Cup of Coffee: April 25, 2024

Good morning! And welcome to Free Thursday!

And away we go . . .

And That Happened 

Here are the scores. Here are the highlights:

Cardinals 5, Diamondbacks 1: Kyle Gibson allowed one run over six, Lars Nootbaar drove in two, Nolan Arenado singled in a run as the Cards bounced back from Tuesday night’s shellacking. Oli Marmol explained the bounceback: “It was just a bad game yesterday as far as the final score. They showed up today ready to go. We take it one game at a time.” Takin’ ‘em one day at a time. Makes you think, man.

Mets 8, Giants 2: Francisco Lindor hit a pair of two-run homers, Tyrone Taylor homered and hit a two-run double, and Jeff McNeil had an RBI single as New York snapped a three-game skid.

Orioles 6, Angels 5: Mike Trout hit his tenth home run on the year — no one has that many — and the Angels rallied from being down 6-0 to make it close in the ninth but . . . lost. Replay didn’t help them as Jo Adell attempted to steal second in the final frame, was called out, and a review upheld that call despite the fact that he appeared to have gotten in there. Might’ve changed things, might not have, but the Angels were sore about it. Gunnar Henderson had three hits and three RBI. Adley Rutschman had two hits and an RBI. The O’s have won four of five, the Angels have lost five of six.

Red Sox 8, Guardians 0: Two Wong Dongs — homers from Connor Wong, obvs — and a homer from a back-from-injury Rafael Devers set the pace. Wong also had an RBI single. Wilyer Abreu had four hits and drove in a run and Cooper Criswell and two relievers tossed a four-hit shutout.

Brewers 3, Pirates 2: I’m too lazy to check but I feel like the Brewers have been involved in more games which finished 3-2 than any other team this year. Like, all their games are 3-2. And if that’s not actually true, know that it is true cosmically speaking. The Brewers scored all three of their runs in the third. One was via a bases-loaded walk and one was via a bases-loaded hit by pitch. The third one was boring.

Dodgers 11, Nationals 2: Dodgers batters rattled off 20 hits and Dodgers pitchers retired the final 22 batters they faced. Mookie Betts, Shohei Ohtani, Freddie Freeman, and Gavin Lux each drove in two. Betts and Will Smith each had four hits. Ohtani had three doubles. Andy Pages hit what was, surprisingly, the only Dodgers homer of the night. Dodgers go for the sweep this afternoon.

Rays 7, Tigers 5: The Rays led by three then trailed by one, tied it up and then Curtis Mead hit a two-run homer to close out a three-run sixth. Tampa Bay snaps a three-game losing streak and avoids a three-game sweep.

Yankees 7, Athletics 3: Homers from Aaron Judge and Anthony Rizzo and an RBI triple by Anthony Volpe gave the Bombers a 5-0 lead by the fifth. A Juan Soto homer and a couple of other highlights later and that was that. Judge’s homer in the first was almost a gift. He took what looked to be called strike three to end the inning but the umpire said A’s pitcher Joe Boyle had balked, so the runner advanced and Judge got another pitch. Then, blammo.

Reds 7, Phillies 4: Will Benson homered, Santiago Espinal singled home two as part of a four-run sixth and drove in another run with a sacrifice fly in the seventh. Cincinnati starter Nick Lodolo was solid enough. Reds reliever Fernando Cruz came in with one out in the seventh and stranded Phillies runners on second and third to put the kibosh on a rally.

Atlanta 4, Marlins 3: A two-run error in the ninth allowed the Marlins to tie things up and stave off defeat, but only for an inning, as Michael Harris II doubled home the Manfred Man on only the second pitch of the bottom of the tenth. Miami had a chance to score themselves in the top of the tenth but A.J. Minter struck out Jazz Chisolm Jr. with the bases loaded and two outs to end the would-be rally.

Twins 6, White Sox 3: Willi Castro, who turned 27 yesterday, hit a three-run homer in the second to help stake the Twins to an early 4-0 lead and Max Kepler was a part of two more runs scoring in the fifth, knocking one in with a single and scoring the second on a wild pitch. The Sox have lost six straight and 12 of 13. And, hell, for that matter, 21 of 24.

Cubs 4, Astros 3: Dansby Swanson, who did not turn 27 yesterday, hit a three-run homer in the first to help stake the Cubs to an early 4-0 lead. That was all Chicago would get in the game but it was all they’d need. Jameson Taillon was solid into the sixth, scattering seven hits and allowing just two. The Astros have lost four in a row and seven of eight.

