Cup of Coffee: January 18, 2024

Good morning! And welcome to Free Thursday!

Yeah, I know I did a free one on Monday but that was all just housekeeping. I wanna get back on a regular footing here now. This week has felt like the first few days of school. Or like after you move into a new house or something. I feel all out of sorts and I crave normality. Normality like Free Thursday.

So let’s just get into the newsletter today, shall we?

 The Daily Briefing

Blue Jays sign Cuban pitcher Yariel Rodríguez

The Blue Jays have signed free agent right-hander Yariel Rodríguez to a four-year, $32 million deal.

Rodriguez, 26, posted a 2.29 ERA with 161 strikeouts in 149.1 innings for the Chunichi Dragons from 2021-22. He did not pitch in 2023, however, as he wanted to come to the United States but Chunichi would not let him out of his contract. So he sat out the year. Chunichi released him in October.

Rodríguez has primarily worked as a setup man in Japan, but some believe the Jays will try to stretch him out to start. For what it’s worth he did start for the Cuban national team in the last Winter Baseball Classic, though they were two short starts, totaling fewer than eight innings.

As far as his stuff, Baseball America says Rodríguez's "four-seam fastball is now a plus pitch that sits 94-96 mph and touches 100 with natural cut" and his '"main secondary pitch is an above-average, 83-86 mph slider with vertical bite and solid depth." Those are the pitches, though, and BA thus believes that his limited mix, along with some spotty control, are what may keep him in the pen.

Some local broadcasts may be coming to Amazon Prime

Diamond Sports, the broadcaster whose Bally’s-themed regional sports networks handle a ton of MLB clubs and NBA and NHL teams, has been mired in bankruptcy proceedings for some time. Yesterday a fairly notable development was announced: Diamond has negotiated a plan with creditors that could allow it to continue to operate beyond 2024. Which is important because, until now, the expectation was that it’d limp through this year and then liquidate.

As The Athletic reported yesterday that Diamond has gotten Amazon to come on board, putting in $115-165 million towards a $450 million rescue package. A package, it is expected, will result in at least some local games for Diamond/Bally’s clubs to be broadcast on Amazon Prime. Oh, and they’d drop the Bally’s Sports branding in the deal.

There is still a ton to be worked out with all of that, however, as all of this was just sprung on the bankruptcy judge, MLB, the NHL, the NBA, and the other creditors in a status conference early yesterday morning. Everyone has to figure it out, the judge has to consider it and approve it and all of that.

On one level, any plan that might keep Diamond/Bally’s running and paying the clubs it broadcasts is one that would be preferable for most parties. Baseball may have some broader, long-term plans that involve owning its own local streaming and everything, but for now a deal that keeps the cable money coming in probably sounds good. The downside, of course, is that this pushes even more baseball games into more expensive premium spaces and further fragments an already highly-fragmented sports broadcast ecosystem which makes it hard for most fans and viewers to understand and to afford. Who ever asks what we want, though?

BTW: for an excellent discussion about sports broadcast fragmentation, go check out Eric Myerson’s post at his Rangelife newsletter yesterday, in which he talks about it in context with the NFL. There’s also a lot of talk about how SUPER cringey, awkward, and downright problematic and gross some “beloved” 1980s and 1990s pop culture was. It’s probably all stuff we’ve talked about here at one point or another over the years, but Eric puts it together oh so, well, I won’t say nicely, because there’s no putting a pretty face on that junk, but he puts it together well.

As for the baseball TV stuff: that’s all in the future. For now, nine of the 12 teams who are broadcast by Diamond/Bally’s are assured to be broadcast as usual in 2024. Three others — the Guardians, Rangers and Twins — are up in the air. They might remain on their Diamond/Bally’s stations or MLB may take them over like it did the Padres and Diamondbacks broadcasts last year. We probably won’t know until the eve of the 2024 season.

As for what I think of all of this writ-large, the wonderful Tipping Pitches put it best:

Play ball!

Volunteers wanted?

One of Cup of Coffee’s UK correspondents sent me this yesterday:

At the moment the cheapest price for any ticket for the London Series is £72.60, and that’s for way up in the corner nosebleed seats. The actual left field corner: £205.70. Behind the dugout: £418.00. Again, that’s for one ticket.

At those prices, you’d think MLB could maybe afford to pay stadium staff for those two games, ya know?

They put their mouth where the money is

Yesterday was the deadline for Nevada politicians running for office in 2024 to file their campaign finance reports. For our purposes a fun thing revealed was that 30 of the 38 Nevada legislators who voted "yes" to approve taxpayer money to go toward the Oakland A’s relocation to Las Vegas received at least $1,000 in campaign donations from the A’s and/or team owner John Fisher. A handful got as much as $10,000 in donations. Fisher is out there spending more on lawmakers than he is on his roster.

One of the most visible Nevada legislators in the runup to the stadium approval was state senator Fabian Doñate, who you may recall got into a heated exchange with A's president Dave Kaval during the hearings prior to the vote, after which headlines like “Senator roasts A’s President!” and the like appeared all over the place. Welp, Doñate got $2,000 from the A’s. And then he voted “yes” for the relocation deal. So much for “roasting.”

It’s not a surprise that these legislators all rolled over. Hell, most of them probably would’ve rolled over even without the donations. I say that because one thing politicians really love about publicly-funded stadium projects is that they get access to the club and its players and the ballpark and it all makes them feel like big shots. That’s the reason these folks get behind these deals. Because they’re kinda sexy. It’s the most basic kind of Babbit-esque boosterism there is. It doesn’t matter if it’s good policy or not.

