Umpires getting owned by ABS is my favorite subplot of the season

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Yahoo Sports: Cincinnati Reds give umpire CB Bucknor a bad day at the office, challenging his calls with Automated Ball Strike (ABS) multiple times, getting them overturned every time

The best part about this article is that this story was entirely one that was always going to happen.  It was never a matter of if, it was always when it was going to come out.  And with 2026 being the season in which MLB has implemented the ABS challenge system into place, it took all of just two games before this came to fruition.  And to the surprise of nobody who follows baseball, it of course involves, CB Bucknor.

When Angel Hernandez retired two years ago, what was really great was that it was completely unanimous that the umpire that would take the mantle of being the worst in Major League Baseball, was CB Bucknor.  Baseball fans basically are incapable of coming to any sort of agreements, about anything, no matter how much statistical evidence there might be, but even still, this was one that came to a consensus pretty quickly, without much incident.

Even the clowns in the BBWAA could probably come to a unanimous decision on whom the worst umpire in MLB was after Angel’s retirement.

Anyway, frankly the only reason it only took two games for CB Bucknor to get exposed as the incompetent umpire everyone knew he was, was the fact that he didn’t have home plate duties on the first game of the season.  And I have a feeling that this article is going to pop up multiple times throughout the season, until either the rules are tweaked, or Bucknor up and retires spontaneously, to save himself the indignity of getting exposed every five games.

Frankly, umpires getting exploited by ABS is basically my favorite subplot of the entire season, and I have a feeling there are going to be a lot more articles throughout the course of the season of ABS having a noteworthy impact on games, and not just including exclusively CB Bucknor.  There are still plenty of other shitty umps like Laz Diaz, Lance Barksdale, Hunter Wendelstedt and Jim Wolf who will have their chances throughout the season to shine under the lights.

I really am a fan of ABS.  For generations, fans, on top of the players have been powerless against the all-powerful calls of umpires, and it’s fantastic to finally see the game evolve to where umpires are finally given some oversight where they can be held accountable for their calls.  It may peter off in the future, but I feel like this season is going to be 180 years of pent-up frustration, aggravation and pettiness unleashed onto officiating crews, and it’s either going to weed out the incompetent, or we’re going to have some really interesting baseball games over the next few years.

I think my favorite part about ABS challenges is that not only is it done in the most public and spectacle fashion, so that the results are shown not just to the players and umpire, but also the entire attending audience, it’s the fact that after the graphic shows the correct result of the pitch, there’s always a few seconds pause before the mathematical result of just how right or wrong pops up, just to kind of punctuate the result, rubbing it into whomever the loser of the challenge was.

Baseball is full of ownage on a regular basis, but ABS allows for a new methodology of it, involving technology, spectacle, and basically a double-down scenario for pitchers and players to want to gamble with.  But it has been telling that the general initial result of ABS challenges in regular season baseball has been more favorable towards players over the umpires, showing that perhaps players haven’t just been whining and bitching for generations now.

I guess this makes me sound old

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

A few years ago on Thanksgiving, my family missed our flight. 

Actually, we did not miss our flight, but rather we missed the recommended two-hour check-in period because mythical wife and I were parents new to two kids, had a boatload of cargo to haul with us, and had to check-in at a service desk, instead of just going straight to security as if we didn’t have all the extra crap.  And the only reason why we missed it is because ATL’s parking garage is the worst in the nation [fact] and the 15 minutes in which it took us to get from car to terminal was the difference between making it and not.

Being late, I can take responsibility for.  Airline travel these days is a stressful ordeal most of the time, multiplied by the fact that it was a holiday.  Add to the fact that parenting is hard, especially at the time, two kids under the ages of two.

