Tag: mlb

I’m not sure all these soft-ass new Dodgers fans even know who Clayton Kershaw is

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

MLBTR: Clayton Kershaw set to re-sign with the Dodgers for his 18th season

Back in 2008 when I was still on my quest to visit every MLB ballpark, my journeys took me out to the west coast, where I was going to hit a Dodgers, Angels and Padres game in one fell-swoop.  I got tickets to the Dodgers game on ebay well in advance, and was pleased to have apparently gotten someone’s season tickets, as they were printed with a design versus the generic Ticketmaster printed tickets.  Little did I or the guy who sold me the tickets, realized the significance of the specific game that I was going to.

My friend and I were having a quick breakfast after landing in Los Angeles, before heading to Dodger Stadium, and we had little idea of what we were in store for seeing.  Frankly, since they were playing the St. Louis Cardinals, we were more excited at the prospect of seeing Albert Pujols, very much still in his prime, doing Albert Pujols things.  Being fans of east coast teams, we had little clue to who this kid Clayton Kershaw was, but was starting that day.  I remember saying to my friend, man, but he has a 9.7 K/9, as a starter, so we kind of had an idea of what to expect.

This Kershaw kid would go on to strikeout the first batter of the game, ultimately pitch six innings while only giving up two earned runs, and although he didn’t get a decision in the game, the Dodgers ended up winning in extra innings.  A few people on the internet told me that I was really lucky to have been able to bear witness in person, to the debut of Clayton Kershaw, but I didn’t really think much of it that year.

In ensuing years, Clayton Kershaw would become the de facto ace of the Dodgers pitching staff, and basically become the best pitcher in all of Major League Baseball.  He was a strikeout artist, with his signature pitch being this cartoon-looping curveball that has paralyzed an entire era of hitters, on top of the fact that he comfortably pitched at 98 mph with his fastball.  He would win three Cy Young awards in 2011, 2013 and 2014, and he was so good at baseball in 2014, that he would also win the NL MVP award, which was a tremendous rarity for a pitcher to take home the MVP.

However, there was a lot of tough luck in Kershaw’s career, where no matter how good he was at baseball, the Dodgers just couldn’t ever seem to get the job done, when it came to winning championships.  Twelve years after he debuted, the Dodgers did win a World Series, but it was the 2020 World Series that receives a tremendous amount of scrutiny over its legitimacy, but for all intents and purposes, Kershaw did get to be able to declare himself a champion, finally.

He technically pitched in 2024, to which if I understand correctly, means he gets to declare himself a champion again, even though he was barely a factor in the team’s overall effort, but the point is, the Dodgers never really amounted to anything when he was the man, and nowadays, as the subject of this post implies, I’m not even sure all the swaths of brand new lifelong Dodgers fans are even aware of who he is, regardless of just how much of an absolute world eater he was throughout the entire 2010s decade.

I may or may not have written about this over the last few months since the Dodgers became World Series champions and spent a gozillion deferred dollars to create a mega roster for 2025 and beyond, but Dodgers fans are an interesting fanbase, in that they’re basically terrible from all criteria sports fans use to judge other sports fans.

They’re fair-weathered, in that they’ve multiplied by 50, coincidentally immediately after they won the World Series.  They’re the sorest winners I’ve ever seen from a fanbase in that they can’t seem to shut the fuck up and be happy that their team just won a championship and are more interested in parroting the same shit to textually barb with fans on the internet.  They’re softer than Charmin in that they are incapable of accepting the criticism and scrutiny that goes with success, and they all seem to go ballistic at any sort of judgment, regardless of the fact that they’re repping the reigning champions.

But on account of the fact that I’d say 69-70% of Dodgers fans decided that they were lifelong Dodgers fans probably three months ago, they seem to be pretty unaware of their team’s general history, or anything beyond November.  They’re all so busy parroting the same shit in their little echo chambers about their stacked roster, that it feels like the news of Clayton Kershaw coming back for one more year, seems to have fallen on deaf ears, despite the fact that he was easily the best pitcher for an entire era, and honestly if he’s remotely healthy, can probably be a legitimate pitcher all over again.

None of these fans seem to care, because the ドジャース Dodgers rotation is pretty shored up with Yamamoto, Roki, Glasnow, Snell and very likely Ohtani will return to pitching this season, so even if they did care, there’s really not any room currently for Kershaw, in spite of his right to be in it.

