Cup of Coffee: February 8, 2024

Good morning! And welcome to Free Thursday!

First off, apologies in advance if there are more typos than usual today. I was out a bit last night, checking out a performance by Complexions Contemporary Ballet, which does a show called “STAR DUST: From Bach to Bowie” that hit Columbus last night. The first half was modern dance set to Bach and Beethoven. The second half was modern dance set to Bowie songs. And folks, it worked. The first number in the second act was set to “Lazarus" from Bowie's final album “Black Star,” and my god that one still hits me in the feels.

All of which is to say that I was in no condition to do a ton of pre-bedtime editing, so we get what we get today. I hope that’s OK.

The Daily Briefing

Gary Sánchez signs with Milwaukee

Catcher Gary Sánchez has signed with the Milwaukee Brewers on a one-year $7 million deal with an option.

Sánchez continued to be one of the weirder players in baseball in 2023, starting the season with the Giants, then going to the Mets and barely playing at either place before finding a decent home in San Diego. There he played 72 games and hit .218/.292/.500 (116 OPS+) with 19 homers. And, despite his reputation as a poor defensive catcher, he had some pretty spiffy framing metrics with the Padres and his pitching staff gave him frequent kudos. Which was not exactly something he got at his previous stops. It was all rather disorienting.

Figure he’ll share time behind the plate with William Contreras and serve as an occasional DH as well.

Hahd Knahcks

Major League Baseball and the Boston Red Sox announced yesterday that a Netflix documentary crew will be following the club for the entire 2024 season, beginning in spring training, with the end product airing in 2025. So it’s “Hard Knocks” with months and months of lead time and a massively expanded production calendar I guess.

This could be cool I suppose, but I worry that baseball players will be boring as hell in this kind of thing. The conformity impulse is so, so strong with ballplayers that I’m struggling to imagine any of the documentary subjects actually breaking out or being interesting. Hope I’m wrong about that, of course.

Another concern I saw some people voicing about this on social media is that the 2024 Red Sox are not expected to be particularly good nor, in all likelihood, will they be notably terrible. They could very well finish last in the AL East because the AL East is gonna be tough, but they won’t be monumentally horrible. They’ll be outside of the postseason conversation but they will not be some 105-loss nightmare or anything. All of which might sap the production of drama, be it inspirational or ignominious.

Personally I’m not too concerned about that because I think it’ll be more interesting to see a baseline baseball team going about its business without the narrative crutch of a pennant race or super low lows. But again, who knows?

When you’ve really excited the local fan base

Even the worst teams usually sell out Opening Day or come something close to it. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a team offer a buy-one, get-one Opening Day offer. That’s the stuff you save for the Tuesday night game in late April. Great job, John Fisher.

What stadium tax abatements are costing us

Whenever the costs of publicly-funded stadiums and arenas come up we mostly hear about the out-of-pocket costs. How much the government — and, by extension, taxpayers — are forking over directly to help build and operate place. Beyond that we hear about land acquisition costs — which are often gifts of real estate to the team owners — subsidiary development rights, cheap loans, and the like.

One thing we hear less about are property tax abatements. That is, the government simply agreeing to forego collecting property taxes from the stadium, sometimes for a period of many years, sometimes forever. Which, despite what someone with an agenda might tell you, is still a cost. A giant shiny building worth a billion dollars or more on Parcel A-346 would normally bring in $X million in property tax revenue. Now it’s not. Since there’s no such thing as a free lunch, the money has to come from somewhere. Or, more to the point, not be spent elsewhere. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying to you.

Last year a book about that came out about that. It was written by a man named Geoffrey Propheter’s and it’s called Major League Sports and the Property Tax. Which, straightforward enough. I have not read it, but Neil deMause of Field of Schemes has, and he reviewed it yesterday. The key takeaway:

Anyone who lives in a city which is run by real estate developers and city officials beholden to real estate developers — which describes Columbus, Ohio, that’s for damn sure — knows that property tax abatements aren’t just given to the owners of sports teams. They’re given to the owners of office buildings, condos, shopping malls, and “mixed-use developments” which are combinations of all three of those things. They’re also given to businesses ranging from startups to full-blown factories from legacy companies.

These abatements are handed out like candy, in fact, characterized as “incentives” for much-needed development. But rarely if ever is it asked if the incentive is truly necessary. If the business or property owner would, actually, not have built where and when they did without the incentive. Sometimes, I am sure, they would not have. Like, say, when a company is truly looking to relocate and is pitting a bunch of different cities against one another. But I’m pretty sure that most of the projects would still be built. The high-rise condo they’re putting up just north of downtown Columbus was not gonna go up in Akron without the tax break. The New York Yankees were not gonna build the new Yankee Stadium in Stamford, Connecticut.

Now think about the state of public school funding in your city. Like most places, it’s probably funded by property taxes. It probably shouldn’t be because that’s inherently unequal and unfair, but it probably is all the same. How much money that would otherwise go to education goes right into a billionaire team owner’s or a multi-billion dollar real estate development company’s bank account?

Well, thanks to Propheter’s book, we now have a pretty good idea, and it’s fucking obscene.

