Cup of Coffee: August 8, 2024

Good morning! And welcome to Free Thursday!

I looked myself in the mirror when I woke up yesterday morning and I told myself: “tomorrow’s newsletter is not gonna have any J.D. Vance items. Yes, he’s our arch nemesis, and dunking on him brings us more joy than almost anything, but we gotta pace ourselves.” And yes, we talk to ourselves like Gollum in these situations.

I did my best to avoid J.D. Vance stuff today. Indeed, there isn’t a single item dedicated solely to him in today’s Other Stuff and, apart from this introduction, his name appears nowhere in this newsletter!

Of course if you wanna look at video of him flailing horribly and coming off like an alien in a skin suit in response to the most basic, softball questions about what makes him happy and why voters might want to have a beer with him on your own time, that’s up to you.

OK, with that out of the way, let’s get on with today’s newsletter.

And That Happened 

Here are the scores. Here are the highlights:

Diamondbacks 7, Guardians 3; Diamondbacks 5, Guardians 3: In the first game Ketel Marte, Geraldo Perdomo and Corbin Carroll each hit two-run homers and Eugenio Suárez added an RBI double. In the second game lefty Eduardo Rodríguez, sidelined by a shoulder injury since spring training, made his 2024 debut. He was OK: three runs on four hits and two walks while working into the sixth, which is pretty good given that he was on a 65-pitch limit. Something to build on. Josh Bell hit two homers and drove in three and Randal Grichuk went deep as well to complete the doubleheader sweep. And hey, both games were done before 7PM. Not a bad day’s work for the Diamondbacks.

Worth noting: the Guardians sent Anthony Gose to the mound for some mopup duty in the first game. He didn’t pitch well, giving up two runs, but the mere fact that Gose was on the field is worth a mention and a hat tip, as the guy has had one of the more interesting careers in recent memory.

As you may remember, from 2012 through 2016 Gose was an outfielder with the Tigers and the Jays. That wasn’t working out great, but Gose was a top pitching prospect as a high schooler so in 2017 he was converted to pitching and signed with Cleveland in 2019, for whom he made 28 big league appearances between 2021 and 2022. Unfortunately he then had to undergo Tommy John surgery. But here he was in yesterday’s game, making his first appearance in over two years.

There are guys who never make the big leagues. There are small handful of guys who make it as a hitter, wash out, and try to convert, but never come close to making the big leagues again (i.e. almost all who try it). And of course there are all manner of pitchers whose careers are ended by injury. That Gose has beaten the odds three times in this regard is absolutely remarkable, and that’s the case even if his ERA doesn’t knock anyone’s socks off. You just gotta respect that level of determination.

Cubs 8, Twins 2: Ian Happ and Michael Busch homered and five Chicago pitchers combined for a six-hitter. Javier Assad handled the first four innings and Cubs’ relievers held the Twins to just three hits in the final five frames. The Cubs take two of three.

Astros 6, Rangers 4: Yordan Álvarez homered for the second day in a row — a shot that jumped off the bat at 117 mph — Victor Caratini also went deep, and Jeremy Peña, Mauricio Dubón, Jose Altuve and Alex Bregman drove in a run each. Yusei Kikuchi struck out eight while pitching into the sixth. Houston wins the season series against their cross-state rival seven games to six and, as a reward, the Astros never have to go to Arlington, Texas again. At least that’s what I’d want.

Athletics 3, White Sox 2: A’s starter Joey Estes gave up a two-run homer to Andrew Benintendi in the second but that was all he’d give up while Armando Alvarez and Zack Gelof hit RBI singles and Lawrence Butler had a sac fly in Oakland’s three-run seventh inning. And with that Chicago’s one-game winning streak comes to an end.

Yankees 5, Angels 2: Angels 8, Yankees 2: Luis Gil pitched five shutout innings in the first game to pick up his 12th win of the year. He was backed by a homer from Oswaldo Cabrera and RBI hits from Austin Wells, Anthony Volpe, Alex Verdugo — who was hitting leadoff for some reason — and Aaron Judge.

In the nightcap Zach Neto hit a grand slam in the Angels’ six-run second inning and hit a two-run double in the fourth to drive in six runs in all. Neato!