Sad as it, having written out this summary of events, it kind of seems apropos that Kershaw is in the background of things, considering the fact that such kind of has been the story of his entire career.

However, considering he needs like 32 strikeouts to reach 3,000, I’m sure the Dodgers media machine will work wonders getting their hordes of fairweather fans all educated up on just how legendary of a pitcher Clayton Kershaw is, and by the time he’s knocking on the door, they’ll all be ready with their freshly purchased Kershaw merch, ready to represent and proclaim themselves fans of his entire career, but at least it will afford Kershaw to be in the spotlight where he rightfully belongs, as artificially manufactured as it might be.

Either way, I’ll be happy for him when he inevitably hits it, because unlike a lot of Dodgers fake ass fans, I have been following the guy’s career, and despite the fact that I generally revile the Dodgers these days, save for Freddie Freeman, I’ve always had a soft spot for the guy I just happened to luck into being able to see his major league debut, after all he very well might be the greatest pitcher of my entire generation, and undoubtedly one of the best to ever do it.

Honestly, it would’ve been more surprising had it been unanimous

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Shocker: Ichiro voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame, but denied unanimous induction by one anonymous vote; reactions are as expected

Like the subject says, it would’ve been more surprising if Ichiro did get the vaunted unanimous decision and make it into the Hall of Fame with the most noteworthy of honors.  But baseball has a problem in their legacy department, and they don’t seem to be in any rush at all to try and alleviate it.  So unsurprising to just about any baseball fan who knows how the voting process works, Ichiro does make the Hall of Fame, as predicted, but, as many have before him, failed to get 100% unanimity, and the part of the internet that cares about this, goes ballistic.

The funny thing is that I predicted that this was probably going to happen back in 2020, when I went on an identical diatribe about how fucked up it was that a single voter denied Derek Jeter the unanimous entry.  I could just have easily just sticky’d and reposted that old post, copy/pasted the whole thing and just replaced “Derek Jeter” with “Ichiro” and it would’ve translated itself fairly seamlessly, but I’m an old man who clearly likes to talk about the same shit over and over again, and am going through the futile exercise of writing about it again.

So here we are again, where some anonymous voter is getting off at knowing that they alone have sparked the internet hate machine, and have thousands of keyboard warriors who want their head on a spike.  Naturally, they’re content with the chaos that they caused and will have absolutely no intention of revealing themselves, because that would assume a modicum of accountability they want to take, and people these days dodge accountability like they’re agents from The Matrix dodging bullets.

People calling for credentials to be revoked, voting rules to be changed, more accountability and transparency; all logical and pragmatic ideas, but none of them are going to occur.  I surmise the only way a vote is actually revoked is when the presumably old, white, guy croaks and he’s physically unable to return a ballot for multiple years and the old white guys at the BBWAA offices start getting return to sender and get the message that the voter might have died.

Lots of hypothetical guesses that it’s the same guy who didn’t vote for Jeter, and frankly, it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to put them in the same basket as the guys who didn’t vote for Cal Ripken, Jr., Tony Gwynn, Ken Griffey, Jr., Greg Maddux, and Randy Johnson, among other legends of the game where their inductions probably should have been unanimous.

Personally, I’ve been spouting off on random comment threads and accusing Bill Ballou out of Boston, because he’s the dude who went on an arrogant diatribe back in 2019 about how he didn’t vote for Mariano Rivera, but just didn’t turn in his ballot, thus still allowing him to get the only unanimous vote in HOF history, but someone somewhere rebutted to me that his vote this year was made public, and he did actually vote for Ichiro.  Other names of baseball writers I’ve never heard of have been thrown out there, but there are many, and none of them are taking the bait to defend themselves, and actually helping the cause of identifying the lone tryhard, so it’s really all futile all the same.

Here’s the thing too – I don’t even really like Ichiro, as a person.  In the two World Baseball Classics he participated in, he got a little too uppity nationalistic and made disparaging remarks about Korea, despite Korea holding their own against his Japanese squad, and although the rest of the world’s baseball fandom still idolizes him, I still see him as a bit of an asshole from that angle.  But as a baseball player, there really were few better and consistent and talented as he was, and I respect all of his actual baseball accolades.

