Tag: sports

#TRYHARDSZN2025: the Hispanic goalie.. in hockey

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

NJ.com: New Jersey teen accepted into 23 schools, amassing around $1.5M in scholarships

Finally, I’ve got our first #TRYHARD from outside the State of Georgia, and it does seem a like an interesting case.  The sheer number of schools this #TRYHARD got into kind of pales in comparison to all of the seasoned Georgia #TRYHARDs that I’ve documented so far, but notching $1.5M out of 23 schools is definitely a higher cumulative per-school average than everyone else thus far, at $65,217.  For context, there was a #TRYHARD or two in Georgia who hit the $1.5M marks, but they were also requiring upwards of 50+ schools in order to do so.

Interestingly, this article actually gives a little more context than any of the previously covered #TRYHARDs, in terms of some examples of why they’re qualified to be a #TRYHARD, as well as some factual numbers and names, as far as some of the scholarships are concerned.

$180K to go to Syracuse seems pretty impressive sounding, but I also have to remind myself that this isn’t 1998 when my sister went off to college there, and the cost of tuition has gone up considerably over the last 28 years.  If I had to guess, $180K probably covers a year, maybe three semesters, tops, and probably doesn’t include room, board, food and all the other incidental expenses that comes with attending college away from home.

Our boy is most undoubtedly looking for a free ride outright, as most of #TRYHARDs are, but if I had to guess, he might have to lower his bar in order to do so.  Considering he’s claimed to want to stay in the greater New York area, one of the fifty different SUNYs seem like a more likely destination for him.

But it’s not to say that he doesn’t bring something to the table; aside from the grades, the accolades and extracurriculars, the thing that stands out to me the most is the fact that we have here a kid of obvious Hispanic descent, but he’s a hockey player, and is actually the goalie for his school, and helped win a division championship.

I admit I don’t follow a tremendous amount of hockey, but I don’t imagine it’s changed that much over the last few years of being pretty much the least diverse sport on the planet when it comes to being rostered by players that aren’t white.  I have to imagine this factoid alone should be more than sufficient for a school to want to kill multiple diversity birds with a single stone by accepting a Latino kid who has great grades, lots of honors, and is a hockey goalie on top of it.

But then again, seeing as how the country has declared war on the letters D, E, and I, maybe some schools are afraid of being too openly accepting of DEI initiatives and will cool on a kid like this.

Either way, hooray for the first #TRYHARD from outside of Georgia.  He brings an impressive resume to the table, but he clearly lacks in the bragging game, and racks the aspirations to aim for a school in every single fucking state.  I do give him credit for being a Hispanic goalie in hockey, but when the day is over, this #TRYHARD didn’t try hard enough to out-do the other #TRYHARDs that are inevitably going to continue to emerge this #SZN.

Man, it’s great to have baseball back

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Ain’t nothing to bring us back to the joys of baseball being back in season than a team trotting out a position player to pitch in a blowout game.  On Opening Day.  Against the Chicago White Sox, fresh off of their historic record-setting 121-loss season.

I know the Braves dropped their season opener out in San Diego, but the Padres are actually a good team, and the Braves could just as easily come back to Atlanta 6-1 or 1-6 seeing as how they have the Padres and Dodgers back-to-back to start the year.

But the Angels, a team whom in spite of having lost Shohei Ohtani, still have Mike Trout finally healthy on the team, and should be better than the Chicago White Sox whom really made no attempt to compete, once again.

It’s going to be a long season for both these teams.  And it’s going to be a long season for the Braves too, because 162 games a season plus potential playoffs means a whole lot of fuckin baseball!

Really though, despite the fact that I have no real intention of watching, well, any games, I’m feeling optimistic about the Braves this season.  As long as they can remain healthy, then I think they have the chance to be a noticeably better squad this year than the one prior where they limped into the playoffs and were bounced unceremoniously.  Despite my general dissatisfaction with their typical Braves-ey lack of movement in the offseason, I do like the acquisition of Jurickson Profar, and although they’re no blockbusters, I like them getting guys like Craig Kimbrel and Alex Verdugo for depth.

Either way, short of some comical fuckups and occurrences, I wouldn’t expect much baseball talk in the brog.  I find that I’m most happiest when I’m not really paying attention to the game these days beyond a cursory glance from time to time.  I still love it, I just have so no time in my life to dedicate to it as I once did, and feel that it’s expendable in the grand spectrum of my day to day.

I still hear about the high level points without any effort, and when the day is over, it’s the dumb silly stuff like position players pitching and other goofy anomalies that I tend to enjoy writing about.

Happy Opening Day!