Marlins 6, Reds 4: Jake Burger hit two solo homers — in the first and fifth — and Derek Hill hit a grand slam, so that was that for the scoring. Marlins starter Valente Bellozo — who I will freely admit I had never heard of before reading this box score — pitched shutout ball into the sixth. I’m gonna be in New York late next week and into the weekend and I have half a mind go to see a Marlins-Mets game. If I do, it may be the game where I know the least number of players for one of the teams since I was like six years old.

Giants 7, Nationals 4: It was tied 3-3 in the fifth when Heliot Ramos and Matt Chapman each went deep. Mike Yastrzemski added a solo homer and an RBI triple. Chapman doubled and singled as well. It was Ramos’ second straight night with a homer. The dude is having a fantastic season. Blake Snell, coming off of Friday’s no-hitter against the A's, gave up three runs on four hits over six innings, though he retired the last nine hitters he faced.

Orioles 7, Blue Jays 3: Jackson Holliday’s two-run homer in the seventh — his third homer in as many games — put the Orioles up after they had fallen behind by a run. Anthony Santander — who had hit a two-run homer in the first — added a solo shot in the eighth for insurance. Eloy Jiménez doubled in two more that inning for more insurance. I didn’t see that highlight, but with the way he’s moving these days I’m guessing it would’ve been a triple for most players.

Padres 9, Pirates 8: We had a lot of two-homer nights last night and Jackson Merrill was one of ‘em. He hit solo homers in the second and ninth, the second of which tied things up and forced extra innings. Xander Bogaerts singled in the Manfred Man for the go-ahead run in a three-run 10th inning — the other two coming in a sacrifice fly by Manny Machado and an error on Yasmani Grandal — and then the Dads held on while the Buccos plated two in the bottom half. Bad news for San Diego: left fielder Jurickson Profar left the game shortly after getting hit just below his right knee by a pitch in the sixth inning. X-rays came back negative, however, so he’s day-to-day.

Brewers 8, Atlanta 5: Milwaukee scored eight runs without the aid of a homer. Is that even allowed these days? We’ll have someone check on that but, in the meantime, know that the Brewers racked up 16 hits, with Blake Perkins going 3-for-5 with three RBI. Joey Ortiz went 3 for 5 with a double, two RBI, Gary Sánchez was 2-for-5 with an RBI, and Jackson Chourio and Rhys Hoskins had three hits each. Atlanta pitchers walked eight batters too, so it was a whole Gashouse Gorillas conga line out there last night.

Cardinals 5, Rays 2: Nolan Arenado hit a two-run double in the third to break a 1-1 tie and Alec Burleson doubled in two an inning later to increase that lead. Erick Fedde allowed one over five to pick up the win. St. Louis goes for the sweep tonight.

Royals 8, Red Sox 4: Bobby Witt Jr.’s otherworldly season continued last night as he went 3-for-4 with two homers, three runs scored, and four driven in. That brings his line up to .349/.394/.606 with 22 homers and 94 RBI. With the win the Royals moved a game and a half ahead of Boston in the Wild Card race, pulled to within a half-game of second-place Minnesota, and are now just four games back of Cleveland which, as noted above, dropped both ends of its doubleheader yesterday afternoon.

Mets 5, Rockies 3: Francisco Lindor hit a two-run single in the top of the ninth to break a 2-2 tie and then Jesse Winker, who had three hits on the night, singled in one more. The Mets had 11 hits on the night. Ten of them were singles, so it wasn’t just Milwaukee scoring without the benefit of the longball. That can play if you sting enough of ‘em together.

Tigers 6, Mariners 2: The Tigers built an early 3-0 lead thanks to homers from Wenceel Pérez and Jake Rogers. The M’s got a Big Dumper homer to pull within one but Detroit plated three more in the ninth thanks to RBI singles from Matt and Vierling and Gio Urshela to put it out of reach.

Phillies 9, Dodgers 4: Kyle Schwarber hit a leadoff homer and, after the Dodgers plated four unanswered runs in the first and second, he struck again with a two-run double in the fifth to make it a one-run Dodgers lead. Philly then broke it open with a five-run sixth inning with the capper being, yep, you guessed it, a three-run homer from Kyle Schwarber. But he was not done: he hit another solo homer in the top of the ninth to give him seven damn RBI on the night.