Of course he deserved to get in unanimously.  For years, people have been coming up with reasons why he shouldn’t get in, at all or first ballot, and throughout his tenure in MLB, he’s knocked them all down.  People loved to discount the 2,000+ hits he had in Japan, and said it would be cheating for him to add that to his hit total to surpass 3,000, so he just went ahead and notched 3,000+ hits in MLB alone.  Along the way, he surpassed Pete Rose as the all-time leader in cumulative hits.  Won numerous batting titles, gold gloves, and AL Rookie of the Year and MVP at the same time.  Frankly, the only thing that eluded him was a World Series, but frankly that could happen to anyone who’s majority was spent in Seattle.

But unsurprisingly, he was denied.  Another legend, denied the ultimate honor, by a spineless, anonymous, most likely white guy, determined to upstage the whole idea of HOF voting in order to put themselves over.  And the BBWAA as a whole doesn’t seem to care, so it all but assures that this is going to happen continuously in the future.

Which means in 2027 when Albert Pujols shows up on the ballot, he basically already has a 0% chance of being unanimous.  Forget about his multiple World Series rings with the Cardinals, the 700+ home runs, all the MVPs and other hardware.  Forget about his charity, philanthropy and squeaky-clean image that made him look like a Dominican Mr. Clean.  A voter somewhere is going to see 2027 as an opportunity to become the most wanted man on the internet with a 100% success rate of getting away with it, and completely capitalize on it.

The funny thing is that unlike Jeter, Ichiro probably does care that he didn’t get unanimous.  During the press conference, Ichiro basically started off talking about the one vote he didn’t get, inviting the mystery voter out for a drink to have a talk.  American audiences guffawed about that one, but let’s read between the lines here, Ichiro’s Japanese honor code and general psychotic dedication to baseball says that he probably considers his entire baseball career a failure because of this one guy.  And as I predicted a long time ago, I still think the man is going to fucking kill someone, and this mystery voter has probably just climbed the list of people whom might be that someone.

On the precipice of history: the 2024 Chicago White Sox

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Ordinarily, I would think I would be committing the ultimate jinx by writing this, and tempting the tides of fate into absolutely feeling the utmost need to punish me for my attempt at clairvoyance.  But I am doing so because I’m about to skip town for the next week, and when the historic inevitably occurs, I won’t really be in a position to be able to take the time to write about it, and I feel that this is one of those things best brogged about as close to its drop date, rather than being something having to be written in retrospect, like the unfortunate majority of the posts I write these days.

And let’s be real here, in order for the White Sox to avoid becoming the worst team in MLB history, they have to go 7-1 in their remaining games, and at the precise time I’m writing this, they’re down 4-1 to the Padres to which if the score holds, puts them at loss #119, tying the American League record for worst team in AL history, and one loss away from tying the 1962 Mets for the worst team in baseball history, before they’ll have several shots to futilely avoid becoming the de facto worst team in baseball history.

Yeah, it would take a legitimate act of god at this point for the White Sox to avoid making history at this point.  And if it were to actually happen, then I’d have received all the validation in the world that I needed to know that I am a supreme being that has actual influence on fates of the world.

But yes, this is a post to talk about and preemptively congratulate the 2024 Chicago White Sox, for becoming the worst team in Major League Baseball history.  Full stop, ever.  Not in this generation, this century, or some other made-up record,* we’re talking about: baseball is invented.  Period.  Worst team in history is the 2024 Chicago White Sox.  Period.

*oh and there’s a lot of this bullshit going around lately, like Elly de la Cruz becoming the youngest player to join the “25HR/65SB Club,” Bobby Witt Jr. being the newest member of the “30HR/30SB/10Triple Club” and any time Shohei Ohtani does anything, he’s the “only” member of the 51HR/51SB Club and you can hear the ancient Oriental gong ring when anyone talks about him

Seeing as how the Braves are slowly dying a truly slow and miserable bleed-out, and have fallen into a position of outside-looking-in as far as Wild Card positioning goes, the White Sox have actually been the thing that I’ve actually been tracking and paying attention to as an alternative.  And I have to say that it’s been really refreshing, from the standpoint of hoping for an outcome, and getting it with tremendous regularity; whereas the Braves inept offense keeps making them lose, much to my disappointment, I could always count on checking the scores and seeing the White Sox take L after L after L each night, as they keep on chugging to immortality.

