Cup of Coffee: February 22, 2024

Good morning! And welcome to Free Thursday!

Let’s jump on in, shall we?

 The Daily Briefing

What the hell is up with the uniform pants?

The Mariners posted a short video of catcher Cal Raleigh telling a silly little kid’s joke. Which, fine, whatever. But get a load of Big Dumper’s pants:

The new jerseys are bad but the pants — see-through goddamn pants! — are an absolute embarrassment. I honestly cannot believe these were allowed to happen.

Serious question: how far down the MLB org chart do you have to go until you find someone tasked with giving a shit about baseball as opposed to marketing and revenue? Because if there was anyone with any baseball decision-making authority above whoever pulled the trigger on these jokes I have to believe they would’ve stepped in and told Fanatics and Nike to rethink things.

They gotta change this stuff before Opening Day. It’s absolute clown shoes.

In related news . . .

Here’s the new sponsorship patch the Royals will be wearing this year:

To sum up: players’ names on the back of jerseys: nearly invisible. Players’ nutsacks and sponsorship patches: visible from the International Space Station. Fantastic job, everyone. No notes.

Eric Hosmer announces his retirement 

Four-time Gold Glove-winning first baseman Eric Hosmer has announced his retirement.

Hosmer, 34, was the third overall pick in the 2008 draft. He enjoyed a 13-year career with the Royals, Padres, Red Sox, and Cubs for whom he was a career .276/.335/.427 (107 OPS+) hitter with 198 homers and 893 RBI. In addition to those Gold Gloves he was the All-Star Game MVP in 2016, won a Silver Slugger in 2017 and, of course, was a part of two Royals pennant-winning teams, including the 2015 World Series championship squad.

In conjunction with his retirement announcement Hosmer announced the launch of a new company, MoonBall Media, via which he plans to produce a new podcast with former Royals reliever Peter Moylan.

Good to hear that. I was worried that we might one day experience a decline in the number of podcasts hosted by a couple of Millennial white dudes. Now I can sleep more easily.

The Pirates: “comfortable with being mediocre”

There’s a big interesting story in The Athletic about the Pittsburgh Pirates and why they have, generally speaking, sucked for so damn long. Like any complex system there are a host of factors which determine success or failure, but ultimately it’s all about owner Bob Nutting being a cheap ass.

An ex-Pirates player who was around when the club had those three anomalous years of success in the mid-teens before payroll got slashed said of Nutting “He pulled out so quick. He was kind of comfortable stepping back and being mediocre. That permeates. That’s just what the organization is.” Given that the team’s record contract for an external free agent is so pathetically low— two years and $17 million for Russell Martin in 2012 — the word “mediocre” is probably an understatement.

Not that it’s just being cheap. The article also details the philosophical incoherence of the front office’s approach to player development.

Years ago the Pirates were considered to be well behind other clubs in advanced analytics and cutting edge training methods. In the past few years they have worked hard to correct that but, if anything, they’ve gone too far too fast, and most importantly, without any sort of well-though-out plan in the opposite direction.

To that end there’s an anecdote in the story about a movement coach the club has hired. Which is a good thing! Except rather than limiting him to teaching conditioning and physical movement to players, they’ve basically put him in charge of the organization’s hitting program for which he is totally unqualified. Meanwhile, the team fired well-respected minor league hitting instructor Jon Nunnally because it was ruffling people’s feathers that big league players preferred to work with him over the big league staff and the movement guy. This despite the fact that Nunnally was a favorite of franchise player Ke’Bryan Hayes for whom he was getting results.

It all starts and ends with Nutting. The only reason he’s not the absolute worst owner in baseball is that John Fisher decided to go all LeRoy Jenkins with the A’s and their move. But Nutting is cheap as hell, both with the Pirates and everything else he touches, and what was once a proud franchise in what was once a great baseball town is a husk of its former self.

Other Stuff

Trump plans to unleash unmitigated military fascism 

From the Washington Post, reporting on Trump’s plans to use the military to round up immigrants and throw them into camps:

And the architect of this would, without question, be Stephen Miller, who is one of the more odious figures America has produced in its history:

Such a plan would, with 100% certainty, descend into chaos and violence soon after implementation began. Civic life would come to a screeching halt. Families would be torn apart. There would be video on the nightly news of infants being ripped from the arms of their parents by men wearing tactical gear and black visors. Many people would die. Many more people — including legal immigrants, legal permanent residents, and U.S. citizens — would be unlawfully imprisoned, unlawfully deported, or worse, as there is no question that racism, as opposed to the law, would be the primary fuel for this rocket ship to Hell.

Right wing zealots and conspiracy theorists have long feared mobilization of armed forces on U.S. soil, claiming that such a thing was a harbinger of a military takeover and the smashing of the regime’s political enemies. They have hysterically warned that under such circumstances we would, at the very least, become a “papers please” country. Now Trump and Miller are actively campaigning on such a thing. A plan under which brown people, no matter their status, would be at risk, papers be damned. Amazingly, none of the right wing conspiracy theorists from back in the day seem to fear this sort of military exercise. They think it’s grand. Funny that.

If we reelect Trump there will be no coming back. America will become indistinguishable from a fascist state. We simply cannot survive it.

