Not what I was hoping would happen

Obviously, Blake Snell wasn’t going to stay unemployed forever, regardless of how funny I would have found it if he did go unsigned, because the San Francisco Giants were the team that blinked, and signed Balakey to a two-year deal, worth $62 million dollars.

I do take satisfaction that the money-grubbing Balakey and his money-grubbing uber-agent Scott Boras were denied in getting the long-term, fuck-you-money deal they were obviously hoping to get, but the fact of the matter is that Balakey is still hoovering up a wildly high $31M a year, and from what I understand, he does have an opt-out clause, which means that this is really more like a 1/$31M deal, because Balakey is undoubtedly going to try and pitch his ass off again so he can opt-out and try against next winter, but will also have the safety net of $31M more dollars from San Francisco should he get hurt, or realize that he’s not as good as people think he is and phones it in and prepares to try again in 2025.

It does just suck though, that an obvious money-grubber like Balakey Snell actually is going to make coin, because I am not a fan of such obvious money-grubbers.  I know that everyone is out for themselves, but at least try to pretend like you give a shit about the team, the city, the fans, or community.  Do some public appearances, read books to kids at schools, volunteer at the local grocery stores or something.  Instead, Balakey goes home and streams video games, while airing out his grievances over how he thinks he’s underpaid when he gets to throw a baseball for a living.

Whatever though, Balakey going to the Giants means he’s going to a team that I already like to root against, and despite the fact that they’re the team that signed Korean superstar Lee Jung-hoo, it’s nice to know I can consolidate my want to see the Giants not succeed, with wanting to see Balakey not perform well enough to warrant getting the big money contract he’s hoping to get.

Switching gears though, if there was anyone who didn’t believe that there’s a Colin Kaepernick-like collusion blacklisting of Trevor Bauer, the signing of Balakey all but solidifies its existence, because we’ve just watched a team commit $62 million dollars for a pitcher that is debatably comparable to Trevor Bauer, who has been shouting on the rooftops that he’s willing to play for the league minimum $740,000.

I hate to sound like I’m the world’s biggest Trevor Bauer fan; I admit that I am a fan of him as a pitcher and some of his personal idiosyncrasies, and I was disappointed when his name was associated with a sexual assault.  But I also know that he was absolved of the accusation that got him blacklisted in the first place, and I would like to see him get a second chance in the Majors, because he’s obviously good enough to hang still, and frankly, what I’m finding the most obnoxious aspect of the blacklisting is how every single team has their own history of embarrassments when it comes to housing players with abuse accusations and actual charges, so there’s just something so hypocritical of the entire league colluding to blacklist one guy like this.

I know that there are still several accusations still pending, but call me crazy, but I do believe in the whole innocent until proven guilty thing, and frankly Bauer himself has said that if a team wants to cut him after taking a flyer, they can cut him at-will, but the man just wants a chance to demonstrate that he can still get the job done in the majors.  Let the man pitch, maybe go 4-1, and if it turns out that at one of these future hearings, something comes out that he really is an abuser, than cut him.  It wouldn’t be any worse than Jose Reyes, Aroldis Chapman or Marcell Ozuna getting busted for violence against women but still getting to keep their jobs.

No matter though.  It’s not like I’m actually going to watch a tremendous amount of baseball this season, and frankly the jury’s out on whether or not I’ll actually watch a single full game this year, seeing as how I haven’t done that since like the 2020 playoffs, so when the day is over, I still really don’t care.  But I would like to see Balakey struggle, and despite my optimism that some team would eventually get desperate and pull the trigger on Trevor Bauer, things are looking less and less likely.  Although I definitely wouldn’t mind being incorrect on the latter, because I would like to see Trevor Bauer get another opportunity to pitch in the majors, plus I think he’s better than Balakey.

Angel Hernandez already in mid-season form

..is the obvious line that 80% of the vested internet has utilized in some shape or form, but honestly there’s really no better way to explain how MLB’s best-worst umpire managed to eject a player, twice, in a single Spring Training game.

In short, St. Louis Cardinals pitcher Lance Lynn is ejected from a no-stakes spring training game for daring to have the audacity to question the strike zone of the routinely worst-rated umpire in MLB, Angel Hernandez.  Angel, who is as soft as airport single-ply toilet paper, demonstrates his constitution by throwing out a veteran player from a meaningless Spring Training game, instead of perhaps laughing or having a little fun in a game that does not matter.

