Cup of Coffee: January 25, 2024

Good morning! And welcome to Free Thursday!

Let’s jump on in, shall we?

 The Daily Briefing

Brewers sign Rhys Hoskins to a two-year deal

The Brewers signed Rhys Hoskins two a two-year, $34 million deal late Tuesday night. There’s an opt-out after the first year.

Hoskins missed the 2023 season with a torn ACL, but he’s a career .242/.353/.492 (125 OPS+) hitter who has averaged 36 homers per 162 games over the course of his six-year career. That should fit in pretty nicely in the middle the Brewers’ lineup.

Joey Votto will not be back in Cincinnati

Reds general manager Nick Krall told season ticket holders at a Reds offseason event yesterday that the team does not plan to bring back Joey Votto. This is not terribly shocking, though I figure there were some folks still holding out hope.

Votto, of course, recently became a free agent after 17 seasons with the Reds. There have been reports that a few teams were kicking the tires on him, but there’s been nothing serious to report as of yet. I get it: the DH/1B market has been super slow and Votto is not exactly at the top of that market, so him being unsigned right now is not a shocker.

Though I think he should be near the top of teams’ lists, at least if they have a DH slot open. Sure, I know Votto past his prime, but I could TOTALLY see him pulling off one of those weird, random, flukey seasons in which an old, seemingly washed up master shakes off the rust and pulls a .295/.400/.450 line over the course of like 110 games out of his ass. Hell, if he signs with the Cardinals it’s almost guaranteed. They’ve practically got a patent on post-retirement seasons like that.

Of course he’s Joey Votto and the same sorts of things that motivate Earthlings like us don’t necessarily motivate him. Sure, maybe he takes a minor league deal with an invite to Spring Training like a lot of people in his position would. But it’s just as likely that he’ll hang ‘em up because he decided he wanted to learn to be a pastry chef or because he got his merchant marine union card and wants to set sail or something.

Trey Mancini signs a minor league deal with the Marlins 

Speaking of minor league deals, Trey Mancini has agreed to just such an agreement with the Marlins.

Mancini struggled mightily in 2023, hitting just .234/.299/.336 (71 OPS+) in 263 plate appearances for the Cubs. Prior to that he was a .265/.330/.457 (113 OPS+) hitter across six seasons. Last year’s struggles plus the minor league deal don’t suggest that anyone has particularly high hopes for Mancini regaining his form, but he’ll likely get more chances to do so in Miami than a lot of other places.

Who will be on the 2025 Hall of Fame ballot? 

With this year’s Hall of Fame voting out of the way let’s look ahead to who will be on the ballot next year, shall we?

Here are the returning candidates who at least have a puncher’s chance of making it, along with this year’s vote percentage in parenthesis:

• Billy Wagner (73.8%)

• Andruw Jones (61.6)

• Carlos Beltrán (57.1)

Wagner was only five votes short. Jones and Beltrán were each much farther away, but they’re trending in the proper direction. So all three of these guys are at least in play next year, with Wagner seeming like a certainty.

One of the two new fellas next year is a mortal lock and the other, I believe, get in within his first couple of shots on the ballot. They are:

Ichiro Suzuki: The only open question is whether he will be unanimous. Which, yeah, he totally should be. The dude was a 10-time All-Star and the 2001 MVP and Rookie of the Year. He led the league in hits seven times and won two batting titles. He had 3,089 hits in the U.S. and another 1,278 in Japan. He scored 1,420 runs and stole 509 bases while playing great defense. He’s inner circle; and

CC Sabathia: Sabathia won 251 games and struck out over 3,000 batters while winning a Cy Young and finishing in the top five four other times. He was the 2009 ALCS MVP and pitched in ten postseasons. There will no doubt be a brigade of voters and commentators who will note that his ERA — 3.74 (116 ERA+) — was not especially sparkling by Hall of Fame standards, but I also think that (a) Hall of Fame standards for starting pitchers have to change in order to track how starting pitcher usage has changed; and (b) Sabathia was pretty much the first, early gold standard of what a workhorse starter could be in this new era. The fact that he was well-liked by his teammates, his coaches, his opponents, and just about everyone else helps. As does a personal story in which he fought an addiction and came out strong on the other side doesn’t hurt either. Maybe he’s not first ballot, but I suspect it won’t take him too long.

As for the rest:

• I think Félix Hernández will get a lot of ink spilled about him, and I certainly think he was on a Hall of Fame trajectory for the first ten years of his career, but his abrupt falloff will likely keep him from getting serious consideration;

• Dustin Pedroia is in the same boat as Hernández in that he looked like a Hall of Famer for a good while until injuries hit him hard in his 30s. There have been a lot of second baseman who have followed that pattern, unfortunately. There should be a Hall of Prematurely Washed Second Basemen or a Carlos Baerga Award for those guys;

• Finally, the “Thanks for playing; at least Jay Jaffe will write a lot about you next December” All-Stars: Troy Tulowitzki, Curtis Granderson, Hanley Ramírez, Russell Martin, Adam Jones, Brian McCann and Fernando Rodney. Though I suppose if Rodney does come back this year as he says he wants to, he could reset his counter.