Pics or it didn’t happen, Elon

Last month Elon Musk tweeted that his company, Neuralink, had successfully implanted a chip into a human being’s brain. Just about every media outlet imaginable reported it, wholly uncritically, based solely on Musk’s tweet. This despite the fact that (a) Musk is a serial liar when it comes to his companies; (b) he has been charged with securities fraud for tweeting lies in an effort to manipulate stock prices; and (c) the only thing we’ve ever heard from a non-Musk source about Neuralink is news that it has had a notable track record of horribly killing animals during its testing of the brain chips.

On Monday night Musk claimed, again, without any evidence whatsoever, that the human patient implanted with the Neuralink brain chip has fully recovered and is able to control a computer mouse using their thoughts. Again, the media is simply transcribing Musk’s claims.

While Neuralink is not a publicly-traded stock, it is privately traded and there is still tremendous upside for Musk if there is heat and hype around the company. Given Musk’s track record, someone in a position to do so should demand that he provide actual evidence of his extraordinary claims. If he can’t, he should be investigated by the SEC for fraud. He’s done it before. He’ll do it again if no one stops him.

Tattoos

My wife Allison has something like 30 tattoos. I’ve lost count. Indeed, I probably shouldn’t even bother counting because she’s no doubt gonna get more. Maybe a lot more given that we now live about a mile from her tattoo studio of choice.

Some of Allison’s tattoos are super significant and relate deeply to her life or her interests. Others were total larks. Some are true works of art. Others are quirky doodles. Some were long-planned. Others were a function of “oh, I won an Instagram contest for a slot with this in-demand artist; I had better think of something before the appointment.” She’s never gotten a tattoo aimed at showing off or shocking people or trying to be cool. They’re all for her and they make her happy. She has about the healthiest attitude toward tattoos I think I’ve ever seen from anyone ever.

I, in contrast, have zero tattoos. Given who I married my lack of ink is obviously not a function of some aesthetic aversion, moral choice or value judgment. It’s mostly about where my life was when I was younger.

Tattoos weren’t as common when I was in my 20s as they are now. It was still not uncommon even as late as the mid-1990s to hear people say that tattoos were only for inmates and sailors. Or, I suppose by then, for aging aunts who go to the beach and get that little rose on their ankle that they think no one will notice but which seems nonetheless transgressive. That aside, my temperament as a young man was pretty old manish and my profession was SUPER stodgy and strongly discouraged that kind of personal expression, so I never really considered it.

Over the years I have loosened up a hell of a lot. Basically every friend I have — my son included — has tattoos. I work for myself and don’t have to give a crap what anyone thinks, professionally speaking. And I have certainly come to appreciate the artistry of a good tattoo. So, as I sit here today, there’s no reason for me to not have one, save one: I have never had an idea for a tattoo which excited me or motivated me enough to really consider it.

That lack of motivation is a function of a very common thought process non-inked people like me have difficulty breaking out of. It’s a two-part thing: (1) we think that if we get a tattoo it MUST be something that is TRULY SIGNIFICANT and which SAYS SOMETHING IMPORTANT about our lives and tastes; and (2) we fear that, as we grow older, whatever it is we settled on as a design may cease being TRULY SIGNIFICANT and will no longer SAY SOMETHING IMPORTANT about our lives and tastes and we will thus feel shame or embarrassment or that we’ll otherwise regret it.

The insights that well-adjusted tattooed people have in order to short-circuit that mind-trap — “dude, it’s nothing more than a marker of a place you were at one point in your life” or, alternatively, “dude, just fucking relax, it’s just a little drawing” — don’t sink in with overthinking people like me very easily. I still think of something Art Alexakis of the band Everclear once said while appearing on some talk show in the late 90s. He was talking about how a fan of his band come up to him at a show, pulled up the sleeve to his shirt, and showed him the “Everclear 4 Eva" tattoo he had gotten. Alexakis said “all I could think is, man, what if we end up really sucking in a few years?”

I’ve at least started to come around on all of that. I still think about what awful tattoos I might’ve gotten when I was 25 and how much they’d make me cringe now, but I’m a hell of a lot more comfortable with myself these days than I once was. At the same time, the sort of things I’m passionate about at this point in my life are a bit more straightforward, too. I actually considered getting something hiking-related last year. The only thing that stopped me from doing that was that almost every example of a hiking tattoo I could find online looked kinda stupid. A lot of muddy boots or crossed trekking poles. Nothing that really spoke to me. Maybe I’ll revisit that when it warms back up and I’m outside walking more again.

The other night Allison was looking at something on her phone and came across a tattoo someone had gotten of a coffee cup that was actually kind of neat. She showed it to me. The design itself was nothing I’d personally get for a couple of unimportant reasons, but she did say that, really, if I were to get a tattoo, it should totally be coffee-related given how much I friggin’ love coffee and given the name of the publication which pays my bills and just so happens to be my dream job. She had a point.

An occasional topic of conversation in my family is “what tattoo should dad get” so I put it out there in the family group chat:

Thanks, Anna. Always helpful.

I’m still not sure I’ll get one, but I am coming around to the idea of getting one with a cup of coffee of some sort on it. Maybe a good old diner cup like Agent Cooper’s. I’ll keep everyone posted. If I do do it, ya’ll be the first to know.

Have a great day everyone.