Obviously, a fat veteran like Lance Lynn probably couldn’t care any less, but understands that he still had a job to do on the day, which was to throw a set amount of pitches, as part of some Spring Training throwing routine he’s probably utilized forever, considering he in his 13th MLB season, so instead of hitting the showers early, he trudges over to the bullpen to get his throwing done.  Apparently Angel Hernandez saw an opportunity to phish out some more attention, so instead of letting a dead horse lie, he flexes on Lynn some more, and demands that he also leave the bullpen and get the fuck off his field outright.

At this point, it’s apparent that Lynn is annoyed, and that’s probably the intent that Angel wanted, and it probably annoyed the piss out of him that Lynn didn’t seem to care about getting the hook from the game, but now that he’s going to have to go out of his way to finish his work or cut it short outright, it is rightfully an annoyance, and that’s obviously what Angel wanted to get out of him, because it really is what Angel Hernandez lives for.

This is all just hilarious because every baseball fan and their mothers all know that Spring Training games don’t count for shit, and are nothing but ceremonial cash grabs for MLB teams to rake in tourism dollars, while players and personnel get glorified paid practice time.  Sure, umpires need a little time too, to perhaps iron out any modifications in the rule book, see real-time use of the updated pitch clock, but the strike zone is something that is for all intents and purposes, unchanged from year to year, minus the personal subjectivity that every individual umpire has.

Angel Hernandez tossing anyone out, much less once, is a testament to just how soft the guy is, and just how much he craves and seeks and does whatever it takes to garner attention onto himself, regardless of just how much he vehemently denies doing such.  There are reasons why he’s pretty much the most well-known umpire in the game, and for all the wrong reasons, and it’s always a redundant question every season how he somehow manages to have a job year in and year out.

Much probably has to do with the long-standing, reoccurring lawsuit he has against his own employers, citing racial discrimination, and the sheer headache that MLB probably wants to avoid by keeping him employed versus the mountains of litigation he’d bring down on the league if they were ever to fire him.  It’s like he’s basically holding a gun to the head of MLB to ensure that he maintains his employment, no matter how grossly unqualified he is to keep it.

No matter, it’s not that I really care about this so much as it’s just ironically funny whenever Angel Hernandez’s name gets brought up.  Usually it’s not happening in the springtime unless it pertains to his lawsuit, but in Angel’s world, there’s no time that shouldn’t be Angel’s time, so it really shouldn’t be a surprise that if there was going to be one noteworthy ejection that happened in Spring Training, of course it was going to be done by Angel Hernandez.

#TRYHARDSZN2024

Feels like it’s starting earlier than usual: two South Fulton teenagers accepted into 63 and 50 colleges respectively, trying really hard to not humble brag about it

It’s apparently already started, that time of year, in which throughout the country there are overachieving high school seniors who begin announcing, as loudly as they can on social media, just how many colleges they have been accepted to.  Some aim for the stars and only go for the cream of the crop like just the Ivy Leagues, and usually upper echelon schools like MIT, Johns Hopkins and Stanford, and then there are others who just apply for every school under the sun, as if there were no such thing as application fees.

And once the acceptances start rolling in, if the number is impressive enough, then onto the internets they go, boasting-not-boasting and humble bragging about how many schools they’ve been accepted into, with the hopes that some media outlet catches wind of it and puts any sort of spotlight onto them at all.

Of course, it can’t be ignored the dollar amounts of all these scholarships love to be extrapolated and added together, so that there can be somewhat of a tangible number to implement a degree of success and value of their accomplishments as a whole, and regardless of if and when they inevitably choose to go to whichever school is giving a full ride, no matter how lesser-heralded it may be, doesn’t change the fact that they put themselves into a position where they could brag about how many schools, simply said yes, you may attend our prestigious institution of higher education if you are willing to pay our egregious costs for credit hours, books, boarding and other bullshit expenditures.

But let’s get #TRYHARDSZN2024 off with a bang, with these two teens in my old stomping grounds of South Fulton county, which is the area’s PC way of lumping together the hood sections of the Southwestern region of the Metro Atlanta area.  But despite the fact that when watching the video in the article, there appears to be a whole legion of tryhards that have been accepted into 10-15+ colleges, these two particular teens who have hit 63 and 50 acceptances get the spotlight as being the biggest tryhards of the tryhards.

Sure, most of the schools that I was able to catch in the article are mostly smaller school, HBCUs, and schools nobody has really ever heard of, there were some notable Power-5 schools that have shown interest in them like Michigan State, Iowa, Kansas, Oregon and Mississippi State to name a few. 