It’s almost like being a kid again in 1996, watching the NBA box scores every morning and seeing the Chicago Bulls notch another W, en route to their historic 72-win season, and it seems fitting that it’s another Chicago sports franchise, also owned by Jerry Reinsdorf, that’s trouping their way towards a historic season, even if it’s not the side of history that a franchise would really want to be on. 

It’s still cool and incredible from a fan of history perspective, and even better that I have no real stake in it, other than the fact that White Sox fans really tore into me after I tore into their shitty ballpark in my sports brogging days, so I’ve always had a negative lean in my perception of the Chicago White Sox.

Bahaha, a little bit of live brogging here, I checked the Padres/Sox score just now to make sure that the Sox were still on their way to #119, and I was frightened to see that the Sox had gotten on the board and it was not only 4-2 Padres, but the White Sox had the bases loaded with just one out; a scenario where scoring a run(s) is a positive probability, and nothing short of two strikeouts or a double play is going to prevent that from happening . . . and then Dominic Fletcher promptly grounds into a double play and the Padres are now three outs away from the W, and the Sox are three outs away from tying the worst record in AL history.

But yeah, it’s still incredible to actually be able to witness like real history happening in sport, even if it’s as ironic as crowning a new worst team in history.  It’s not some fake record that the dorks at Elias come up with on a daily basis like most hits on a Thursday evening game with a humidity under 40% with Laz Diaz as home plate umpire after he ate Burger King for lunch, but a solid, concrete historical mark that actually was on a pedestal of being a record that might not be perceived to be possible to break.

I mean, it really is difficult to be this bad; there’s an adage in baseball that every team will win 60 games and lose 60 games every season, and it’s the other 42 games in which a team either becomes a championship caliber squad, or a team tanking on purpose to get optimal draft positioning.  The 2024 White Sox not only won’t get to 60 wins, it’s a very solid possibility that they might not even reach 40.

There was this one statistic I saw a little while ago about how the AL Central has four out of the five teams solidly above .500, but solely on account of the White Sox anchoring them down, the division as a whole is still under .500.  And the hits just keep on coming and coming as far as all the statistical anomalies that have bubbled up about just how bad the White Sox are, and as the kids say these day, I am here for them, all of them.

Like I said, ordinarily I wouldn’t dare tempt fate and write something like this before it happens, but math is a game of probabilities, and a .234 team miraculously going 7-1 down the stretch to avoid becoming the worst team in history isn’t a bet that I would take, and contrarily, in spite of my general phobia against sports betting, I would actually feel comfortable betting my house that the White Sox are going to fulfill their destiny in becoming the worst team in baseball history. 

It’s just a matter of when it’s going to happen, because they still have one more game against the playoff-hopeful Padres, three against the awful Angels who are still 29 wins better than the Sox while simultaneously being 31 games under .500, and then they close out their season with the Detroit Tigers who are very much in the thick of the Wild Card field and will more than likely still be fighting for their playoff lives next week.

But the odds are that it’s going to happen while I’m out of town and away from the keys, so as out of character it would be for me to commemorate before it happens, I just wanted to give a hearty congratulatory shoutout to the 2024 Chicago White Sox, for becoming the worst team in Major League Baseball history.  Y’all deserve it.

EDIT: Unsurprisingly, the Sox would make me sweat, winning 2/3 from the Angels and relying on the still then-unclinched Tigers to actually exert effort to get #121, before dropping the final two games to the Sox, allowing them to finish out the season with “just” 121 losses, one more than the 1962 Mets.  But like the wise Dom Toretto once paraphrased, it doesn’t matter if you lose by an inch or a mile, losing’s losing.

This is what we statistic enthusiasts like to call, a small sample size

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

The Athletic conducted an anonymous MLB player poll, and among the topics was a query of where would you like to play if . . .

if money, rosters were not a factor

That’s a pretty big fucking if, if you ask me, because when the day is over, the only thing that matters to baseball players, much less 98% of professional athletes, is money.

But anyway, a whopping overwhelming majority of responders to the survey, said that they would want to join the Atlanta Braves, in a hypothetical world where money and rosters were not a factor.  Obviously, I say such with dripping sarcasm in case it’s hard to pick it out in soulless text, because only 86 total players responded to the survey and just 12.7% of players said that they would want to play for the Braves, which in doing the math, is just but 10.922 players who said that they would want to play for the Braves in a magical hypothetical world where money (and rosters) were not a factor.