What really bothered me about the whole situation was the fact that after we were told that we would not be getting onto our flight, was the fact that for the next hour and 50 minutes, while I was on the phone with Delta trying to figure out what our options were, was knowing that our aircraft was sitting there, still waiting for cargo to be loaded, still waiting for people to board, still, just fucking waiting.  Meanwhile, thanks to some uppity gate agents hiding behind the subjectively conveniently wall of protocol, my family was denied clearance, and I had to drop $700 on the spot for two new day-of holiday tickets in order to go to Virginia for barely 12 hours, all for being 10 minutes past a recommended check-in time.

Look, I know that rules are rules, and my family wasn’t there at precisely 2+ hours before departure time.  But I’ve witnessed in my rather copious flying experiences people in way more dire and illogical, and should-be-fucked situations emerge victorious, all because there’s a generous amount of discretion, grace and ability to read the room involved with being in airline customer support.

I was ten minutes late.  I wasn’t a dick or raised my voice or created a scene with the agent.  I also understand the needs of the baggage handlers and that their time needs to be accounted for.  I wasn’t asking for super special treatment, and to be escorted through security through special assistance.  I just wanted a little bit of grace and understanding for our parenting situation, and a little bit of leniency on the time, especially since there was more than enough of it remaining to make our flight.

But no, we were stonewalled, marked as no-shows, and not allowed to advance on our original itinerary.  The reasonable flights were refunded as credit, but that needed to be used immediately along with $700 extra dollars to book two new flights, and it led to a real shitty holiday travel experience.

All because a gate agent didn’t really feel like working, and used the wall of protocol to shield themselves behind.

It’s not lost on me that from a cold hard facts point of view, the agent did nothing wrong.  From a procedural standpoint, they did everything to the T, and when the day is over, you really can’t ask for much more from an employee.

Nobody is required or expected to go above their required duties, and I know there’s a lot of gray area when it comes to Office Space debates on doing the bare minimum versus trying to do more, but when the asks are not difficult or require little extra effort, but the result is the satisfaction and gratitude of helping another person accomplish something, why the fuck not give it a whirl?

I’m sure that there have been points in my life where I’ve hidden behind the exact same wall of protocol, but I’m fairly certain that if I did it, it was coming from a place of antagonism, and I was probably aware that my refusal to budge was going to be seen as an act of hostility, from whom I was being obtuse with.

Well that introduction went a little long, because what the whole point of this whole post is that I recently had a situation with a colleague, where I asked for some assistance with a project, and was met with a surprising amount of resistance, a deflection from a shield of protocol, and a conclusion where the task was not completed, and will have to wait an entire week for this person to come back from PTO before it gets completed.

Like the airline story, they’re not in the wrong with the course of action that they chose to take, but the ask I had for them was to convert two sentences and three bullet points into a smaller, digestible 2-3 sentence paragraph; a task that I’ve seen not just any copywriter, but this specific copywriter accomplish in less than five minutes.  I even vetted the ask with them over Teams before entering the request into Workfront, which was met with a response indicating how easy it would be.

But once they received it in Workfront, they responded to the group that the due date for the task was already past-due because our PMs are suspect in capability, and that it would have to wait until the following week due to their upcoming PTO, and that they recommended assigning it to another copywriter if it was urgent.

To this type of response, I scrunched my brow at the screen, and wondered why the fuck they had agreed upon its ease if they weren’t going to help out with it in the first place?  Furthermore, this all happened at like 10 am in the work day, there was more than enough time to just knock it out, then I could do my part, and we could close the entire project out, and that would be one less ticket looming over our workloads.

Aggravated, I decided to not reassign the task, and to make sure it remains on this copywriter’s plate.  It has the time, but it could have been done so much sooner, and on principle, I’m going to make sure that they still do it, and lord help me if they complain about their workload when they get to it then.

I get wanting to coast before a vacation, but I’m also the type who absolutely abhors the idea of anyone having to pick up or fill in or finish something that I started.  I’m a monster when it comes to trying to close out all my tasks, tie up all loose ends, and knock out anything that can be knocked out before I go radio silent.  To me, it just seems like common courtesy, but as I very well have learned throughout my life, nobody works harder than a Korean, and I feel as if I’m a step above the rest on top of it.

