget that Walt hated Jews?

Anyway, I understand why Didney did it, but it doesn’t change the fact that I thought it was stupid.  Naturally though, stupider is the obvious news that Didney brought Gunn back, which kind of also sends mixed, but also negative messages out to the inquiring public: namely the fact that by bringing Gunn back kind of says that Didney condones insensitive jokes about pedophilia, rape, the Holocaust and 9/11.

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The fallacy of judging player contracts before they’re finished

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

With the news of Bryce Harper signing the most historic mega-deal in baseball history comes a whole lot of interesting things:

  • All the bitching and moaning coming from MLB (union) players like Justin Verlander, Evan Longoria, Kris Bryant, and Adam Wainwright among others, about how free agency is busted, owners are crooked, and the system being broken have just had all of the wind taken out of their sails; the last week alone has seen Harper sign his historic 13-year/$330 million dollar contract, Manny Machado signing a 10-year/$300 million contract, as well as Nolan Arenado signing an 8-year/$260 million dollar extension. Free agency is not busted, it’s just the financial game within the game has changed, and it’s just taking longer.
  • A whole lot of discussion about Harper’s intentions, considering the fact that despite taking the aforementioned deal from the Phillies, in the process he turned down a ridiculous shorter-term contract from the Dodgers which would have had him making around $45 million a year for four years as well as a 10-year/$300 million offer from his former team, the Nationals, where they would have deferred the last $100 million of the deal, where he would have been getting paid, with interest, until like 2053, which probably would have equated to over $330 million, frankly.
  • Every Nationals fan who had been a Bryce Harper fan over the last seven years has now become massive Bryce Harper haters
  • Every Phillies fan who had hated on Bryce Harper because he played for the division rival Nationals is now the greatest Bryce Harper fans that have ever lived

Amidst all of these things, are and will be many more, articles that will be examining the finer details and the minutiae of Bryce Harper’s deal with the Phillies.  And in a previous time in my life, I probably would be one of them, and be ready to declare it “a bad deal” because of the hypothetical likelihood that by the time Harper is 38 years old and hobbling into the final year of his deal in 2032, he most certainly won’t be playing like a guy that will be getting paid like $28 million dollars, and how long-term free agent deals pretty much always fail, because players rarely contribute the statistics necessary to justify their salaries.

Such could very well become the case by the time 2032 rolls around but the bigger question really boils down to “but did the Phillies win a championship(s) in those 13 years?”

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Here’s a crazy idea for MLB

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Fans don’t care when millionaires squabble: Cardinals pitcher Adam Wainwright latest to opine about the current state of MLB where free agents go unsigned, thinks a strike is becoming inevitable

A part of me thinks, or at least wants to declare, that if baseball goes on strike again, I should just be done with MLB, because punishing fans because two sides of ridiculously wealthy parties can’t come agree on which side should be entitled to more money.  It’s a ridiculous squabble no matter what way it’s looked at, where it’s abundantly clear that neither has any concern of how it looks from the perspective of those not a part of it.  But the reality is that I like sports too much, and even if there were a strike, and then they come back at a different time, I’d probably still end up watching again, much to my dismay.

On one side of the fence, we have the players, where many players have been very outspoken this offseason, about how it’s becoming ridiculous and indefensible that some very prominent free agents, namely Bryce Harper, Manny Machado, Dallas Keuchel and Craig Kimbrel have not been signed yet, and Spring Training has literally just begun.  Ironically, nothing has been heard from the actual “victims” of this trend, and all remarks have been coming from mostly players who are currently locked into cushy, long-term, multi-million dollar contracts, because it’s easy to fling stones from pedestals.

On the other side of the fence, we have the ownership and front offices of all the Major League Baseball teams, whom throughout the last decade-plus, have all entered an era where statistical analysis has risen to prominence, and through such number crunching and analytical predicting, it’s taken a tremendous toll on how they view the financial worth of players, all across the spectrum. 

In layman’s terms, teams themselves have become risk-averse and less willing to haphazardly sign players to ridiculously long and high-dollar contracts, fearing the high possibility of “bad contracts” bogging down payrolls and inhibiting the team from succeeding on a long-term basis.

In short, the players are accusing the owners of being cheap and hoarding the revenue for themselves, calling them greedy.  They want more money to go in their pockets.

In short, the owners are telling the players that this is the way the game is evolving, and that they need to deal with it and get with the times.  They want more money to stay in their pockets.

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