I feel like maybe the Dodgers shouldn’t have kept pitching to him, but alas, it’s too late. Philly takes two of three.

The Daily Briefing

Grayson Rodriguez placed on the IL 

As mentioned in yesterday’s recaps, Orioles starter Grayson Rodriguez was scratched from yesterday’s start and went back to Bawlmer for imaging. Well, he had the imaging and the result was his being placed on the injured list, retroactive to August 4, with what manager Brandon Hyde called a "mild" lat strain. In 2022, Rodriguez missed three months with a lat strain while still in the minors, but Hyde says the club is reasonably confident that he will be back this season.

Rodriguez is 13-4 — those 13 wins lead the AL — with a 3.86 ERA (99 ERA+) and 130 strikeouts and 36 walks in 116.2 innings this season. The Orioles are already without Kyle Bradish, John Means and Tyler Wells for the season, so while no one ever needs to lose a frontline starter, Baltimore probably needs it less.

Today in Baseball History: the two-day strike ends

Major League Baseball has had a pretty damn tumultuous labor history, but even real MLB labor heads often forget the labor stoppage that began on August 6, 1985 and ended just two days later, 39 years ago today.

The fact that a strike even could take place in the middle of the season was because the Collective Bargaining Agreement that had been struck to end the 1981 strike expired during the 1984-85 offseason, so there was no labor agreement in place once the 1985 campaign began. This would happen again nine years later and would lead to the big 1994-95 strike and once again in 2002 when negotiators juuuuuusssst averted another one. It was only after that that the owners figured out that it wasn’t in their best interests to allow seasons to start with no labor agreements in place and began to lock the players out before the season as a means of diminishing their leverage, as they did in December 2021 through March 2022.

As for the substance: it was pretty typical for the era. The owners released financial data which purported to show that Major League Baseball was losing money and demanded that the players agree to loony demands. The figures, however, were highly dubious and the MLBPA did not believe them. Months of negotiations ensued and things went nowhere and eventually the players walked out. A tale as old as time.

The owners proposals were a hell of a thing:

• First, they wanted, according to them, to “improve competitive balance” by preventing clubs with above league average payrolls from signing any free agent for more than the major league average salary;

• Second: they proposed forbidding clubs with above league average payrolls from making any trades in the middle of the season which increased their payroll; and

• There was a whole pension/revenue sharing piece of it but I won’t bore you with the details. Just know that, as usual, the owners wanted to limit their financial outlay while maximizing their revenue opportunities;

The owners claimed that these proposals did not impose a salary cap and took the position that what they did with their revenue and how much they contributed to player pensions was their business, not the players. But when you say that half the teams cannot sign any free agent for more than the league average and that half the teams can’t increase their payroll during the season, what the hell are we even doing here? When people talk about why the relationship between the owners and the players was so bad in the runup to the 1994 strike, these sorts of proposals, which could only be made by a side that has utter contempt for the intelligence and the desires of their negotiating partner, figure in pretty significantly.

Anyway, things dragged on until August 6 when the players walked out. The next morning Don Fehr of the MLBPA and the owner’s attorney Barry Rona met privately and struck a deal in which the owners dropped their demands for limits on free agency salaries and in-season payroll increases and the players agreed to bump up arbitration eligibility from two years to three years. That last bit would have lasting consequences, of course, as to this day the sides still fight about how to pay younger players who are not yet eligible for free agency. It’s what has led to the advent of Super Twos and the assemblage of incentives and bonus pools and things currently in place for pre-arb players.

Play resumed on August 8, 1985 with 18 games scheduled, including five doubleheaders. The full 162-game schedule was completed and Major League Baseball, despite the brief early August hiccup, and despite a bunch of the usual “fans vow never to watch baseball again!” stories, set an all-time league-wide attendance record. And they all lived happily ever after.

Well, for like three months, anyway, after which the owners began colluding against free agents in an effort to achieve via illegal means what they could not get via negotiation. But we’ll save that bedtime story for another day.