Ultimately, my mind immediately thought to the notion that this wasn’t just ordinary apathetic work avoidance, but rather more typical to Gen-Z work ethic, and no matter how nice and chipper and glowy of personalities a worker can be, the barest of bare minimums is to be expected, and that anything that might be construed as exceeding such, is absolutely out of the question.

Nice enough and chipper and pleasant as this copywriter is, they still turtled up behind the shield of protocol as if I were asking them to find the cure for cancer.  Shifting the request to the other copywriter was out of the question to me, because they’re younger and more apt to bitch about an additional request being made of them, and I don’t want to hear it.  But even in spite of all the remaining time in the day, they didn’t have the time to address my ask, but they did have time to get on the department Teams channel and wish a happy birthday to fucking Mariah Carey.

Perhaps the five minutes of doing such should be construed as five minutes of flagrant not-work time spent, and they should make up for it by spending five minutes on the task that I had asked them for.

Either way, I suppose complaining about the perceived work ethics of those younger than me qualifies as one of those things that justifies the fact that I’m old now.  Whatever though, at least I know I’m capable of getting shit done, even if others might consider such attribute as giving shit away.

The subtle aggression of emoji skin tones

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

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Every workplace’s text client communication vibe is different.  I’ve been places where there are a ton of old motherfuckers around, so there’s basically no text internal communication client at all, and even if there is one, nobody uses it, and those who do are pariahs and are looked at like moon people for even daring to consider internal text client communication as official business correspondence.

Conversely, I’ve also been to places that ran Slack, which means there are like 76 different channels of groups, communities, and teams, and every single message is responded to in 164 different gifs and emojis, and Slack communication is interpreted as official business, and there are major businesses decisions that are locked in via the client.

Where I’m at these days is kind of midway point between the two, where we run Microsoft Teams as our official client.  There are plenty of technologically inept olds still in the company that by virtue of either refusing, or are just too old to figure out how to use the client, simply don’t.  But I’m fortunate to my department having a lot more technologically savvy users who have no issues using the client, and it’s what we use on the regular to communicate, in and out of the office.

The majority of the etiquette here are users using the default emojis to acknowledge or recognize appreciation, mostly the standard yellow thumbs up, and heart, and if something is funny, then the laughing face emoji.

However recently, I’ve noticed a little shift in some user behavior that kind of has me thinking some things.  At first, it started with some remarks in some group threads, where the responses aren’t just getting thumbs up’ped, but they’re being thumbs up’ped with both the regular default yellow thumbs up, as well as the black skin tone thumbs up.

Obviously, in spite of my general appreciation of dark humor, I have no issue with black people representing and busting out black skin tone thumbs up emojis.  It’s just that I couldn’t help but notice that after these started getting used, it didn’t take long before I noticed that later on, when there was another comment that warranted mass acknowledgement, I would see that in addition to the black skin thumbs ups, there were now users responding with white people thumbs ups.

The thing for me is that I have no qualms with the white folks doing this, it’s just that in my observations, this was behavior that was not done until the emergence of black skin thumbs up emojis.  Maybe it’s just me, and maybe I’m likely overthinking things, but there’s something that seems subtly passive aggressive with a hint of racism about the act, as if some of my white colleagues were kind of triggered or offended that some of our black colleagues decided to start utilizing black thumbs up emojis, so they decided to respond with white ones.

And then we have comments that look like the above, where there’s a mish-mash of colored emojis in response to an inconsequential remark in the grand spectrum of a work day.

What if I felt the need to jump in on this racial representation?  You know who doesn’t get considered in the great expansion of emoji skin tones?  That’s right, Asian folks.  There are skin tones to account for white people, black people, and numerous shades of brown to cover Hispanics, Middle Eastern, Indian, or anyone whose skin tone is remotely in the spectrum. 