Other Stuff

I’m feeling attacked 

Because I am an educated, middle aged, cat-owning white person with liberal leanings there are all manner of “New Yorker” and “New Yorker”-esque single panel cartoons which speak to me and/or attack me on a personal level. I’m just that kind of a cliche, I suppose.

But when they start making the subject of the cartoons which speak to me and/or attack me LOOK JUST LIKE ME, well, it’s a bit too much to bear:

At least he doesn’t have glasses on. If he had glasses on I’d be filing lawsuits. But yeah, this is deadly accurate.

The NYPD Yankees

The New York Yankees have a seriously outdated, stodgy, and conservative facial hair policy that almost everyone wishes they’d change. Now the NYPD has decided to ape it, banning beards. They’re going to go more conservative with uniforms too, banning open colors and restricting when officers can wear knit caps and things like that.

Normally when such restrictions are placed on a group of workers it’s the bosses who like it the most and the rank and file who rebel. These being cops, however, a whole lot of ‘em seem to like the idea of mandating an old school conformity:

That quote stands on its own as a banger, but it’s even better if you imagine it as the money line from the pre-credits scene of a “Police Academy” reboot.

Actually, you don’t even have to imagine it in a reboot. There was a scene early in the first “Police Academy” movie that was basically this:

• Police Chief: [Lamenting the newly relaxed admission requirements for the Academy] They all used to be the right color, the right height, the right weight. And they all had Johnsons, Lassard!

• Cmndt. Lassard: Johnsons?

• Chief: You know...

• [motions to his groin]

• Cmndt: Oh, yes.

• Chief: There were Johnsons as far as the eye can see.

• Cmndt: Yes. And what a lovely sight it was.

So good for the new-look NYPD.

And yes, I got lost in a “Police Academy” Wikipedia hole as I was writing this. The best part, among many great parts, was that the film’s producers considered Michael Keaton, Tom Hanks, and Judge Reinhold for the role of Mahoney. Bruce Willis actually auditioned for it but didn’t get it.

Talk about sliding doors, man. Nearly 40 years of Hollywood history would’ve been rewritten if Hanks or Willis got that role. Can you imagine? I bet Steve Guttenberg does all the time.

“Blazing Saddles” at 50

Yesterday was the 50th anniversary of the release of the classic “Blazing Saddles.” A movie so full of jokes — some amazing, some so intentionally dumb that they’re likewise amazing, albeit on a completely different level — that you probably laughed just thinking about it.

There’s a lot of bad political/social discourse that invokes “Blazing Saddles” these days. Most of it coming from older people who are upset that you can’t casually use racial slurs anymore and claim that “you couldn’t make ‘Blazing Saddles’ today!” Even a lot of people who should know better think this, as you routinely see that line parroted in the media:

The argument, such as it is, is that people are “too sensitive” now and that modern audiences can’t handle humor which invokes race. These people fail to appreciate, however, that there’s a massive difference between humor about race and racist humor. It’s apparently lost on all of these people that “Blazing Saddles” is a deeply, deeply anti-racist movie in which the racists are the idiot bad guys. “Blazing Saddles” punches up and you can always, always punch up and mock the racists, even today.

It doesn’t get mentioned nearly as much, but “Blazing Saddles” is also an anti-capitalist movie. I mean, the entire plot of the movie involves evil business and political interests cynically attempting to leverage ordinary people's bigotry in an effort to obtain power and financial gain via the running of the railroad through Rock Ridge. People say that movie couldn't be made today? Bitch, we're living in that movie.

Not that those folks are completely wrong. Indeed, I actually don’t think you could make “Blazing Saddles” today. Just for different reasons than they think.

One reason you couldn’t make it today is that the entire cast except for 97 year-old Mel Brooks is dead and Hollywood can’t seem to do remakes without a winking cameo to the original vehicle. If Gene Wilder was still with us and was spry enough to play the governor, the green light might come faster.

Another reason you couldn’t make it today is because westerns don’t do too well at the box office anymore. Find some way to move it to the 1990s and have it revolve around the invention of some consumer product and you might have something.

The biggest reason you couldn’t remake “Blazing Saddles” is that there is almost no appetite for good political or social satire these days. What passes for that is so dumb and obvious that it’s almost embarrassing to watch. Mel Brooks has never been the most light-handed of filmmakers, but the dude is funny as hell and somewhere along the line people interested in satire forgot how important that part of the equation really is.

Those things aside you could totally make “Blazing Saddles.” All you’d have to do is to sand-off the use of the n-word in the screenplay, as we’ve collectively, and wisely, I think, decided that it’s not a good idea for white people to use that word even with our tongues in our cheeks like Brooks did it. That wouldn’t change much, actually. You’d totally make up for it with some good jokes that could be had as the townspeople spend more time than they did in the 1974 movie going out of their way to disingenuously explain that they’re not, actually, racists. And you’d have to update Harvey Korman’s character’s name because no one remembers who Hedy Lamarr was anymore.

Somebody go back and get a shit-load of dimes. I’m done for the day.

Have a great day everyone.