All the same, that 12.7% was higher than all other teams in the league, so obviously the Braves who aren’t getting many wins on the field these days, is taking any W’s they can get anywhere else in the stratosphere, including a meaningless survey talking about fantasy realities.  Even if it is basically the mother of small sample sizes, which is a phrase that is often thrown around in the sports analytical community, like when a pitcher goes 5-0 to start the season and people start anointing them the Cy Young Award winner for the season.

That being said, I don’t buy it for two seconds that if the entire league were to be mandatorily surveyed, that the Braves would come out on top.  There’s a reason in reality why the lion’s share of marquee talents have gone to the Dodgers, Phillies, Yankees, Mets and anyone else who’s been shown to have a willingness to back up a Brinks truck to coveted free agents over the last few years, because when the day is over, money is a factor, often times the only factor, that determines where players in any sport, usually go.

The Braves are a notoriously cheap organization that is allergic to free agents, and the only ones who typically get the big bucks are homegrown talents that are often times seduced into signing early-big money deals that are often times well below the market value if they were to hang tight until free agency, preying on their youth, inexperience and promises of be rich now, instead of be fuck-you-rich later.

They’re an organization that has been historically funny with the money since Ted Turner ceded ownership to Liberty Media which reorganized to their very own Atlanta Braves corporation which clearly makes it way easier to hide their finances from prying eyes, and since this has been the case, the entire organization has prioritized fiscal goals over sport ones, ignoring the fact that nothing rakes in the big bucks than winning championships.

It’s a team that’s so drunk on their own Kool-Aid of tradition, lineage and history, that they’re handcuffed by their own doing to making any sort of change, or steps towards forward progress and trying new things.  It’s what makes them the mother of risk-averse, and they’re always convinced that the answer lies somewhere within the organization, as opposed to the idea that there just might be, some really talented players out there who exist in other organizations.

In the rare instances where players do consider variables like location, the City of Atlanta isn’t really the most appealing place to make a home of, unless you’re already born and bred country, and/or are guys at a stage of their lives where they want to actually think about things important to raising families, then maybe Atlanta, more importantly the bevy of suburbs north of the city like Alpharetta, Johns Creek and Milton where rich athletes tend to scurry up to, would be a positive.

But if I’m a younger cat like Trea Turner, Juan Soto, Mike Clevenger or Adley Rutschman, wanting a little bit of life in the city, I don’t think Atlanta would be really that appealing.

And the reality is that the Braves are a team that are so caught up in money and roster, that there’s no way any upper-tier talents that are on the edge of possibly making a move, would realistically consider the Braves, over organizations that are committed to winning and willing to open wallets, doors and opportunities, because lord knows we’ve seen in reality, just how many players have squeezed their way onto the Dodgers and Phillies over the last few years, like an Indian or Japanese subway car, and teams like that, always make things work, versus throwing in the towel at the 7th hour and saying we can’t compete.

Either way, this was a cute little sample size scenario that clearly triggered me into vomiting out a bunch of words of the disdain that can only come from a fan of the team, about how the Braves realistically couldn’t be the organization that randomly anonymous players in the aether would actually want to play for, on a grander scale.

Not a fuckin’ chance.

There are poor teams, teams that spend, and The Braves Way™

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I was thinking one morning before I started making breakfast for the kids, about how the Braves had lost yet another game to the lowly Nationals, while the Phillies had won another game, adding one more game in the standings over Atlanta.  There’s no shortage of shady remarks I could spout, that only come from the type of fan who loves a team to where they have absolutely nothing but snarky vitriol for them, but instead, I actually had what I thought was a great visual representation of how I felt the Braves operated in the MLB landscape.

There’s a scene in the Game of Thrones television show, where Littlefinger smugly tries to educate Cersei Lannister that knowledge is power, only for her to immediately command her guards to grab him and slit his throat, before calling them off, and retorting that power is power.  Littlefinger is an arrogant smarmy fuck throughout the series, and it’s always a treat to see someone put him in his place, because it unfortunately does not happen that often.

The Braves are Littlefinger.  They operate in this insulated bubble where they think they’re smarter than all the other teams in Major League Baseball, and are quick to congratulate themselves on irrelevant accolades such as profit, revenue and all things that pertain to how much money they make from all the schmucks who throw money at them.  The unspoken part is concurrently how little they re-invest back into the team itself, that ultimately is the product that is meant to generate all that currency in some shape or form.