But Asian people?  No dice there.  No light skin tones with a hint of warmth to encapsulate Asians, and maybe some people from like Southeast Asia, the Pacific Island, or regions of Korea and Japan where there are lot more rural folks with tanned skin could get away with using some of the brown-tone emojis, but the fact of the matter is that there is no real set of emojis that takes into consideration Asian skin tones.

Obviously, the generic yellow thumbs up is not sufficient for Asian folks, because we are not fucking Simpsons characters, and have tones that look that yellow.

Needless to say, I’m leaning in a direction where I wish all skin tones would just be eliminated, and we’re left with just the standardized Simpsons yellow emoji.  Take race out of the equation, and eliminate any possibility for such subtle passive aggression.  I know all the people utilizing these non-standard emojis and I don’t think they’re trying to be racist, but to me, it kind of comes off that way, especially since racist-ass Microsoft’s emoji catalog doesn’t account for Asians, and if I wanted to jump aboard the representation train, I can’t.

The craziest part about all these distractions

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

A little while ago as I was doomscrolling, I saw this one meme.  At this point, I can’t remember what it was about, whether it was Iran getting bombed, the rise of shitty gas prices (again), a bunch of dumb white guy CEOs biting into hamburgers, or whatever, but it went like, The craziest part about X is that [orange fuckface in the white house] is named in the Epstein Files over 3,000 times.

For whatever reason, this stuck with me, and I really began to actually think about recognize about all the shit going on in the country and across the world, that really are just a whole bunch of distractions to the fact that the sitting president of the United States has been named countless times in the Epstein Files.  And of course, not a single fucking soul is doing anything about it, and as much as I want to love my country of birth, I just end up hating it a little bit more each time I think about it and am reminded of such.

A few years ago, I felt like I had one of those life’s revelations that in spite of the constitutional right to have information, the media really does go out of their way to steer people away from thinking about bigger issues, and at the time, there was a big hullabaloo about the Washington Redskins finally agreeing to change their name, conveniently at a time where the country was in turmoil over coronavirus, Black Lives Matter demonstrations, and just the ‘usual’ state of civil unrest.

That was probably the first time I really noticed and recognized a scenario of mass distraction like that, and despite the fact that I was like 40 years old, it felt like one of those naïve moments of realizing that the world isn’t quite as innocent and altruistic as we might want to believe it is. 

We are truly never too old to learn and realize new things.

Either way, that’s kind of where I’m at these days, feeling frustrated, disappointed, and generally mad at my country for being so simple-minded and easily distracted to bigger things.  Obviously, I knew nothing major was really going to come out of the initial release of Epstein Files, because Washington is a spineless and gutless swamp full of people with all the cards who would absolutely not narc on each other, and would sooner eat their young than to act in a manner that positions themselves contrary to the mutation of whatever direction-wing that the right has transformed into these days.

It’s almost flabbergasting the lengths that the current administration has gone to in order to get people not talking about the Epstein Files, and that the actual president of the country is named literal thousands of times in it, which is absolutely not a good thing, considering the context of just about everything else in them.  Like, the United States basically started a war, with Iran, in order to get people to avert their eyes somewhere else.  And then predictably, war-like conditions always result in a spike of gas prices, and for the people lucky enough to remain blind to World War 3, they definitely wouldn’t miss the escalation of gas prices on the homefront, and then they’re busy being miserable about that.

But honestly, it’s the fucking noise about the McDonald’s CEO and the wimpy bite he did, and the ensuing chatter and bullshit that has emerged from that, that has me feeling the most enraged.  Because there’s literally an unearthed horrific global pedophilia ring that was just revealed, but people would rather expend their energy debating and analyzing some rich asshole taking a bite out of a hamburger.

As much as I loathe all of the fucks in Washington that are keeping our entire country as the cesspool it’s been downgraded to, I have just as much vitriol and disdain for all the people in the country that fall for such elementary distraction tactics.