Royals 3, Blue Jays 2: Maikel Garcia and Salvador Perez each had two hits and an RBI and a team pitching effort from the Royals kept the Jays bats at bay. Toronto has scored just seven runs in the last three games. Two of those games were 3-2 losses, so maybe I’m my Brewers 3-2 thesis from above may be really wrong. Forget I said anything.

Rangers 5, Mariners 1: Adolis García and Evan Carter hit back-to-back home runs in the fourth and Carter hit a triple to drive home García in the seventh. Texas had also scored twice in the sixth when Jonah Heim singled and Mitch Haniger committed a two-base error. The Mariners, meanwhile, left nine runners on base and were 1 for 11 with runners in scoring position. Corey Seager left the game following the seventh inning after being hit by a pitch on the shin. They’re saying contusion, though Bruce Bochy said he didn’t know if Seager would would play today.

Padres 5, Rockies 2: An early four-spot set the tone and Padres starter Matt Waldron gave up one run in six innings. Xander Bogaerts had three hits and Ha-Seong Kim and Jackson Merrill had two RBI. From the AP gamer I learned that that this was the 25th straight game to start this season in which the Rockies have trailed at some point and that they’re only the second team to do that in the modern era. The only other team to do it was the 1910 St. Louis Browns. That team went 47-104-4 — ties would be fun, eh? — and had a guy named “Sled Allen” on the team. You don’t run into a lot of guys named Sled these days.

The Daily Briefing

Cody Bellinger has a rib fracture 

I said in the recaps yesterday that Cody Bellinger left Tuesday night’s Cubs game due to bruised ribs. Strike that. Intensify it:

In related news, the first time I ever saw Wrigley Field was in a 1970s baseball book I got from the school library in which there was a photo of, I wanna say Roberto Clemente, crashing into the ivy to make a catch with a bad grimace on his face. Even little elementary school Craigy thought to himself “aren’t there supposed to be pads or something on the wall?” Nearly 45 years later the answer to that remains: “well, there should be, but ivy is pretty so we’re just not gonna do that.”

Cardinals demote Jordan Walker 

The St. Louis Cardinals have demoted outfielder Jordan Walker and lefty Zack Thompson to Triple-A Memphis. Infielder José Fermín and lefty John King were called up.

Walker, 21, was a top-five overall prospect last year and had a pretty solid rookie season, batting .276/.342/.445 (114 OPS+) with 16 homers and 51 RBI. This year, however, he’s batting just .155/.239/.259 (41 OPS+) with no home runs, four RBI in 20 games. At the time of demotion he was on a 3-for-27 slump over his previous 11 games.

Walker is not the only Cardinal hitter not hitting, but he’s been the worst everyday player, he’s the youngest everyday player, and he has options so it makes sense that they sent him down.

Giants put Blake Snell on the injured list 

Blake Snell was slated to start for the Giants yesterday afternoon but that didn’t happen: he was placed on the 15-day injured list with a left adductor strain. Ryan Walker made his first start of the season against the New York Mets in Snell’s place, though he was just a one-inning opener in what turned out to be a bullpen game.

Snell is 0-3 with an 11.57 ERA(35 ERA+) and has allowed 18 hits in 11 and two-thirds innings worth of work over three starts. Those numbers would make a lot more sense if he was hurt.

Red Sox place Brayan Bello on the IL

Sticking with injured pitcher news, the Boston Red Sox placed righty Brayan Bello on the 15-day shelf, retroactive to April 21, with right lat tightness. Sox reporters passed along word yesterday that the team doesn’t think it’s super serious, though, and that they expect him to come right back off of it when the 15 days are up.

Bello, 24, is 31 with a 3.04 ERA (137 ERA+) with a K/BB ratio of 26/7 in 26.2 innings across five starts.

Former minor league umpire sues MLB, alleges he was fired for complaining about homophobic harassment from female umpire

Out Sports reports that a fired minor league umpire sued Major League Baseball yesterday, claiming he was sexually harassed by a female umpire and discriminated against because he is male and bisexual.

The plaintiff is Brandon Cooper, who worked in the minor league Arizona Complex League last year. His suit claims that a fellow umpire, Gina Quartararo, learned that Cooper was bisexual and derided him with homophobic slurs and other crude remarks and, on one occasion, shoved him. He alleges that that when he complained to Major League Baseball his concerns were ignored, that he was told to go to sensitivity training and that he was subsequently fired despite what he claimed to be excellent evaluations.