Continue reading “#TRYHARDSZN2024”

Does nobody move for ‘excuse me’ anymore?

During my last family trip, I observed a noticeable amount of instances where saying ‘excuse me’ to people, resulted in absolutely no response at all.  And it’s not like I’m taking any off-path routes to get from point A to B to C, I’m talking about very general, public and heavy-traffic walkways or paths, where people clog up traffic, I want to get around them, and they have the space to move elsewhere, but for whatever selfish reason, they exist in the way.

I say excuse me, in a normal, neutral tone, and in some instances, people glanced over at me, and in other either people pretended like they couldn’t hear me, or proceeded to completely no-sell the fuck out of me.  It’s at this point, I say excuse me in a louder, more insistent tone and this usually does the trick to get them to acknowledge my existence, and when I usually just proceed to move at them, will they actually move.

It’s not like I was walking by myself in most cases, and could just as alternatively take longer, wider routes to avoid being close to people in the first place.  In most of these cases, I’m wheeling a stroller, luggage, or, in a rush carrying a toddler that needs to go to the bathroom, but for whatever reason it is, it just felt like a conspicuously high number of instances where it just seems like people have dropped common courtesy of moving the fuck out of the way when people say excuse me.

And when I have to repeat myself, louder and more hostile sounding, all these cocksuckers look at me like I’m the asshole for trying to get somewhere, where they’re the conceited selfish shitheads blocking walkways and thinking their inane conversations or needs are higher priority than others.

It’s not lost on me that this is sounding like an old man yelling at the sky kind of rant, but what’s really wrong with hoping that people have common decency to continue honoring the simple and basic human interaction of moving out of the way when someone says excuse me?  It’s not like I’m barreling through with the intention of initiating contact and shoving people out of the way, I’m simply alerting people that I need to get around them, and to pardon any potential contact and give them a heads up to move if they can.  Fuck me, right??

Anthony Rendon is hilariously unbelievable

lol: Angels third baseman, Anthony Rendon, goes on the record, opining that the baseball season is too long and that it should be shortened

We got to shorten the season, man,” Rendon said. “There’s too many dang games–162 games in 185 days or whatever it is. Man. No. We gotta shorten this bad boy up. Let’s go.

Here’s why this quote from this particular player is amusing for all the wrong reasons: Anthony Rendon hasn’t played even 60 games a season, much less close to 162 games, in four straight years.  Granted, 2020 was the COVID-shortened season, but between 2021-2023, he’s played in just a diminutive 30% of games that the Angels have had.

Furthermore, he’s halfway through a contract that’s paying him $245M over seven years and it’s safe to say that he’s basically already on the hall of fame of worst free agent contracts in baseball history.  To say that he’s been a bust is an understatement, the guy has been ducking his job as if his job were to avoid playing in baseball games by any means necessary.  He’s been mysteriously injured for the last four years with no real understanding to what’s been ailing him, and he even got himself suspended for a week, when he got involved with a heckler in Oakland.

As many internet comedians have pointed out, he shortens his own season anyway, so it seems redundant that he’d put himself in the line of fire like this in the first place.  But I think my favorite observation was one that I had myself, that basically nobody seems to hate the game that has made him a gozillionaire, more than Anthony Rendon:

Love something as much as Anthony Rendon hates baseball

The man is truly unbelievable.  I feel for the Angels, because between losing Ohtani, they’re stuck with an albatross like Rendon, who clearly has phoned in his career at this point, and will stick around nursing injuries and pretending like he can’t play for the remainder of his deal, and after banking $245M bones, I don’t even think he’s going to bother doing the thing where he starts trying to play hard again within the last two years of his deal, so that he could possibly try to position himself to getting another big contract.  He’ll be 35 and 36 in the final years of his contract, and considering he already hates playing baseball right now, there’s absolutely no way he’s going to try and stick with a job he hates so much in 2-3 years.

Walgreens is basically the GameStop of drugstores now

I know this comparison needs a lot of fleshing out, but once my mind formulated this comparison, the ball started rolling faster and faster, and as has lately been the trend of process for me, if it makes it past a certain point, then I pop it off to my main friends group chat, and if things flesh out a little bit more, it sticks on my brain, or I feel like I haven’t tapped into this topic any further, it becomes a brog post; whenever it is that I actually have the time to write anymore that is.