I digress though.  This is a topic that I really didn’t want to expend any energy on, because politics are all shit and I hate them, but it’s like when I’m on social media, and I see things that I want to comment on, where I can utilize the template of “the craziest thing about X is that [orange fuckface] is in the Epstein Files,” but I don’t want to deal with the rebuttals and responses of anyone who does live on that side of the fence, because their stupidity would undoubtedly be detrimental to my general state of mental health.

So to my safe little brog that nobody reads, where I can pop off about whatever topic I want, without there being any real chance for any recourse, even ones as inflammatory as politics are.

Like sending gorillas to do custodial work

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

That’s the best analogy that comes to mind when I think about the bright idea to send ICE agents to Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson Intergalactic Spaceport, Nail Salon and Chicken Tender Museum in order to assist with crowd control and the nightmare scenario where the vast majority of TSA agents are no-showing because they’re not getting paid.  Sure, they’re marginally capable of perhaps doing some base job functions like staring at people menacingly while behind a gaiter and holding an automatic firearm so that people think twice about trying to cut any lines and shave an hour off their wait, but there’s a higher possibility that these ICE clowns make things worse, escalate a situation, and there’s probably going to be more arrests and possibly deaths, before any progress or civility is restored to the airport.

I’m just really glad that I don’t have any upcoming flight bookings coming up, because I’d probably punt on any airline travel I have coming up if it required me to go through ATL right now, because it doesn’t seem to matter when people are rolling up to the airport these days, the waits just seem to grow commensurate to how early people are showing up.

Mythical wife and I are current with The Pitt, and the most recent episode introduced a sub plot where two ICE agents bring a woman set to be detained to the ER, because she was most likely injured during a raid that they conducted.  And the presence of ICE in at the hospital passively makes all sorts of minority staff, patients and waiting patients to peace the fuck on out of the Pitt.

When Doctor Robbie tells them to stay the fuck to themselves and not be meandering around, they basically roid rage and attempt to interrupt the treatment of their detainee and send her to detention without treatment, with no regard for her injuries, and when an RN intervenes, he gets taken down and arrested as well, and in classic Pitt logic, there is no situation that cannot be made worse, somehow.

I feel like this is exactly what’s going to happen at ATL, with ICE wandering around the airport now.  All sorts of Hispanic and other minority would-be passengers will see them lurking around, and decide it’s not worth getting targeted and possibly detained and shipped off to a concentration camp detention center, and slip on out of the airport and ironically, ICE will have assisted in relieving the congestion of humanity at the airport, slightly, but seeing as how this was probably also the intention of the whole plan, it begins to grow the narrative that airline travel is becoming more of a white privilege than it already is.

Regardless, it’s just sad, laughable, and endlessly pathetic to see the state of, well, everything these days.  ICE agents trying to do TSA functions is like asking gorillas to do custodial work, at first they’d probably show remote capability of the bases of functions, but ultimately something is going to set them off, and ragey, power-tripping violence is going to be inevitable.

The craziest part about all these airport nightmares is that the guy sitting in the White House was named like 3,000+ times in the Epstein Files.

If not to tease with, then why??

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

The Autopian: there exists a single Honda Odyssey Type-R minivan, and it has 550 horsepower, turbo charged, and a six-speed manual transmission

I’ve said it before, I have no qualms with minivans.  They’re spacious, versatile, provide tremendous utility and purpose, and I couldn’t give two shits less about the reputation that comes with being a parent driving around in one.  The only reasons why I don’t have one today is that the industry clearly knows the value of their utility, and when I was car shopping, none of them seemed remotely available south of $60,000, and the fact that mythical wife absolutely abhors them, and feels tremendously stronger about reputation than I could.

Needless to say, when I saw the words “Honda Odyssey Type-R,” it did elicit a jaw drop of the smallest sense, because it was the amalgamation of two things that pique my interest; the adult parent appeal of minivans, clashing with my boyhood fandom to Honda’s Type-R performance division, to create this wholly unnecessary, nobody-asked-for-this soccer rocket of a ride, that has garnered enough intrigue to where it’s becoming a brog post.