Cooper also claims that Major League Baseball employs an illegal affirmative action/quota system for umpire promotion and alleges that “to date there has never been a woman who has worked in a (regular) season game played in the majors, and most umpires are still Caucasian men. To try to fix its gender and racial diversity issue, defendants have implemented an illegal diversity quota requiring that women be promoted regardless of merit." He says that Quartararo bragged to him that ““MLB has to hire females, they won’t get rid of me unless I quit.”

Out Sports spoke with Cooper and you can read his comments at the linked article. MLB has not issued any statement. Quartararo was not named a party to the suit.

Other Stuff

Where we are right now

No matter how much one disagrees with what any group of protesters stands for, a public official ordering the arrest of peaceful protestors precisely because of the substance of their position — or what he disingenuously claims to be the substance of their position — which Abbott clearly communicated above, is blatantly illegal and is morally wrong. This is shameful and it is dangerous. It is leaps and bounds beyond the sorts of imaginary horribles conservatives like Abbott routinely claim to be violations of First Amendment rights.

There is a real hunger on the part of a great many people in power to brutalize protesters — and media covering protests — and to stifle dissent based solely on its substance. It’s the sort of thing that well inevitably lead to Kent State-style violence. The scariest thing: if and when that does happen, a great many people in this country will cheer it.

More legal problems for the MAGA gang

An Arizona grand jury indicted former Donald Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, attorneys Rudy Giuliani, Jenna Ellis, John Eastman and three others for trying to subvert the results of the 2020 election in that state and award the state’s electoral votes to Trump instead of Joe Biden after the 2020 election. A bunch of state officials were also charged with various other crimes in connection with the scheme to steal the state.

Arizona’s AG did not attempt to indict Trump himself in this but, really, he’s more likely to get convictions, and faster, without doing so while sending a strong message to anyone who tries to pull this sort of shit again.

And really, that’s the most important thing here. Trump may or may not lose again this fall, but either way it will probably be close and Trump will no doubt try to do what he was unable to do in 2024 and subvert democracy. But with a clear message now being sent by multiple states that “if you help him, your ass is gonna be in the jackpot” it’s hard to see who is gonna sign pleadings and certifications or organize conference calls to make it all happen. There are always ambitious people with no scruples floating around, but how many of them are gonna risk it all for a wannabe autocrat who will be long dead by the time they get out of jail and get their law licenses back, if indeed they ever do?

As for cases in which Trump actually is on trial, things seem to be going great:

I appreciate that there is a cultish element in Trump’s base which will never abandon him, but there are also people who have supported him because they get off on tax cuts and because he hates the same people that they do, generally speaking. Not all of them are ride-or-dies and at some point their other prejudices will come into play.

One of the big prejudices, even if no one will admit to it, is most people’s belief that almost every person who goes on trial is likely guilty and is probably a bad person. Or, as Michael Tae Sweeney put it yesterday on BlueSky:

In this case it happens to be true of course, but that’s beside the point. The point is that a great many people who tend to lean Republican but who aren’t fanatics about Donald Trump are seeing him sitting at the defendant’s table, looking absolutely miserable while he’s forced to keep his mouth shut day after day. That’s a long way from a rally where he gets off a few zingers at the expense of that bitch Hillary and I suspect it’s gonna do more to erode his support than a lot of people are prepared to believe. Maybe it won’t result in Biden’s numbers going way up but it’ll hurt Trump as a fair number of people will stay home rather than vote for the skeezy guy who pays off porn stars.

I get it, but . . .

A new study published last month in the Sports Management Review revealed that watching sports over time can change our brain structure for the better. It says that watching sports significantly enhances physical and mental well-being.

I approvingly cited earlier studies to this effect in my book about fandom a couple of years ago but both then and now I merely accept the findings intellectually. Based on my interaction with most fans I remain convinced, to my bones, that sports pumps toxic humours into our very souls, profoundly immiserating us and preventing us from rising above “ennui” as a baseline emotional state.

Unless our teams win. Then they’re awesome!

Ok, sure

The Chicago Tribune reported yesterday that the Bears want to build a new $4.6 billion lakefront stadium with half of that money coming from the taxpayers, even if they claimed in a press conference later in the day that, no, it’s totally a free lunch for taxpayers. $3.2 billion of that money would be for building the new stadium itself and another $1.4 billion would be dedicated to infrastructure improvements around and outside the stadium. Left uncommented upon is why a stadium might cost the same as your average nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, but maybe that’s just the Chicago Way.

