Cup of Coffee: August 22, 2024

Good morning! And welcome to Free Thursday!

And away we go.

And That Happened 

Here are the scores. Here are the highlights:

Mets 4, Orioles 3: Mets starter Sean Manaea retired the first 17 batters he faced en route to seven+ innings of three-run ball, Francisco Lindor homered in the third, and Mark Vientos put New York ahead 3-2 with a solo homer in the seventh before the O’s tied it up in the eighth. Then Jesse Winker, pinch hitting for Harrison Bader, led off the bottom of the ninth with a walkoff homer and the most emphatic home run celebration I think we’ve seen from anyone all year:

Afterwards someone on the Citi Field production team put this up on the video board:

Sounds like it was a hell of a fun day at the old ballpark. The Mets take two of three.

Red Sox 4, Astros 1: Justin Verlander came off the IL to make his first start in a dog’s age. And it wasn’t bad, as he gave up two runs in five innings. Unfortunately for him, the only offense the Astros mustered all day was an Alex Bregman solo homer in the first. Boston used seven pitchers to scatter eight hits and allow just one run while Ceddanne Rafaela hit two RBI doubles and David Hamilton hit a solo shot. Boston takes two of three from Houston.

Rangers 1, Pirates 0: Andrew Heaney pitched five shutout innings and four relievers finished an eight-hitter with 16 combined strikeouts. It was still 0-0 heading into the bottom of the ninth but Texas strung together three hits off of David Bednar with Wyatt Langford hitting a walkoff RBI single. I’d say “tough luck no-decision for Pirates starter Domingo Germán (6 IP, 0 ER)” but screw that dude.

White Sox 6, Giants 2: It was 2-2 when the ninth began, but after a couple of men reached Korey Lee hit a tie-breaking two-run single and then Lenyn Sosa did the same thing to make it a four-run inning. Giants batters struck out 12 times.

Nationals 6, Rockies 1: Mitchell Parker allowed one over seven and Luis García Jr. hit a three run jack that gave the Nats a 5-0 lead by the third. After that there wasn’t much else to do.

Diamondbacks 10, Marlins 8: Lourdes Gurriel Jr. drove in four runs, including a go-ahead, pinch-hit three-run double in the seventh and Jake McCarthy and Geraldo Perdomo homered as the Dbacks sweep the Fish. Arizona is now 31-13 since July 1, which is better than everyone.

Twins 11, Padres 4: Padres starter Matt Waldron’s knuckler didn’t knuckle and het got lit the F up for 10 runs. He’s allowed 22 runs in his past three starts, actually, so he’s having a hell of a go at it lately. Matt Wallner’s three-run homer was the big hit in Minnesota’s big seven-run fourth inning which came amidst an 18-hit attack which helped the Twins avoid being swept.

Yankees 8, Guardians 1: The Aaron Judge/Juan Soto show as Judge hit two homers and drove in three and Soto homered and hit a bases-clearing double and drove in five. Nestor Cortes didn’t need eight runs given that he shut Cleveland out on three hits over seven. Judge has six homers over his last nine games which is nice and has 47 on the year, which puts him on pace for 60 again.

Reds 11, Blue Jays 7: Toronto had a 6-0 lead after three and got outscored 11-1 the rest of the way. Elly De La Cruz homered and stole his 60th base on the season. Spencer Steer hit a two-run homer and Noelvi Marte and Jonathan India each went deep. “Anytime you can score 11 unanswered is usually a good thing,” Reds catcher Tyler Stephenson said after the game. Hey, Stephenson: you stick to playing and leave the in depth analysis to the experts, OK? But yeah.

Phillies 3, Atlanta 2: Brandon Marsh hit a tie-breaking, pinch-hit sacrifice fly in the eighth. Kyle Schwarber and Trea Turner each had an RBI too and Aaron Nola gave up two runs while pitching into the sixth. Philly now has a seven-game lead over Atlanta, whose lead over the Mets for the third Wild Card is now one and a half games.

Cardinals 10, Brewers 6: It was a seesaw game that had the Brewers up in the bottom of the ninth. That’s when the usually reliable Devin Williams lost his radar, hit a guy, and walked three dudes, including Matt Carpenter and Tommy Pham with the bases loaded. That allowed St. Louis to score two, to tie things back up, and to force extras. Trevor Megill’s tenth inning was worse as he intentionally walked one guy and unintentionally walked another to load the bases, after which Nolan Arenado hit a walkoff grand slam, sending Cards fans home in a rare-of-late good mood and snapping the Brewers’ six-game winning streak.

