Cup of Coffee: February 1, 2024

Good morning! And welcome to Free Thursday!

Let’s dispose of the introduction and just jump on in, shall we?

 The Daily Briefing

David Rubenstein makes his first statement since the O’s sale news broke

Yesterday David Rubenstein made his first public statement since news broke on Tuesday afternoon that he has an agreement in place to purchase the Orioles from the Angelos family. The statement:

I caught a lot of hell from some Orioles fans on Tuesday when, following the first reports of the sale, I posted a couple of mostly tongue-in-cheek tweets about how private equity goons suck. They weren’t personal to Rubenstein but, rather, they were broad things about what would happen to the Orioles if they were treated like any other PE-purchased asset. To say those comments went over poorly would be an understatement.

Which, fine, fans are gonna fan. But it’s amazing how quickly people took to lionizing Rubenstein mere moments after the news was announced and before a single detail about his plans for the team has been revealed. If you want to see the flavor of those comments, just look below Rubenstein’s tweet, which is linked above. Short version: he’s being treated like the second coming of Christ Himself.

Yes, I know that John Angelos is terrible. I’ve written a great deal about his terribleness. And I understand the euphoria with which would-be liberators are often greeted. But what guarantees are there that Rubenstein is going to be some sort of savior? How does anyone know how he’ll approach payroll? How does anyone know whether he’ll be a Steinbrennerian micromanager or a free-spending Mark Walter type who lets top baseball ops talent run the show? How does anyone know whether his primary goal is, actually, winning the World Series or, rather, the subsidiary development around Camden Yards that he mentions prominently in his statement above? The answer is we don’t. The embrace of Rubenstein is, as far as I can tell, 100% a function of “he’s not John Angelos, therefore he’s perfect, and if you suggest otherwise, blogger boy, you’re a hater.”

I dunno man. What percentage of owners, even those who followed awful previous owners and who talked about winning it all or bust, actually followed through in the way fans wanted? What percentage of them are truly damn-the-torpedos types who subordinate everything to winning? Mark Walter is I suppose. Steve Cohen wants to be. But I’m put in mind of some others who were greeted warmly when they took over a new team following a hated owner. Guys like Bruce Sherman in Miami who followed the Marlins’ Angelos-esque owner, Jeff Loria. Hell, Peter Angelos was thought of as a savior himself. Fans were excited as hell when he took over. How excited are they now? Of baseball’s 30 owners, how many of them are accurately described as “win first, make money second” guys? How many fulfill the expectations fans had the day the news of the sale was announced?

I swear, I’m not trying to be a hater here. I really do hope O’s fans get something good out of this. But it just seems nuts to me to see people going all-in on Rubenstein the way they have, less than 24 hours after the news of the sale broke. I’m even more surprised at how many of them have told me that Rubenstein’s nearly 40-year tenure of running the Carlyle Group — a tenure rife with scandal of various stripes — is an irrelevant consideration. Indeed, I was told it was not worth mentioning at all and that I should shut up about it. All people wanna talk about is that he’s a Baltimore guy with a long philanthropic track record.

Like I said, I get the O’s fans’ excitement. But the unwillingness of so many of them to demonstrate even a modicum of skepticism here — skepticism we should ALWAYS have whenever a billionaire comes forward and says he wants to do nice things for us — is sort of gobsmacking.

Padres sign Wandy Peralta to a weird deal

The San Diego Padres signed lefty reliever Wandy Peralta to a four-year, $16.5 million contract with three opt-outs yesterday. Which I suppose you could call a one-year deal with three player options, but I’m not gonna get all technical about it I don’t suppose.

Peralta, an eight-year veteran who most recently pitched for the Yankees, has been one of baseball’s steadiest relievers over the past few years. Since 2021 he’s posted a 2.82 ERA (149 ERA+) over 165 games. He started walking more dudes than usual in 2023, but he was solid even with the command struggles.

In San Diego Peralta joins a grand experiment in which A.J. Preller seems to be constructing his entire roster out of relievers, having already added Yuki Matsui, Woo Suk Go, and Enyel De Los Santos this offseason. The more the merrier, that’s what I always say.

Joe Smith retires

Veteran reliever Joe Smith announced his retirement yesterday.

This is not a big surprise as Smith, who is 39, had not pitched since the Twins released him in August 2022. Still, Smith had a pretty nifty career, finishing with a 3.14 ERA (129 ERA+) in 866 appearances over the course of a 15-year run during which he suited up for eight different clubs. Perhaps the sidearmer’s most notable trait was his durability, as he averaged 57 appearances a year and finishes 36th all time for games pitched.

Happy trails Joe Smith, arguably the least-Googleable ballplayer of all time.

Possible Phillies City Connect jersey leaked 

A jersey has surfaced on eBay which may very well be the Phillies Nike City Connect jersey which is set to be unveiled this spring. Via Twitter user @Gottagoto_MO's:

Paul Lukas of UniWatch looked it over and believes that it’s legit. He also calls it “pretty awful.” Can’t say I disagree.

When the Padres almost moved to Washington

Old baseball card heads know that Topps printed a bunch of 1974 cards in which Padres players had “Washington Nat’l Lea.” printed on them instead of “San Diego Padres.” I was certainly curious about that when I first encountered Dave Winfield and Nate Colbert Cards with that written on them when I was a wee lad. I can’t remember exactly how I figured out what was going on with those, but I’m sure I had some random baseball trivia book or came across a Sporting News story or something that explained it.

For those of you who do not already know about the Padres fleeting association with Washington, yesterday the Washington Post ran a story about the time, 50 years ago, when the Padres announced they were moving to our nation’s capital . . . and then didn’t.