They are always convinced that the organization has all the parts they need in order to contend for a World Series, despite the fact that they only have the one from 2021 that was the mother of hot streak luck but then again what World Series winning squad isn’t the same?

The Braves are tremendously risk-averse to the point where they basically take no risks at all, mainly in the arena of paying a free agent or trading some prospects for a sure-thing good player, and year after year, their biggest weakness is exposed, and they get bounced from the playoffs in the NLDS.

Meanwhile, all the other contenders in baseball are Cersei and her guards, who represent teams that have their own intelligence in their own rights, but are either less risk averse, or are willing to open up their copiously overflowing wallets because baseball is a massively fucking profitable business venture, or worse off for the Braves, both.

Non-fans of teams like the Dodgers, Yankees and Phillies are quick to criticize how much money that these teams are spending on free agents and contract extensions, but the proof is in the pudding; all of them are at the top of the standings currently, and are leaps and bounds in the best positions to reach the World Series.

Sometimes you have to just stop trying to outsmart everyone, because when everyone is playing chess at the same time, you just have to brute force and fuck everyone else with some money and demonstrate that power is power.

As much as I criticize the Braves, the truth of the matter is that they are a great organization.  General manager Alex Anthopolous is a sharp guy who has lucked into some really fruitful moves that didn’t really sound impressive on paper, but paid out in dividends when they worked out, but it’s obvious that even he’s working with his hands partially tied behind his back, from the stingy purse strings closing the wallet that he’s denied access to.

With the knowledge that the team does have, they’re competent at fielding a team that’s routinely good enough to make the playoffs, especially now that there are two wild cards, but they constantly run out of gas and/or have their weaknesses exposed, and crash out at their routinely low ceiling.

But imagine just how great the Braves could routinely become if they just stopped being so fucking Braves-ey and sobered up from the bullshit The Braves Way™ Koolaid they remain so drunk on.  As soon as Spencer Strider went down for the year, pick up Trevor Bauer for the peanuts he’s asking for just for a chance to pitch in MLB.  As soon as Ronald Acuña went down for the year, pick up the fucking phone and start making some calls, and not assume that an outfield of Jarred Kelenic and Adam Duvall at the corners could cut it.  If the team had Bauer, then Schwellenbach or Waldrep could become a valuable trade chip to get someone useful now.

Fire someone; on any other team in any other sport, a slump like the one the Braves are going through usually results in someone getting fired, regardless of the obvious fact that it’s out of their control that the players aren’t playing well.  If the team doesn’t want to axe Brian Snitker, then fire Kevin Seltzer, the hitting coach.  Strong arm Chipper Jones to be the interim hitting coach that fans have wanted to see the hitting savant become since the second he retired from the game.

Stop being so afraid of fucking rentals.  Stop being so fucking cheap.  Stop believing The Braves Way™ is the only way, because rest assured, it is not.  No matter how much I’d prefer power to be power over knowledge, at the very end of the day, baseball, much less any sport, is a crapshoot, once playoffs begin.  But if I’m a betting man, the teams that employ more power, tend to be the ones primed to be standing once the postseason begins, and with the way things are now, the Braves and all their Littlefinger knowledge sure as fuck don’t seem primed for anything other than an even earlier postseason exit, in the wild card series; if they even make it at all.

MLB’s Japanese Player Fetish

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

This has been a topic that I’ve had on my list of things that I wanted to write about, that I just haven’t really been able to bring to fruition.  Either I burn myself out on writing about high school tryhards applying to every school under the sun, or I just don’t feel like I have sufficient time to write about it, but it’s definitely a topic that I feel like I could go off about, but for whatever reason, I just haven’t had the chance to do so until now.

But it’s been something that’s been brewing over the last few years, and this year it’s definitely come to a boiling point about just how cringey MLB has become when it comes to their obvious opinion and feelings when it comes to Japanese players.

Sure, Shohei Ohtani is an incredible specimen of a baseball player, and I do think there is legitimate argument that we might be able to call him the best player of all time (for this generation), and that he’s more impressive than Babe Ruth, Hank Aaron, Albert Pujols, combined.  Statistically he does bring a lot to the table, but one thing that he does not bring to the table that MLB insists that he does, is the fact that he is, Japanese.