Tigers 8, Cubs 2: Detroit scored two in the second via two-run homers from Trey Sweeney and Riley Greene and scored four in the ninth thanks to an RBI single from Riley Greene and a three-run shot from Kerry Carpenter. The Tigers have won seven of nine.

Royals 3, Angels 0: Johnny Cueto made his season debut in his 17th season, starting for the Angels against his old team, and worked into the seventh, allowing three runs. Not good enough, however, as Michael Lorenzon blanked Anaheim for seven and two relievers completed the four-hitter. Kyle Isbel hit a two-run double and MJ Melendez homered for the Royals who have won six of seven.

Rays 4, Athletics 2: José Siri hit a late go-ahead homer for the second straight game. On Tuesday it was a solo shot in the eighth, this time it was a two-run blast in the seventh. The Rays have won five of six.

Dodgers 8, Mariners 4: Max Muncy hit a three-run double in the Dodgers five-run fifth inning. Shohei Ohtani stole his 39th base of the season, putting him one swipe and one homer away from joining the 40-40 club. Dodgers starter Jack Flaherty won his tenth game after allowing two runs — one earned — and five hits while pitching into the sixth. The Mariners have lost three in a row and eight of nine, going 1-8 on their road trip to Detroit, Pittsburgh and L.A. They’re now five back in the West to a Houston team that doesn’t look like it’s gonna cave and seven and a half out of the Wild Card picture with far too many teams to jump. Some disastrous dog days for a team that looked good for much of the year.

The Daily Briefing

Joey Votto announces that he is retiring

Joey Votto posted on Instagram last night that he is ending his bid to return to the big leagues and is retiring. It was a short video in which all he said was “That’s it. I’m done. I’m officially retired from baseball. Then in the caption he thanked his parents and people who helped him as a youth player, a minor leaguer, and a major leaguer. He closed with this:

Votto had signed a minor league deal with the Toronto Blue Jays and was attempting to make it back to the bigs but he lost a lot of the season to injury and was ineffective in 104 plate appearances for Triple-A Buffalo. He turns 41 in a couple of weeks. It happens.

No one will remember the struggles in Buffalo, of course, because Votto had a wonderful career.

Votto spent his entire MLB career with the Cincinnati Reds and finished that career last year as one of the best players in franchise history. In 17 seasons he posted a batting line of .294/.409/.511 (144 OPS+), collected 2,135 hits, hit 356 home runs, drove in 1,144, scored 1,171 times, and drew 1,365 walks. He was the NL MVP in 2010, he was a six-time All-Star, and he won a Gold Glove. While he may not have hit some of the traditional milestones Hall of Famers tend to hit, he has a more than credible Hall of Fame case.

But he was more than a great baseball player. He was one of the truly interesting and unique ballplayers to come down the pike in some time.

There are a million anecdotes about this. David Letterman and Jerry Seinfeld once spent a few minutes on Letterman’s Netflix show talking about how Votto talked to fans while he was on the on deck circle or first base, thanking them for coming to the park. Three years ago The Athletic did what amounted to an oral history of Joey Votto being weird or random or inscrutable, as recounted by his teammates over the years. Stuff like Votto getting really into watchmaking, Votto studying survivalist books, Votto taking improv classes so he could have more lively conversations with his teammates, and, best of all, Joey Votto’s legitimate love of mopping floors. As I said at the time, the whole article reads like a series of Chuck Norris Facts except they’re about an amiable but slightly off-center introvert who just so happened to have the best batting eye of any player of his generation.

One always got the sense that the waters ran deep with that guy. That, unlike so many players, he had many varied interests outside of baseball. Because of that, I have a feeling that Joey Votto will have an interesting and unconventional life after baseball. And boy howdy, I cannot wait to hear his Hall of Fame speech.

Happy trails, Joey Votto.

Yankees place Luis Gil on the injured list

Yankees righty starter Luis Gil left Tuesday night’s game against the Guardians early with what the team initially called lower back tightness. After further examination, however, they have diagnosed Gil with a back strain and have placed him on the injured list.