I figured

Last week I talked about how the Cleveland Browns owners were trying to use the City of Cleveland as leverage to get a new stadium. The team wants a brand new domed joint in that rather sad, airport-adjacent, industrial-park-laden suburb of Brook Park. Cleveland’s mayor was enabling the shakedown for some reason by making a nine-figure offer from the city’s already strained coffers to help the team out. At the time I opined that the Browns owners were just using Cleveland as leverage.

And yeah, that seems right. From Ken Prendergrast of the Cleveland development blog, neo-trans (via The Rooster):

The line, “Half of that will be privately funded and create new tax revenues that will fund the other half” is probably giving actual economists, as opposed to civic boosters, a stroke right now. And maybe physicists too, as it’s the stadium grift version of a perpetual motion machine. Thoughts and prayers to them in these trying times. Maybe in their honor the team should call the place Bootstrap Memorial Stadium.

The part where the project includes 20,000 — 20,000! — surface lot spots strongly suggests that Brook Park doesn’t much care about aesthetics or responsible urban planning. But I suppose when you give away over a billion dollars to plop a stadium on the site of an old Ford plant you’re not really concerned with such things. Dollars to donuts that it ends up looking like a Costco or a Home Depot, just like that place where the Texas Rangers play.

I’m obviously not from the Cleveland area and I don’t care about the Browns, but really dudes: let the team go. Don’t make counter offers. Don’t complain. Just wait for the team to move, take back the lakefront property, and do something that will benefit residents of the city rather than a bunch of drunk football fans who drive in from the burbs eight times a year and tell all their friends and family members that it was a miracle they didn’t get shot or turned trans or whatever the current imaginary horrible is for people who rarely if ever enter the city limits.

Other Stuff

Great Moments in Self Awareness

It was a busy day Tuesday so it’s understandable that this one slipped through the cracks. But hoo-boy, this, from a Trump fundraising email sent out soon after Tim Walz was named Harris’ V.P. candidate, takes the damn cake:

Donald Trump, of course, is a convicted felon who would not be able to vote in November if it were not for the part of the “dangerously liberal agenda” which allows felons to vote in his home state of Florida. Not that he’s ever been bothered by little things like intellectual consistency or shame.

The best part of this is that it wasn’t some last-second brain fart just before someone hit send. Modern political communications are such that the Trump campaign almost certainly had this email pre-written, just waiting to hear if it was going to be Walz or Josh Shapiro’s name they would be pasting in before letting fly. So someone drafted this line and someone approved this line ahead of time.

He keeps doing it

Yesterday I noted that right wing figure Ben Shapiro compared Tim Walz to Chris Farley, thinking that it was a clever insult when, in reality, Farley was wildly popular and is loved and missed. Then yesterday morning Shapiro whipped out another one:

I, for one, think that Shapiro should spend every day until election day comparing Walz to popular, well-loved, and dearly-missed comedians who inspire good feelings among people. If, when he realizes that Don Rickles references get him nowhere, he starts dropping George Carlin, Norm Macdonald, or Mitch Hedberg comps the Dem ticket might top 500 electoral votes.

The Dividing Line

This tweet crossed my desk yesterday:

With the caveat that using media and advertiser-invented generational identifiers in any serious way is idiotic because any group of, like, a billion people is super messy, I am pretty sure I can agree with this. There may have been Gen-Xers before Janeane Garofalo but Janeane Garofalo is the First Gen-Xer, cosmically speaking.

I think it's way more important that we find a similar, celebrity-based Gen-X/Millennial line of demarcation, because that's always been way fuzzier. Probably because the Generation-Defining Industrial Complex did not really become sophisticated until the 1990s, which led to a lot of weird and messy overlap when kids born in the early 1980s were being considered.

There was a term “Gen-Y” that was widely used for a time before it was supplanted by “Millennials,” and they were not always substituted on a 1-to-1 basis. Then people started defining generations with greater attention to habits and experiences as opposed to the years in which they were born which led to the vague and less-than-helpful classification of “Xennials” who were born between, say, 1980 and like 1984 or 1985. But to me “Xennial” was more akin to the American Association or Players League than the NL and AL that are Gen-X/Millennial. It’s kind of a classification but not really.