His ethnicity has nothing to add to any argument over his place in baseball history, but MLB is so rapid quick when it comes to injecting it into the narrative, and it’s not like those who follow baseball aren’t already aware that Japan is the de facto #1 country in the world when it comes to baseball talent, seeing as how they’ve won the vast majority of Olympic golds and World Baseball Classics when it comes to international competition over the last 20 years.

But MLB does it anyway, because for whatever reason, over the last 20 years, they’ve become an organization that is definitely going through a serious weeaboo phase in their history where Japan = #1, and everything, including their own assets are inferior in comparison.  Ohtani is definitely a worthy blue pill to cause this phenomenon within the organization, but the ensuing trickle-down effect when it comes to the yearly migration of a handful of Japanese players and the hype and fanfare they get when they come to America is downright cringey.

Yoshinobu Yamamoto making more money than Roger Clemens and Nolan Ryan ever made in their careers, combined is an egregious overpay and fellating sign of kowtowing to their Japanese overlords. 

Everytime Shota Imanaga throws another scoreless inning, bean counters for Elias and MLB blow their loads at being able to throw out another tweet about how low his ERA is, seemingly completely ignorant to how the league will adjust on him harder than the stock market once the scouting report on him is complete. 

Seiya Suzuki is by-and-large a perfectly good, above average player, but the way MLB expounds his occasional positive contributions is like they’re talking about the second-coming of Ichiro.

The season is barely a quarter of the way through, and there’s already talks about the next Japanese overlord, some guy named Munetaka Murakami.  But few outside of the diehard fans of their respective teams are bothering to get excited over any prospects on their own farms.

The point of all this is that it’s extremely clear that MLB has a pretty raging boner fetish on Japanese players right now.  I can practically hear the gong and racist Asian theme in my head every time I see an MLB channel or MLB beat writer lose their shit over something a Japanese player does, as if their mythical powers from the magic Orient were why Yamamoto had a 5.2 inning outing where he gave up no runs, while Max Fried throws a complete game shutout in the middle of an era where complete games are becoming as scarce as no-hitters.

Much has been made of Ohtani’s 2024, and how because he doesn’t have to worry about doing any pitching at all, he can focus on being the demigod of hitting he’s believed to be.  Every single home run he hits, is answered by some god-awful MLB tweet fellating him for doing what he’s going be paid $700 million dollars to do; meanwhile, Marcell Ozuna of the Braves is leading the majors in home runs currently, when just a year ago, fans were clamoring for him to be cut from the team and eat the salary hit, and MLB barely takes notice when he maintains his home run lead.

It’s just funny how an entire organization like Major League Baseball becomes no different than myself and lots of my nerdier friends in my life have been at certain points of their lives, when it comes to going through a Japan #1 phase.  I look back at that time of my life with rolled eyes and a little bit of embarrassment, but the difference is that I’m not a publicly known, forward facing, billions of dollars organization, looking like a collective cringey weeb in front of the rest of the world, and I look forward to the day when MLB grows out of it, because it’s really fucking embarrassing watching them spooge all over themselves over Japanese players.

Landon Knack won the MLB Seoul Series

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

lol’d heartily: while in Seoul, Korea, Los Angeles Dodgers caught on camera marveling and drooling over Korean actress Jeon Jong-Seo throwing out the ceremonial first pitch during an exhibition game between the Dodgers and the KBO’s Kiwoom Heroes

Honestly, I didn’t think I’d get as much enjoyment out of the MLB Seoul Series as I did.  I’m so far removed from my general fandom of baseball these days, and I’m so cynical and jaded, that I figured this was all just some typical cash grab by MLB to try and dupe and hoover money out of the Korean market, and that it’s always kind of weird, rhythm-wise when MLB teams play regular season games in Asia during Spring Training, and then come back to wrap up Spring Training before re-embarking on the regular season for 160 more games.

But then seeing highlights of Freddie Freeman acquainting himself to the Korean fans with a blast of a home run, and seeing the Padres’ Kim Ha-Seong coming home and blasting two dingers of his own against the LG Twins were pleasant highlights.  And then there was the gleefully enjoyable wake-up call on the final day of the trip, waking up and checking the score to the Padres/Dodgers game to find out that the Dodgers’ $325M acquisition Yoshinobu Yamamoto, got absolutely blown up, lasted one inning, and took a monumental L to start his MLB career.