Everything about it is just so laughable, from the aggressive Type-R styling hints, from the grill, red H emblem, accents, to the more obvious things, like the quad pipe exhaust, aggressive as hell rims, and the hood air intake.  As much as I want to lament about how unnecessary this is, the fact of the matter is that this is the only one in existence, a one-of-one, the chic IT phrase of today to denote its exclusivity and rarity, and I think most everyone can agree that in spite of its existence, the chances of this, or anything closer to this seeing the light of day commercial remains pretty slim.

The go-parts of it are especially entertaining, considering most of minivans are hauling so much weight, there’s almost little logic to running anything other than a V6 motor of some sort, but in true Honda and true Type-R logic, they’ve smashed in a turbo-charged inline-four, from the Civic Type-R into this minivan, and are alleging a horsepower of 550 hp.  And paired to it, is a six-speed manual transmission, and the best part is that it’s coming out of the dash like the random Civic Si from the mid-2000s that most car heads agreed was kind of a flop; but it kind of makes sense in the context of a minivan.

So yeah, six-speed manual Honda Odyssey pushing 500hp+.  I’m surprised the Type-R badge on the back of it isn’t bigger, and frankly isn’t just the entire sides of the ride, like a Fast & Furious Team Toretto graphic, because if something is going to remain a 1-of-1, it needs to shout it from the rooftops a little better.

It’s like whomever designed this, they like the idea of being a sleeper car, unsuspecting and inconspicuous, but while they were putting it together, whether Honda superiors or their own arrogance started to intervene, and hints of obvious aggression and performance began to permeate the overall package of it.  It’s white and ordinary looking from the onset, but then there’s the rims, and when you see the back of the ride, window covered with more stickers than a Takahashi brother from Initial D, huge exhaust pipes that look more suited for an insurrectionist’s Dodge pickup, by the time you notice the tiny-ass Type-R emblem on the back, the jig is already up that this is no ordinary children hauler.

And not to go unnoticed was that the driver’s side was on the left, which is to say that this was clearly designed with teasing Americans in mind.  Minivans don’t really have the purpose in the world than they do in America, other than kidnapping in Taken-like films, and this would be too conspicuous for crime.  But it seems obvious that this was meant to tease and tantalize the American market, and I would have to acquiesce that it’s working, because I would probably trade in my car and our third car to get my hands on one of these, without even considering the consequence of being short one car for my household of three drivers.

Which leads me to wonder what the point of this thing coming to fruition even is, because like in the linked article above, minivans now are already costly expenses as they currently are, but then adding the cost of what a Type-R designation does to it, I can’t imagine that there are a lot of families out there willing to drop what I’d guess would be between $80-90k for a fucking minivan, even if that Type-R badge tickles the tits of all sorts of boyhood dreams of once-boys-now-dads out there.

All the same, consider me thoroughly entertained by the creation of a Honda Odyssey Type-R, even if there’s only going to ever be the one in existence.  My 18-year old self can get together with my 40+ year old self in my brain and lament on how great it would be to finally own anything with a Type-R badge on it.

I hope Dodger Stadium will get a big weeb gong soon

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

KTLA: Dodger Stadium sells the naming rights to the venue for the first time in history, to Japanese clothing company, Uniqlo

By now, there’s no shortage of jokes about how the Los Angeles Dodgers have gone long since gone full-retard when it comes to their relationship with the entire fucking country of Japan.  The acquisition of Shohei Ohtani brought forth the current wave that has left Hideo Nomo-mania in the dust, and then with the rapid acquisitions of Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Roki Sasaki, the organization has fully embraced their buy-in to the old Japan = Superior meme from old weeb culture.

However, as much as I, like many out there, like to take our shots at the organization for leaning into being weeaboos, there’s no denying that it has been absolutely nothing short of lucrative.  As much money the team has dumped into player commitments spanning the next two decades, the team has purportedly already made that money back, multi-fold, from all the deals, sponsorships and rights solely from Japanese companies.