So many easy jokes about the Mariners repping Nintendo

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

LL: Seattle Mariners agree to wear Nintendo Switch 2 patch for the 2025 MLB season

I don’t care enough to dig deep into the finer details, but Nintendo doesn’t own the Mariners like they once did, but they have enough pull with the baseball organization to ensure that throughout the 2025 baseball season, the Mariners will have a sponsorship patch on their away uniforms for the Nintendo Switch 2.  Their home whites will have a regular old Nintendo word mark logo on those alternatively.

Regardless, the jokes write themselves about a company like Nintendo being the uniform sponsor for a baseball organization like the Mariners, because in more ways than one, they operate in similar manners.  Now such could be as the result of the once ownership and the influence Nintendo clearly still has within the Seattle Mariners organization, or maybe they really are two peas in a pod in how their business philosophies are concerned, but the fact of the matter is that there really is a lot in common between both companies.

Nintendo is notoriously Japanese, as in that they are more than happy to operate in a completely risk-averse, efficient manner that prioritizes a zero-waste mentality.  For example, despite the fact that a billion people on the planet wanted the Wii when it first came out, they were all like ehhhh, let’s make just 20 million units, can’t possibly risk there being some false demand and us being stuck with extra units and being forced to sell at a discount.  And for the next several years, nobody could get their hands on one, and they were selling on the resale market at insane markups, and by the time demand was truly fulfilled, the Wii 2 was knocking on the door, and the process kind of repeated itself. The point is, Nintendo prioritizes efficiency and avoiding all risk over possibly making consumers happy and meeting demand a lot closer in which they operate to this day. 

And the Mariners are kind of the same way, because they just, always kind of suck as an MLB franchise, and no matter how much the market changes, how much talent they luck into from their system, and the availability of free agents throughout the years, the organization just somehow manages to always suck at winning baseball games, and much like Nintendo, letting consumers down by taking no risks, avoiding any possibility of dead money by signing no free agents, and routinely letting their fans down on a yearly basis.

It’s funny, because I actually wrote about the Mariners not too long ago and how it’s pretty incredible how much they’ve sucked historically.  Because this is an organization that has had the likes of Ken Griffey, Jr., Randy Johnson, Ichiro Suzuki, Alex Rodriguez, Edgar Martinez and a prime Robinson Cano, and in some cases, an overlap of some of these talents. Yet they never won anything, beyond the magical 2001 season where they won 116 games, before crashing out unceremoniously in the playoffs to the Yankees.  They rarely saw the playoffs, didn’t do much once they got there, and no matter the talent that has been on the squad, they just, well suck.

Just recently, the Mariners successfully signed their catcher Cal Raleigh, to an insanely team-friendly deal, six years at just $105M.  The guy is an average 4 WAR player, not even hitting his prime, and could easily have been worth double of this, in just a few years.  But he clearly likes something in Seattle and has agreed to stay there, but the real question is if the Nintendo Mariners will actually do something with this centerpiece, or if it will just be more of the same, operating like Nintendo, where they will only produce the absolute bare minimum in order to be relevant, but absolutely nothing more in order to even attempt to be anything but afloat.

It’s really a chicken and egg situation on whether the Seattle Mariners are operating like Nintendo, or if Nintendo is operating like the Seattle Mariners; but if I’m a betting man, I’d say the former, but either way, neither is a particularly enviable position to be in, because jaded video gamers all resent Nintendo for their Nintendo-ey business practices, and Mariners fans all resent the Mariners for simply never really trying, so ultimately, this sponsorship marriage seems to be a very fitting fit for both parties involved.

I’m pretty sure basketball is nothing like slavery, bro

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

SI: NBA guard Dennis Schroder, exasperated by how many times he’s been traded in his career, likens the process to ‘modern day slavery’

Fewer things inspire me to get on a keyboard and pound out some words like professional athletes complaining about well, anything, considering the fact that they’re all overgrown man-children who get paid exorbitant amounts of money to play children’s games at an extraordinary level.  And in this case, we have NBA player, Dennis Schroder, whom jaded from witnessing one of the most lopsided and surprising trades in the history of professional sports, decided to air out his frustrations and compare the stress of being traded to being the modern day equivalent to, slavery:

It’s like modern slavery. It’s modern slavery at the end of the day,” Schröder said. “Everybody can decide where you’re going, even if you have a contract.

First, I don’t think Dennis Schroder understands what slavery really is.  As defined by Merriam-Webster, slavery is:

1a: the practice or institution of holding people involuntarily and under threat of violence
1b: the state of a person who is forced usually under threat of violence to labor for the profit of another

Last time I checked, NBA players, like all other professional athletes are usually not under the threat of violence, and furthermore, are actually paid wages in order to perform their trade, which in the case of Dennis Schroder, is to play basketball.