The short version: the Senators left town for Texas to become the Rangers in 1972, which really pissed off Congress, which then leaned on Major League Baseball to get a team back in the Capital. Meanwhile, the Padres had just finished up their fifth season of bad baseball in front of few fans. Owner C. Arnholt Smith wanted out and he agreed to sell the team to Joseph B. Danzansky, president of the Giant supermarket chain for $12 million. On December 6, 1973, the National League owners conditionally approved the team’s move to Washington. Topps printed the cards and that promotional photo above was taken. It seemed like baseball was about to abandon San Diego and return to D.C.

But then San Diego mayor and future California governor Pete Wilson filed an antitrust lawsuit to keep the Padres in town. Smith didn’t want to deal with that kind of hassle, backed out of the deal with Danzansky, and tried to find another buyer. McDonald’s CEO Ray Kroc, who had previously failed in his attempt to buy his hometown Chicago Cubs, agreed to buy the Padres and keep them in San Diego.

It was a pretty easy sale, actually. As Bill Center of the San Diego Union-Tribune wrote several years ago, Kroc was on his yacht in Florida, reading about the Padres/Washington fiasco and simply decided that he wanted to buy them himself. Which he did, in what was probably the quickest negotiation in the history of baseball franchise sales:

As I wrote back in 2020, Kroc’s ownership of the Padres started off with a great deal of controversy, but at least it was fun and interesting controversy. Washington, meanwhile, would have to wait another 30 years, during which it was constantly used as a bargaining chip for MLB owners who wanted new stadiums, before it could get back in the big league club.

Other Stuff

More on Musk lying about the brain implant

Yesterday I criticized the credulous reporting of Elon Musk’s tweet about his company, Neuralink, allegedly implanting a chip into a human test subject’s brain. I believed, and still believe, that Musk was lying about that in an effort to get exactly the sort of gullible gee-whiz press that he received which, ultimately, enriches Elon Musk even more that he has already been enriched.

Later in the day someone far more qualified to call out people like Musk on their bullshit, Cory Doctorow, wrote about that at greater length. At the outset he echoed my assessment about the Neuralink thing:

Doctorow then moved beyond that, talking more generally about the hucksterism endemic to the modern tech economy. That’s particularly the case with AI, where many of the most hyped AI products turned out to be fakes in which human operators — sometimes a team of them — stand behind a curtain doing the actual work in question. He dropped a great line about that too, saying “So much AI turns out to be low-waged people in a call center in the Global South pretending to be robots that Indian techies have a joke about it: "AI stands for 'absent Indian.'”

The greater insight, however, came when Doctorow noted that there are two potential critiques of any given tech claim, be it about AI or worker-sacrificing automation of any other kind. One critique is that that the innovation in question is a bad thing that should not be done. The second: that the innovation in question is bullshit. One of them is far more effective than the other.

Here’s Doctorow, using as an example the much-hyped “cashier-free” Amazon Go stores that, in reality, required a lot of people behind the scenes to operate even if Amazon tried to hide that fact:

Which isn’t to say that all much-hyped technological advances are bullshit, of course. But it is to say that before anyone goes crazy buying the hype or, for that matter, excoriating it as the gateway to some new dystopia, we should expect those doing the hyping to actually prove that they’re doing what they say they’re doing. Which, very often, they’re totally not.

McCarthyism, but make it racist 

Yesterday executives of TikTok, Meta, Twitter and other tech companies were called to testify before Congress about children’s online safety. And, as is the case with almost all Congressional hearings, to allow members of Congress to beat whatever political drums they feel like beating that day.

Missouri Senator Tom Cotton, a dangerous lunatic if there ever was one, decided that he’d use his time questioning TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew to do a McCarthyite/racist mashup:

That’s pretty stupid for a guy who went to Harvard for both undergrad and law school. Makes me wonder if he was admitted on diversity grounds. Like, say, some program that gives racist, authoritarian nincompoops an unfair leg-up.

Did they find Amelia Earhart’s plane? 

Probably not, but I live by four rules in life:

1. Never get less than twelve hours sleep;

2. Never play cards with a guy who has the same first name as a city;

3. Never get involved with a woman with a tattoo of a dagger on her body; and

4. When there’s a news story about anything I first read about in some “Amazing Mysteries!” book in 1983, including Bigfoot, the Yeti, the Loch Ness Monster, or unexplained crap like Amelia Earhart’s disappearance, I’m gonna link it.

So I link this, from the New York Times:

Everything about this screams “horseshit” and “I am a rich dude with an undersea exploration venture for which I’m trying to draw some heat,” but it’s still real to me dammit.

Seriously though: one of the biggest “wow, I guess this is growing up” moments I ever experienced was when I watched some actually serious Earhart documentary when I was 15 or 16 and it quite convincingly argued that Earhart almost certainly made a navigation error that caused her to miss Howland Island, run out of gas, and crash into the ocean. There were no aliens involved. There was no Pacific version of the Bermuda Triangle operating here. She did not become a prisoner of the Japanese. She just hit the drink and was lost forever beneath its inky depths.

The only mystery, if you care about such things, is where, exactly, the plane is. The dude in this article thinks he knows. I think it’s way more likely he found a blip that is plane-shaped only in the way a burn pattern on some old lady’s toast in Dorking, United Kingdom is Margaret Thatcher-shaped. At most, and playing the odds, he found a WWII wreck.

And yes, I realize that ten year-old Craig who believed it to be a possibility that Earhart encountered a temporal anomaly and found herself stranded in the 14th century at which point she became the warrior/philosopher queen of some Pacific Island empire would be disappointed by 50 year-old Craig’s skepticism. But, hey, 50 year-old Craig is disappointed by ten year-old Craig’s belief that Kelly Tripucka was the best basketball player ever, so we’re even.

Have a great day everyone.