On top of the fact that winning is about the most lucrative thing any sports organization can do, the Dodgers have become a veritable money printer over the last decade, with the last 2-3 years being a massive peak, so when the day is over, myself and all other critics are merely haters and jealous fatties when it comes to voicing our criticisms and dislikes about the team, but they’re still churning money out like they invented the printing press for currency, and a lot of already-rich white guys are getting richer, and fans of the team are enjoying a squad that’s been playing near .600 ball over the last few seasons with a contention window that’s seemingly never closing.

But the news of Dodger Stadium selling the naming rights to the ballpark, that piques my interest just beyond being a not-fan of the Dodgers, but rather to my appeal as a ballpark enthusiast, as well as someone who’s one of those traditionalist olds who is reluctant to accept certain changes.

Even if I weren’t a fan of the team, there was still something inherently cool about the fact that Dodger Stadium had long remained one of the few MLB parks that didn’t sell naming rights.  Yankee Stadium, Fenway Park, Camden Yards, Angel Stadium, come to mind off the top of my head; I’m reluctant to include Wrigley, since it’s the technically the name of a the gum company too, the Royals are reportedly soon to be leaving the K soon, and Nationals Park is simply biding their time waiting for the right company to sell the naming rights to.

But for the OG’s, there was always something cool about how they didn’t sell their naming rights, it’s like the entities that owned them didn’t care, or wanted to have their name on them, even at the expense of the millions that could come with selling out.  A control thing, or a power play, perhaps, but the fact that they remained unbranded, regardless of how I might have felt for the teams that played in them, just seemed cooler than boring ass bullshit like Truist, LoanDepot, AT&T, Citizens Bank, Citi or other soulless white guy corporations slapping their names onto venues.

And even though Dodger Stadium isn’t even close to my upper quartile of MLB parks, with their horribly uncomfortable seats, shitty sound system and overpriced concessions, at least they had the dignity to remain, just Dodger Stadium, and not be some lame corporate sellout in order to get a cheap pay day… until now.

And of course, it goes to a Japanese company, with Uniqlo being granted the ability to overpay for the naming rights to the biggest weeb team outside of Nippon Professional Baseball.  The name is yet to be revealed, although it is heavily speculated to be “Uniqlo Field at Dodger Stadium,” with the probable hopeful ideology that fans will not embrace the new name and continue to refer to it as “Dodger Stadium” which is obviously what’s going to happen while the team gets to pocket the naming fees all the same.

But it still seems really lame that the Dodgers would allow this to happen, all the same.  It’s like for the last 64 years, they didn’t feel the need to sell out the name of the ballpark, but it’s become evident over the last decade that there has been a shift in management to where the organization is determined to make as much money as ungodly possible, even at the expense of some of their long-standing integrity pillars, like the name of their ballpark.

I can’t hate the pursuit of money too much, because I kind of understand the rich’s obsessions with getting richer, and the success of the Dodgers won’t last forever, so it’s not the worst idea in the world for all the people in charge of the organization trying to amass as much wealth as possible while the getting’s good, and considering the team is on the hook for like $1.3 billion in payroll to cover for the next 20 years, it’s not a bad idea for the team to build as much of a cushion as they can, all while all the stuffy white guys on whatever board of directors or investors can still get their nut too with others to pay.

But with Uniqlo joining companies like Daiso, Nippon Air, Yakult, it just feeds to overwhelming narrative that the Dodgers don’t so much belong to Los Angeles as much as they belong to the entire country of Japan, and I can’t help but wonder what the heavily Chicano population that actually attends Dodgers games on the regular feels about it.  Probably not negative while the team is still on top of the league, but I look forward to seeing how salty people get when the Dodgers will inevitably feel the pressure of a closing contention window, and hopefully one day feels what it’s like to have to go into rebuilding and have to eat some losing seasons.

I imagine the salt that comes from the rapidly abandoning ships of the Dodgers bandwagon will be an especial delicacy, but that probably won’t happen for quite a long time; but it will inevitably happen, because no team stays on top forever.