I didn’t know who Dennis Schroder was, and I was tickled by the fact that he actually spent five years in Atlanta.  But I figured that he must be some scrub who has been hanging onto a career in the NBA and has mostly been living on league minimum salaries, which by the way, the NBA absolute league minimum is still $1.1 million dollars, and more for guys who have the years of experience that Schroder has, which is to say that being an NBA player pays at the very least 1.1 million times more than what slaves got when slavery was a thing.

But in fact, Dennis Schroder himself has actually cleared the vaunted $100M mark as far as career earnings go.  In spite of my initial thought that he had to have been some scrub, he’s apparently not a bad player, having averaged 14 points and nearly 5 assists a game as mostly a backup point guard, which are pretty above average numbers in my estimation, and seems worthy of the $100M he’s earned in his career thus far.

But such adds to the absurdity of a guy that’s made this much money to be making the dumb comparison of trading players being akin to slavery, and adds to the narrative of the bullshit tone-deaf chasm between professional athletes and ordinary citizens of the world.

I get that he’s probably frustrated that he’s been traded five times in his career and has had to move now, eleven different times, but that’s all part of the deal of being a professional athlete.  You are nothing but an asset, no matter what management tells you, and when the day is over, you are available to be traded and dumped and moved on a moment’s notice, if the needs of the business outweigh the needs of the asset.

The Luka trade was almost like a league-wide reminder that nobody is untouchable, on top of all other analytical reasons why it’s potentially one of the most lopsided deals in history, but the fact remains nobody is untouchable.  Schroder may be on his eighth NBA team, but there are all sorts of guys way more talented and famous than him that have been bounced around as much as him if not more.

Hall of Famer, Moses Malone has played for nine.  Future Hall of Famer, Vince Carter, played for eight NBA teams in his career.  Apparently, the NBA record is some dude named Ish Smith, who played 14 years in the league, and played for 12 different franchises, having been traded six times.  And even he still cleared $44M in career earnings, galaxies apart from what Kunta Kinte made in Roots.

In all fairness, Schroder quickly realized the colossal fail of what he said, and tried to walk it back some and acknowledge that he makes a lot of money and is blessed to be able to do what he does.  But speech has no undo button, and the media that recorded him will always have on record of him making his completely absurd remarks.  And comparing the woes of being traded as a professional athlete to slavery is about as big of a fuck up as there can be, but he’ll be lucky that the media is still mostly all over the Luka trade to give him any attention beyond the knee-jerk reaction.

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.

Who does Roki think he’s fooling?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

MLB: .com makes a point to let everyone know that next big Japanese shit, pitcher Roki Sasaki will not be signing with the Yankees

Back in like 1998, there was an episode of WCW Monday Nitro where Bret Hart was cutting a promo in the ring with Mean Gene Okerlund, going on about whatever Bret Hart martyr speak he was gushing about at the time, most likely his beef with the nWo.  And then without any notice, Brian Adams, formerly Crush of WWE just meanders into the ring to confront Bret.

At the time, the nWo was wildly more popular than anything WCW-branded, and the nWo was seemingly adding new members left and right, whether they were WCW guys turning coat, or guys just coming into the company just being introduced as new nWo members.

Brian Adams was pretty much a guy that had been primarily a bad guy heel character throughout his whole career to this point, so he seemed like a natural fit for the nWo.  Furthermore, he came into the ring wearing all black and a black trench coat, and the most cliched trope in history at the time was opening a coat and revealing a nWo shirt underneath, oh what a dastardly bad guy.

Basically, Adams got on the mic and told Bret Hart that he would have his back in his plight against the nWo, but absolutely anyone with even just a quarter of a brain knew what was going to happen.  Neither Bret or Mean Gene were remotely convinced, and even the crowd, and WCW crowds were a very different breed of dumb wrestling fans, could smell the most obvious of rats in the history of attempted trickery.

Sure enough, they didn’t even bother to save it for a later segment much less a future show, and Adams opened his coat to reveal the nWo shirt that even Ray Charles could see was there, and Bret got a beatdown when the rest of the gang showed up.

Roki Sasaki is basically Brian Adams, and pretty much every baseball fan on the planet knows he’s going to end up on the Dodgers.  No matter what he says, no matter what bullshit media reporting is done that he’s “giving everyone a chance,” and trying to convince people that there’s a possibility he ends up anywhere other than the Dodgers.