For what it’s worth, Aaron Boone said last night that the club believes that Gil’s back strain is minor, and they think he can keep throwing while on the IL, avoiding the need for him to have to work back up to starting shape.

Gil, 26, initially made the rotation as a fill-in for the then-injured Gerrit Cole but he has pitched well enough to stick. He's posted a 3.39 ERA with 144 strikeouts in 124.2 innings across 24 starts. He walks too many guys and he was much better early in the season than he has been as it’s gone on, but he’s been a useful starter for the Bombers.

Other Stuff

Republicans who performatively hate cities 

This crossed the timeline yesterday. For context, the man tweeting here is the head of Ohio Right to Life and a Republican operative who currently enjoys a political patronage seat on the State Medical Board of Ohio despite the fact that he has no medical background whatsoever:

The lowest-hanging fruit here would be to note that (a) if Ohio sucks, and if Ohio has been controlled by Republicans for the past 15 years, maybe it’s Republicans’ fault; or (b) that “gee, this would be a great place if you took away almost all of the people, businesses, industry, banks, colleges, services and amenities” is a really stupid-ass thing to say.

What strikes me more about this is that Gonidakis, like almost all Republican politicians, activists, and public partisans, owes his entire life and career to the cities he’s bashing.

He’s from Akron, a historically Democratically-controlled city, and he was educated in Columbus and Akron. His legal practice and political posts all center around Columbus, Ohio. He lives in Dublin, Ohio, an upscale suburb of Columbus which had more residents who voted for Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden in 2016 and 2020 than who voted for Trump either year. And, of course, Dublin would not exist if not for it being literally adjacent to Columbus.

I’m no stalker, but I’m guessing that if you followed Michael Gonidakis around you’d frequently find him in fancy restaurants and luxury-goods stores in Columbus and that, in every way that matters apart from having a big yard, he lives a mostly urban existence. In this he would not be alone among Ohio Republican officials. The vast majority of them, including our Republican statewide office holders and most of the members of the legislature, have homes in and around Columbus and almost all of them choose to live in wealthy, educated liberal neighborhoods. The ones who aren’t family men and women are often seen in the hip and trendy bars and taverns around downtown, right alongside the godless liberals they claim to abhor.

But it’s just a claim. Most of these types of people are all talk. They play up the whole rural/urban divide for political purposes but they’d never be caught dead spending time in actual rural or working class spaces. When they leave public life they often move from the suburban houses or farms that look good in their political ads into townhouses in expensive parts of the bluest areas of major cities. They actually love cities, and they love them for all of the reasons lots of people love cities. They just like to cosplay as good ol’ boys and girls so they can pander to their rural political base.

Just ask J.D. Vance. You know him: the hillbilly who has two houses. The first one is in the East Walnut Hills, a hip, urban liberal part of Cincinnati which voted overwhelmingly for Biden in 2020. When he’s in Washington he lives in his $1.6 million dollar home the trendy, hipster-filled Del Ray neighborhood of Alexandria, Virginia. Here’s what one of his De Ray neighbors, who has spoken to Vance since he moved into the neighborhood, told the Washington Post last month:

They’re phonies, the lot of ‘em.

The new “Megalopolis” trailer is unhinged

I am still 100% convinced that Francis Ford Coppola’s upcoming film “Megalopolis” is going to be a hot mess, but it remains a hot mess I totally wanna see. Indeed, I’ll only be disappointed if it’s not unhinged, nustso, and self-indulgent on several levels.

My almost ghoulish excitement for “Megalopolis” was piqued yesterday when a new trailer was released. While most of it was standard trailer fare, the first minute or so of the thing consisted of quotes from major film critics such as Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris slamming Coppola classics like “The Godfather” and “Apocalypse Now” upon their release. The idea being that you should forget anything anyone tells you about “Megalopolis,” because Coppola is a filmmaker who has always been ahead of his time.

Except . . . all the quotes were bogus! Totally made up! It seems that Coppola — or some marketing dude or some producer misusing ChatGPT — simply fabricated them all or, in one case, pulled something a critic wrote about a non-Coppola movie and applied it to “Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” That’s truly nuts! It’s batshit! I mean, I almost respect it it’s so nuts.