But I was tasked with going to a specific location, as mythical wife got confirmation that they had what she needed, and that I could pick it up when the pharmacy opened at 9 am the following day.  I get to the pharmacy at 9:04 am, and already get attitude from the pharmacist working the counter, first fucking thing in the morning.  Turns out that they didn’t have the prescription ready, and when I explained that I had gotten a confirmation that they had it, I got a quick rebuttal about how he wasn’t there last night, unsurprisingly.

I wait for a few minutes for him to contact another store, and thankfully another location (allegedly) has it, but my morning’s schedule is already thrown off, and I’ll have to be late for something else in order to squeeze in a trip to the other location, after a virtual work meeting and kids’ school thing I need to see first, that I’m already going to be concurrently.

It dawns on me when I get to the parking lot of my kids’ school that Walgreens has basically become the GameStop of the drugstore landscape, because much like GameStop was mostly the last man standing between companies like FuncoLand, Babbages, Electronics Boutiques and all the big box retailers that have died or are still in the process of dying, Walgreens is very much one of the only survivors left, at least here in Atlanta, where every Eckerd and Rite-Aid have gone under, with only CVS really left to oppose them. 

And in my specific area, there are like two Walgreens for every CVS, and much like going to a GameStop, the takeaway from the experience is almost always negative afterward.  Like bringing a box of old console games, and getting offered $15 in store credit, every time you walk into a Walgreens for a prescription, either they don’t have it, they don’t have all of it, haven’t gotten to it, or are determined to service six cars in drive-thru before entertaining the thought of helping a live human being in the store.

Much like GameStop, Walgreens’ prices are inflated and almost feeling exploitative, mostly because they really want you to sign up for their rewards/customer info tracking programming in order to have a chance to get some more digestible costs.

I know I’m not giving a tremendous amount of examples here, but the bottom line is that both of these companies continue to survive and exist, solely because of their general lack of competition, and the fact that they’re the only ones really surviving where their wares can be acquired in hand quicker than an Amazon Prime order.  But having to deal with either company  makes me feel like I’d prefer a kick in the balls first, and if it could be helped, I would much rather seek an alternative before resorting to them at all.  And when you go to either, you just know it won’t be a smooth experience, and walking out of them only will breed resentment and disappointment.

Sometimes there is no funnier reality television than the NBA

Somehow true: Portland Trail Blazers center Deandre Ayton misses game due to being unable to get to the arena on account of icy weather conditions

I’ve been following sports for pretty much all of my entire lucid life, and in all those years, this is honestly the first time that I’ve ever heard of a scenario where a player basically called out due to the weather.  This is the kind of shit that a college student says when they don’t want to get up for an 8 am class, or a shitty American babysitter says when they’re checked out.

But an NBA player?  Especially one who’s making $32M to play fucking basketball?  Mind blown.

Like, I’m sure because he’s mega rich, he lives a little bit in seclusion, because that’s what rich people tend to like to do.  And I know Portland is a weird place, in terms of people, as well as geography, and they’re kind of subject to the shitty weather conditions that afflict Seattle and the rest of the Pacific Northwest, but you’d think a go-zillionaire like an NBA player like Deandre Ayton would have some sort of contingency plan for icy roads.

Honestly, it’s not entirely on the player too, the team itself could’ve taken better preparation for this, like putting up him and other players in a baller hotel right near the arena or something if there was any indication that the weather was going to go tits up on game day.

Imagine if something like this occurred in the MJ era of the NBA?  Ayton would be destroyed by a Charles Oakley type of veteran meat mountain, on his own team as well as opponent.  Guys like Alonzo Mourning or Karl Malone would be all up his ass crack, giving him shit for having the audacity to miss a game due to icy roads.  He must live at Castle Black or something and the Kingsroad was just too coated with northern ice or something.

Whatever though, unsurprisingly the best part of this whole situation is the backlash it’s gotten on the internet, and when people collectively get mad at something, the clowns occasionally deliver some hilarious observations.  I think my favorites that I’ve seen so far are:

Pretty funny the Trail Blazers of all teams could not blaze a trail for DeAndre Ayton.

And then there was this one that is clearly familiar with Ayton’s game in general, and spun his joke to hilarious effect:

I realize Ayton couldn’t drive to the game, but perhaps he could have done several spin moves, each taking him slightly further from the rim to the game.

In all fairness though, as critical I feel towards the situation and carte blanche to criticize, I have to admit that sometimes, there’s fewer things more entertaining than the bullshit that comes from the NBA players themselves.  Between the Pistons trying their best to become the de facto worst team in league history, and clowns like Ayton calling out due to black guys ice, I can’t say I’ve paid more attention to the NBA in a long time.