A guy who probably speaks no English isn’t going to want to go to any place not a small market with absolutely no Japanese presence much less Asians in general.  He’s not going to Milwaukee, Kansas City, Cincinnati, and I highly doubt Atlanta, Tampa Bay, Oakland Las Vegas Sacramento, or Baltimore were any of the 20 teams that were reportedly interested because Japanese hot shits require this thing called money to even be invited into the conversation.

Japanese hot shits want money, and want comfort.  So they require a big market, preferably one with Japanese and other Asian people, to have some remote chance that they can get a taste of home when they’re playing abroad.  This is why New York, Chicago, Boston and Los Angeles are always in the conversation whenever Japanese hot shits are on the market, but when it comes down to it, Los Angeles always covers multiple bases because they offer money, comfort of demographic, and the shortest flight distance to Japan, which is why they typically have the highest success rate at landing them.

Geography is undefeated. 

Nobody’s buying it, and nobody really even cares.  At this point, it’s more exasperating that they’re wasting people’s time at even bothering to exert time and energy into this sad ruse, and baseball fans just want him to go ahead and declare the Dodgers his choice of destination, have his shitty little press conference, put on his jersey and shut the fuck up so we can move onto the next storyline, or even the arrival of Spring Training.

Furthermore, the Dodgers have been low-key tampering with the whole thing, with golden boy Shohei Ohtani probably having all sorts of conversations and being in his ear trying to recruit him, since they were national team teammates.

Money isn’t going to be an issue, because the Dodgers would probably defer 60%+ of the contract until like 2040.  The only real issue is that the Dodgers frankly don’t need Roki, because they already have a full pitching rotation with Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Balakey Snell, Tyler Glasnow, Dustin May, and eventually Ohtani himself, but there’s always the possibility that Ohtani just goes another season as just a DH while he recovers, and the Dodgers aren’t the type of team to not pick up a hot shit free agent because they have no need, so much as they can deny others from getting them.

The only question mark and viable alternative to the Dodgers are the San Diego Padres, who also fulfills a lot of the Japanese hot shit checkboxes, but they also play in paradise.  Plus, the fact that Yu Darvish is already there is the safety net that holds some legitimate weight for Japanese guys.

But if I’m a betting man, when Roki does peel off his black trench coat, I still got the Dodgers shirt on underneath.  In the cyclical ecosystem of baseball, the rich tend to get richer, before they eventually age out, crash out and bail out before they actually deal with any sort of adversity, many years down the line.

Notre Dame for the Natty; and chaos

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

An interesting thing happened this year’s college football bowl season; with the playoff expanded to 12 teams, it basically murdered any interest I could have in absolutely any other bowl game that wasn’t a CFB playoff game.  Even Virginia Tech being in the Belk Duke’s Mayo Bowl, which is maybe like a C-tier bowl, instead of the E-tier that shit like the TransPerfect Music City Bowl or ReliaQuest Bowl couldn’t interest me in the least bit.  And I don’t think such was the intention of the CFB committee, but at the same time I don’t think they should be surprised that fucks to give for any bowl that wasn’t a playoff game, actually ended up being quite minimal.

Anyway, the field is set for the National Championship, with it being The Ohio State University against Notre Dame, two schools I typically give no shits about beyond that I want to see them lose every time I hear their names in competition.  Not that I had any real horse in the race, but I obviously hoped for Georgia to win a third natty in recent years for the fact that they’re the hometown team for me, but their chances seemed like a wash when Carson Beck was ruled out after hurting himself in the SEC Championship.

Texas was my B-pick, because I proclaimed that the Natty really was theirs to lose; and it’s not because I like Texas by any stretch of the imagination, but if we really did end up with a Texas vs. UGA III, I didn’t think there was any chance that Georgia could upend them a third consecutive time in a single season.  And if there’s any consolation at all for me, there’s always some degree of satisfaction in being right.

However both schools shit the bed, and we’re stuck with TOSU and ND for the first-ever 12-team playoff version Natty, and I really couldn’t give a shit on who actually wins.  Honestly, I think TOSU is probably going to win, like a 38-17 contest because they look like world beaters right now, and they did win the first-ever 4-team playoff, so it just seems like one of those kismet things that they’d win the first-ever 12-team playoff, out of some weird tradition.

But for the sake of picking someone to root for, I think I’m going to be rooting for Notre Dame; not because I like them in the least bit*, but because Notre Dame winning a National Championship is basically the worst thing to happen for the CFB committee, who will undoubtedly be facing a lot of difficult questions should ND win the Natty, and I like the idea of chaos being brought to their doorstep instead of TOSU getting to be National Champions.

*especially since they no longer have a Korean kicker

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