Woman on trial for murder points the finger at Scott Erickson 

In the summer of 2020 former big league pitcher Scott Erickson was street racing a woman named Rebecca Grossman in Westlake Village, California. The two had been together at a restaurant and were heading toward home. Whose whom is unclear. The point is that they left the same place and were heading to the same place and were in a damn hurry to get there.

Erickson was in the lead as the two cars approached a crosswalk, driving at what one witness estimates was over 80 m.p.h. Erickson’s vehicle made it through the crosswalk without obvious incident. Grossman, however, struck and killed an 11-year-old boy and his 9-year-old brother. One of the boys was carried along on Grossman’s hood, flew off when the hit the brakes, after which she ran him over. She didn’t actually attempt to stop the car herself. The car just stopped because it had a safety feature which cut the engine after a front-end collision. Two younger brothers were pulled to safety by their parents, who were walking with them and who witnessed the horror.

Erickson, who has never been accused of hitting the boys or otherwise causing the collision which killed them, was charged with misdemeanor reckless driving. He pleaded guilty in early 2021 and was given community service. Grossman was charged with two counts of vehicular homicide, gross negligence, and hit-and-run resulting in death. She is set to go on trial later this month.

As the Los Angeles Times reports, things got interesting at a pretrial hearing yesterday. Her attorney tipped his defense, pointing the finger at Erickson. He says that sheriff’s investigators never checked Erickson’s SUV for damage and he suggested that his car could have hit one of the boys:

The lawyer is obviously claiming that Erickson lied and was actually driving his 2016 Mercedes which, unlike the 2007, has never been inspected. That he pulled the old switcheroo.

I dunno. It’s hard to know what to think of an argument like that without being there for it and knowing more than we know just from reading the paper. But, eh, it seems pretty desperate. Very “Matlock” or something. I guess you gotta go with what ya got but I wouldn’t put too much faith in that defense.

Other Stuff

The last word on fonts

And now a quick note for those of you who don’t like the serif font I’m using.

I keep having to go back to the old house to pick up things we forgot when we moved — it’s so sad; feels so empty! — and when I was doing that today I went to the settings and noticed that this was the font structure employed over at Substack:

Substack, design-wise, was pretty basic, so it didn’t let you pick specific fonts, only “basic sans,” “classic serif,” “fancy serif” and the like. But now we know that for the life of Cup of Coffee its body text was a serif font not unlike what I’m rolling with here.

Which leads me to suspect that the serif-haters in our midst are expressing — gasp! — ideology over genuine reactions to the Cup of Coffee user experience, which have been serifful since August 2020.

OK, that’s the last I’m gonna talk about that because there is nothing more harrowing than getting into it with font fundamentalists I’ve talked too much about fonts already.

WATFO?

From the Chicago Tribune: “A study’s surprise finding: Most workers want to be in the office more often.”

My first, snarky assumption based on the headline alone was that the “workers” polled here were all commercial real estate executives. Then I read the article and found that my snark impulse was not wrong! The poll was actually conducted by commercial architecture firm Gensler which, quite obviously, has a vested interest in businesses investing in office space.

As the article goes on, it talks about just how much workers want all manner of things most offices don’t have yet — cafes and libraries and comfortable common areas and collaborative spaces — but which can easily be designed and built . . . by companies like Gensler. The article also contains some insight from people at commercial real estate brokerage CBRE, who quite obviously also has a vested interest in in-office work.

I’ve not worked in an office for over 14 years so I’m really not the best person to talk to about the pros and cons of office work. And sure, I can totally see how in-person collaboration and in-office resources can be useful for a lot of people, depending on what they do and where they do it. But I also feel like commercial architecture and real estate folks are not the most reliable sources on that either and that this article is far more of a propaganda piece than it is objective reportage.

 RIP Pitchfork

Condé Nast bought Pitchfork in 2015, presumably because it thought Pitchfork was a good publication. Now it’s killing Pitchfork by merging it with men's magazine GQ and laying off basically everyone.

There was official talk from Condé Nast, of course, about how it’s just a restructuring aimed at getting the best out of its properties and how it’s committed to continuing to publish strong music journalism and blah, blah, blah, but don’t buy it. We’ve seen this movie a hundred times before across all manner of publications. Even if the name remains for a while it’ll go away soon or will become completely bereft of all that made people read Pitchfork to begin with.

Pitchfork has been around since 1996. And no, it’s not always been everyone’s cup of tea. It certainly spent a lot of time in its early years engaging in a lot of music snob gatekeeping. Though, in its defense, so too did just about everyone who talked about or wrote about music back in the 1990s. God that was a drag.

Over the years Pitchfork changed, however, and it diversified. While any given Pitchfork review might make my eyes roll with its preciousness and almost fetishized esotericism, the overall vibe of the publication became broader and more welcoming over the years. It reviewed the sorts of artists to which it and other critical outlets may not have given the time of day 25 years ago. Just as notably, it welcomed more women and more people of color to its staff in ways that the stereotypical angry white male dominated world of music criticism never considered doing way back in the day.

Which, as laid off features editor Jill Mapes noted, makes this new development highly ironic:

I’d say it’s the end of an era, but the era in which a smart, opinionated publication with a passionate readership could continue to survive under corporate ownership ended many, many years ago. That some have lingered on this long is an anomalous act of cosmic grace, nothing more.

I was not expecting this today

A lot of people like Pitchfork but are having it taken away from them. Then there are some things absolutely no one in the world was asking for yet are being visited upon us regardless of our desires:

Sorry. I saw that so you had to see it. That’s the only way I can quit thinking about it. You do with this information what you will.

Have a great day everyone.