While “Megalopolis was funded by Coppola personally, giving no studio a say over its content, it is being distributed by Lionsgate, and yesterday Lionsgate pulled the trailer entirely. Included where I had it embedded here during the original draft of this piece but, alas. A Lionsgate spokesperson issued a statement:

That doesn’t make it clear who actually decided to put in the fake quotes, as Lionsgate merely blames itself for its bad “vetting,” suggesting that no one with the company had a role in creating the trailer. At the same time it apologizes to Coppola and his company, which could mean that maybe Lionsgate did have more to do with it. Or, alternatively, it could be saying “we’re sorry we didn’t prevent you from running with your dumb idea and embarrassing yourself, Francis.” I dunno. And, actually, now that I think about it, I don’t really care.

When I last posted about “Megalopolis” a few people thought my desire to see it despite it probably being a hot mess was just some bit. I assure you, it is not. I am so hungry for some audacious, non-formulaic cinema that I am willing to absolutely embrace a bad movie, if indeed this turns out to be a bad movie, as long as it’s different and somewhat insane. Especially if it’s somewhat insane. And the more we learn about “Megalopolis,” the more insane it gets.

I may be first in line when it is released on September 27.

“The case of the nearly 7,000 missing pancreases”

This story at Vox is pretty damn eye-opening. The headline, quoted above, is accurate in that it really does involve 7,000 missing pancreases. But they’re not misplaced pancreases as opposed to pancreases which nobody other than their original owners, now deceased, probably ever possessed.

It’s a story about the business of organ transplants, you see. About the authorities which handle the business of organ harvesting and allocation and about how they seem to quite obviously be perpetrating a fraud on the public by getting subsidized for work they have not done while leaving thousands of people who could be getting transplanted organs but aren’t out in the cold because the transplant authorities find it to be better business to juke the donation and transplant stats than to actually do what they’ve been tasked with doing.

I’ve been listed as an organ donor every since I got my driver’s license 35 years ago. It’s a bit sobering to know that, as things currently stand, there’s a fairly decent chance that, when I shuffle off, none of my usable organs will ever go to anyone in need of one because of administrative chicanery.

I don’t care about this merger, but . . .

Paramount Global, which owns Paramount Studios, CBS, and a bunch of cable channels, has mounting debt, declining revenues, and sinking share prices and, as such, the rich folks who own it put it up for sale several months ago. At present there is a tentative deal for it to be sold to the production company Skydance Media, which is controlled by David Ellison, son of Oracle founder/centibillionaire Larry Ellison. At the last minute, however, entertainment mogul and financier Edgar Bronfman Jr. has swooped in with an offer of his own which might upset the Skydance deal. You can read about it all here if you want, but you really don’t have to because I don’t really care too much about this sale for its own sake and have nothing intelligent to say about it.

Indeed, I wouldn’t have even read the story if it didn’t involve TV networks and movie studios I recognize as a media consumer. Like, if these were investment banks or software companies I wouldn’t give a crap. But I know a lot about movie history and I casually follow stories involving the studios. So I read the story about Paramount, I marveled at just how much the world of the very rich is animated by nepotism, and I idly wondered if whoever buys Paramount is gonna bulldoze the historic 65-acre studio complex on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles and make a killing by putting up a couple thousand overpriced condos with great views of the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. It’s what Cecil B. DeMille and Robert Evans would’ve wanted.

By the way, you should read more about Hollywood Forever Cemetery and you should visit it if you go to Los Angeles. The place is a trip. They do movies an concerts and stuff there. It’s, in my mind, far more in keeping with the sort of place one should want to be buried than your usual boring and dreary cemetery, but I digress.

The one thing from that Paramount sale article that actually interested me was this:

Billy Pierce played the very small part of Sidney in “Little Big League” and the young version of Emilio Estevez in “The Mighty Ducks.” Now he’s a cypto guy who is part of an investment group buying Paramount? With the caveat that anyone super into crypto probably has a LOAD of skeletons in their closet, I’m gonna guess that Pierce is doing better than most former child stars these days. At the very least I’m guessing there’s a hell of a story — a possibly sketchy story, but a hell of one anyway — about how one goes from a small part in “The Mighty Ducks” to being a major shareholder of Paramount Pictures.

Sorry, I know that last item was a rambling mess. Just where my brain was most of the day yesterday.

Have a great day everyone.