In addition to asking for the public financing, the Bears want to refinance the debt from the previous publicly-financed improvements to Soldier Field which still have not been paid for due to shortfalls in revenue that were projected at the time that deal was done. This puts me in mind of Ippei Mizuhara asking his bookie for another bump. The Bears are really bad at this, but they still want more! They’re good for it, they swear!

I get that the Bears are the most important game in town and that the White Sox are the least important pro sports team in the city, but given that the State of Illinois so quickly laughed off Jerry Reinsdorf when he asked for less than half of that for a new ballpark mere weeks ago I cannot see the state entertaining this at all. Indeed, a little while after this report came out the governor said “I remain skeptical about this proposal. I'm not sure that this is among the highest priorities for taxpayers.” As for the city:

I’m guessing the Bears don’t put this out there unless they think they have at least a puncher’s chance of making it happen, but such a project would represent the most irresponsible use of public money for sports imaginable. That’d be the case based on the size of the ask alone — no city or even state can responsibly spare $2.3 billion for such a handout — but also because the Bears aren’t going anywhere and everyone knows it. Maybe they head out to the suburbs, but they aren’t going to leave the Chicagoland area, ever. There is absolutely no risk of them fucking off to Austin, Oklahoma City, or London if they are told no.

So tell them no, Chicago/Cook County/Illinois. If the Bears want a new playground, let ‘em build it themselves.

A contender emerges

I used to talk a lot about, one day, taking advantage of the fact that I can work from anywhere that has an Internet connection and moving out of the country. Impossible-to-circumvent immigration restrictions make feeding my Anglophilia a non-starter, but readers who have been around a bit will recall me musing about The Netherlands or Portugal due to the relative ease with which someone possessed of my basic life circumstances can settle there.

I haven’t talked much about that of late because, for various personal/family reasons, my basic life circumstances aren’t really great for such a thing at the moment. But nor have I set the notion aside. It could still happen, even if it might be a couple of years before it makes sense. As we wait, I keep my eye on the horizon for new contenders. Such as:

Like most digital nomad visas, if you stay a year and keep your nose clean and your paperwork in order it can renew for four more years at which point you can become a permanent resident or a citizen.

Pros:

• It’s fucking Italy;

• My kids, through their mother’s family, are eligible for ancestry-based Italian citizenship if they want it, so if they wanted to join me they could do so;

• My ex-wife’s half-sister and her family are natives who live about an hour outside of Venice. I like them a great deal and, given that they have remained Facebook friends with me and sometimes like my pictures and things, I do not think they hold the divorce against me. Which means, hey, I’d know some people there. And her husband is a doctor, and that could come in handy!

• I’m not on a trust fund, my parents would not be desperately seeking my return, and thus they would not send a sociopathic conman after me who will try to kill me and assume my identity;

• Even if I’m wrong about the previous item, digital technology and security make “Pulling a Tom Ripley,” as we say in the prospective ex-pat world, pretty much impossible, so it’s safe.

Cons:

• Italy is currently run by a far right, fascist-friendly party and that’s certainly not good. Of course it’s Italy and nothing is ever really done efficiently there, so their modern implementation of fascism may be less scary than when someone more competent than Trump gives it a go here. Not that I really feel like chancing that;

• In that same vein: based on my experiences there — including one wonderful afternoon when every single person who lived in my sister-in-law’s apartment building came out into the stairwell to enthusiastically cheer and celebrate because the cable guy actually showed up for once — I feel like I’d have a hard time getting my mind around just how difficult it can be to access basic services in a country that would much rather sit, drink espresso, and talk about how all of the basic services are hard to manage than actually fix said basic services. I’m not saying I’m the most type-A person in the world and that I demand the utmost in efficiency, but I am an American and compared to most Italians I have known, that would make me a type-A++++. They will all, of course, live longer than me because they are way better at picking their battles than most Americans are.

• Despite the name Calcaterra, I am not Italian by blood and, though I know a great deal about actual day-to-day, non-touristy life and culture there due to my ex-in-laws, people will assume based on my name that I can speak the language or that I know more than I do and that’d be a hassle. Like, the last time I was there, in the space of just a few days, five or six people saw my name on my credit card or a reservation or whatever and said “Oh, Calcaterra!” at which point they began to speak incomprehensible Italian to me until they could tell I was lost. If anything, I’d rather be assumed to be a dumb American because they at least take pity on you for that in most places. Not France, of course, but most other places.

I’m sure there are more things I could add to this list. The Netherlands may still be more my speed, however, and if the UK ever does do a digital nomad thing I’d jump at that in a second. But I wanted to throw this link into the old archive for when I finally get around to thinking harder about such things in a few years.

Have a great day everyone.