The upshot of all of that is that the Gen-X/Millennial line moves depending on a number of factors, not least of which are whether the person drawing the line wants to be considered a Gen-Xer or a Millennial for whatever reason.

My wife, for example, was born in 1980 and she steadfastly asserts that she’s a Gen-Xer. Technically speaking I am inclined to agree given that 1980 is the absolute earliest you ever see anyone even suggest as the beginning point for Millennials, and only a minority of people really do think that a Millennial year, as they tend to tie to to people who began graduating high school in 2000. Yet, if you go by habits, sensibilities, childhood experiences, facility with technology, and stuff like that, Allison is far more Millennial. Like, I’ve lost track of the sheer number of times she has grabbed my phone or my laptop from me, called me an old man, and quickly did whatever thing it was I was struggling to do because I grew up with a goddamn Commdore64 and a landline in my room. That’s more meaningful, I think, than what year a person was born.

But back to celebrities. I asked Twitter who represents the definitive Millennial watershed and got a ton of answers. The best ones I’ve seen are Britney Spears (December 1981), Beyoncé (September 1981), Macaulay Culkin (August 1980), Kim Kardashian (October 1980), and Natalie Portman (June 1981), though I’m sure some of you have just as good if not better ideas.

But if you do have one: please show your work.

Tightwads 

I read an Atlantic Monthly story yesterday which began with an anecdote about a guy who had $60,000 saved up to buy a new car and no other pressing financial obligations. But when he went to the dealer he froze up, got anxious, and spent only $30,000 on a used car. Then this paragraph ensued:

The whole article is about well-off people who just can’t bring themselves to spend what they have, and I find that to be a rather tedious topic, but it made me think of the connection between money and psychology in general.

I am not financially savvy, really. I have a general idea of what’s smart and what’s not smart when it comes to spending, saving, and investing, and I do a fair amount of smart things. Like, I have a savings account and an IRA to which I contribute and, at least in more recent years, I’ve limited my debt as best I can. But like most people I’ve made some dumb decisions, or put off making smart decisions, out of laziness, procrastination, or inertia and, at least occasionally, irresponsibility. I’m human and emotional. I’ve had some good luck and I’ve had some bad times and I don’t think any of that makes me either a spendthrift, a tightwad, or an outlier. It’s a big stew of both circumstance and psychology. I’m guessing most people fall in the gray middle like that too.

Whatever that amounts to, it’s not at all surprising to learn that there’s a huge psychological component to people’s relationship with money. In addition to being acutely aware of it in my own life it’s easily observable in others. I had clients or people I knew when I was lawyer who were fabulously wealthy but who were always anxious about not being even richer. Or who were generally satisfied with their station but who were so comically tight that the ghost of Jack Benny judged them negatively. I’ve also known some very poor people who either hoarded objects and whatever money they did get like it was the Great Depression or who spent every dime they got the second they got it, because YOLO. Life is complicated and it’s best not to judge, even if you feel the impulse to do so (and God, did I have the impulse to judge my rich clients).

There are a ton of reasons why I am the way I am, politically speaking. Stuff like my personal disposition, my parents, the times in which I grew up, the places where I grew up, my mentors, and what I learned academically are all pretty damn important, obviously. But there’s also part of my ideology that has always been aware of the emotional aspects of money and my belief that it’d be great if we, as a society, made alleviating the stress which surrounds it a priority, separate and apart from simply dealing with people’s immediate financial needs (which is also necessary when it comes to want and poverty, of course).

How much happier and healthier would families be if they didn’t have to stress about finding and paying for childcare? How many more people would start their own businesses, work in lower-paying but more fulfilling jobs, or engage in creative pursuits if healthcare wasn’t tied to their employment? How many people would live more balanced lives and would be happier and healthier in their old age if they had pensions or a reliable safety net waiting for them when they retired? Again: here I am only talking about the effect that would have in diminishing the stress and anxieties in people’s personal lives. That’s before you even get to any of the societal benefits, of which there would be many I suspect, if those conditions prevailed, but that’s another topic.

So much in our politics gets reduced to arguments over who wants to give money to whom and whether that’s bad or good economically. Knowing what we know about the connection between money and people’s personal psychology, however, it seems irresponsible not to think about it and talk about it in those terms as well.

Have a great day everyone.