I mean seriously, there isn’t a better narrative than a Japanese pitcher getting absolutely shelled while pitching in Korea.  I’m sure he will settle down and have a very fine season and possibly career in America, but I’ll be damned if I didn’t smile like the Grinch upon seeing his woefully embarrassing line for the morning, and knowing he’ll be leaving the motherland with little else than a big-ass L.

However, the best story of the trip, was undoubtedly the hilarious spectacle of the entire Dodgers roster going gonzo once they laid their eyes on Korean actress Jeon Jong-Seo, taking the hill for the ceremonial first pitch. I mean, I can’t blame all these baseball bros, for most of them, they’ve probably never seen a proper Korean celebrity like Jeon, with her perfect face,* slim figure, legs that go to the moon, and for a Korean girl, she got a little bit of booty.*  

*most likely surgically enhanced

And then she proceeds to hit the target pretty impressively, considering she was kicking off on the wrong side of the rubber.  But it didn’t stop pretty much everyone in the Dodgers’ dugout, most visibly Ryan Brazier, Gavin Stone, Gavin Lux from letting their jaws hang to the ground.  And hilariously extra were Tyler Glasnow, Chris Taylor and surprisingly, the happily married Freddie Freeman from staring a little too hard at Jeon.

But to me, the best part about the whole thing is that if there was going to be a singular winner of the entire Seoul Series, it’s definitely #96 for the Dodgers, Landon Knack, who was the guy who caught the first pitch from Jeon, but also got to take his photograph with her afterward.  Without question, Knack is envy of the entire Dodgers locker room, getting to be the guy that got to get up close with the Korean bombshell, and even put a hand on her, during the photograph.

The thing with ceremonial first pitches is that with 162 games plus exhibitions and playoffs for some, there are a whole lot of ceremonial first pitches in a season.  Every now and then, it’s going to be a legitimate A-lister or powerful figure, but for the most part, it’s going to be like the local Wells Fargo regional office’s VP’s son type of guys throwing out the lion’s share of ceremonial first pitches throughout a year.

The rule of thumb typically is that the bigger the celebrity or figure it is throwing out the first pitch, the higher caliber of player will be behind home plate waiting to catch the ball.  When George W. Bush threw out the first pitch, Ivan Rodriguez caught him.  When Pedro Martinez returned to Boston after being inducted into the Hall of Fame, David Ortiz caught him.  The list goes on and on, where depending on the level of celebrity, the higher the caliber of player is waiting to catch it.

And it’s clear that the Dodgers weren’t made aware of who was throwing out the ceremonial first pitch in their exhibition with the Kiwoom Heroes, because they sent a guy with the number 96 out to go catch.  Because the rule of thumb is that the higher and wonkier the number is in Spring Training, they’re younger minor league guys who are actively in a tryout phase with the team.  I actually had to Google the Dodgers’ 40-man roster to even find out who #96 was, and I still have no idea who Landon Knack really is.  His minor league numbers look promising, and I’m sure he’ll have a new number at some point this year, but the truth is that he was the low-man on the totem pole, thrust out there to do grunt work.

Clearly the mainstays of the Dodgers couldn’t be bothered to go out and catch a ceremonial first pitch, so they sent Landon Knack to go do it, and gee golly I’m sure Knack couldn’t have been happier to do the duty when he saw Jeon Jong-Seo step onto the field and take the mound.  Without question, if any of the players knew who was throwing it, and what Jeon Jong-Seo looked like, we probably would’ve seen Tyler Glasnow or Chris Taylor fighting over who would get to catch.

Unsurprising, as soon as the Seoul Series was over, Knack was immediately cut and sent down to the minor leagues to start the year, because anyone wearing a number higher than 70 typically is, unless they’re one of the baseball edge lords that asks for a high number.  Regardless of if he gets called up or not, gets hurt or not, Landon Knack is definitely going to have a core memory from his brief trip to Korea.  And his teammates will always be green with envy when he inevitably makes his picture with Jeon Jong-Seo his phone’s lock screen, and gets to flash it around when he’s called back up to the majors.

Without question, Landon Knack definitely won the Seoul Series, and MLB players probably will remember this the next time they’re sent out to Korea for any exhibitions.