My guess is that next year we get Wagner and Ichiro elected and that’s it. The real race will be to see if Sabathia consumes more oxygen than the continuing candidacies of Beltrán and Jones do, which is entirely possible.

Other Stuff

Let’s get Old Gator to Albuquerque 

Most of you know Old Gator, the Dean of HardballTalk/Cup of Coffee comments.

Some of you, but maybe not most of you, know that a couple of years ago Old Gator was laid up bad by a bum ticker and many related maladies that had him in the ICU for a month and have had him partaking in all manner of physical and mental rehab experiences, all of which probably suck, even if they’re necessary.

What many of you also know is that Old Gator — whose real name is Rick Wallach — is the foremost Cormac McCarthy scholar on the planet. What’s more, he has written a new paper on McCarthy’s work. What’s more, the 2024 Southwest American Culture Conference is being held in Albuquerque, New Mexico next month and Rick would love nothing more than to be able to attend in person and present his work. Unfortunately, this is America and medical bills are no joke. Because of that, Rick getting to the Conference is a financial challenge. Rowena has set up a GoFundMe to help that along:

As you’ll see if you click through, it’s even most of the way there. But we do need to put it over the top if we can. And if it hits that top, which seems modest to me, let’s try to put it a little bit beyond that so Rick can watch Rowena eat a big juicy steak someplace while he eats his veggies. It seems only fair.

Seriously, though: Rick has come back from a lot and I’d love nothing more than for him to be able to keep doing the work he loves in the way he loves it. And if that means getting him booked in steerage on a Breeze Airlines redeye to New Mexico next month, I wanna make that happen. Thank you for your support.

Racism made simple

Ever since that plane had the door fly off a few weeks ago racist right-wingers have used it as an excuse to go after Boeing and the airlines for having diversity, equity, and inclusion policies (DEI). If you are asking why those two things would go together at all, I laud you for your ability to avoid all of the dumbest and most depressing political commentary and the circle jerks which surrounds it.

Most of you, I suspect, understand exactly why such an equation has been made: almost the entire animating force of right wing politics these days are the fearful, reactionary grievances of straight white men who no longer feel like they control everything. As such, any and all bad things — or, for that matter, even neutral things — that happen to that class of folks are blamed on racial, ethnic, and religious minorities, gay people, and trans people, regardless of how nonsensical it is to do so. DEI policies mean that, sometimes, white men don’t get absolutely everything they feel they are entitled to. Boeing had a plane with a mechanical defect. Boeing has DEI policies. Ergo, the DEI policy caused the mishap.

That’s dumb enough on the surface, but like all malignant things, it has quickly spread. Now, instead of using mishaps as a means of going after DEI policies in at least some superficially reasoned way, a shortcut has been developed in which the very term “DEI” has been turned into a slur, the sort of which allows for discourse that would make unreconstructed racists of the 1950s blush. Stuff like this:

It's amazing to me just how much work right wing jackasses put in over the decades to find euphemisms to mask their blatant racism only to have modern right wing jackasses simply spew out every possible thing short of the actual n-word. Those folks who tried to walk some line from the 1960s through the early 2000s really have to be kicking themselves for all of their wasted effort right now, when absolutely unadorned racism is considered completely acceptable to a wide swath of people on the political right.

Film Locations, Then and Now 

This item turned into a ramble. I hope it’s at least an occasionally interesting ramble but I can’t be too sure. Sorry, but my mind is scrambled this week so we’re just gonna have that.

In my never-ending quest to passively sit on my ass, slack-jawed, with my laptop balancing on my belly while I fool myself into believing that I’m enriching my life, I recently encountered and followed a Facebook group called “Film Locations, Then and Now.” There are a lot of other ones like this, of course, with names like “Historic Film Locations” or whatever. They’re all basically the same and they’re all exactly what they sound like. They mostly feature people taking their own photos on the site of an old film location and then posting both it and a screenshot from the movie next to each other so people can see how the setting has changed or how it hasn’t changed over the years.

It’s such a simple idea but it has really sucked me in. Partially because of the “oh, look, that’s where the movie was filmed” thing. But also because I’ve always been a sucker for then/now photos of almost any place. I can only vaguely articulate the reasons why that kind of stuff fascinates me but it’s definitely tied up in a lingering fascination I have with the transitory nature of humanity, my appreciation for the power of entropy, and my love of the Shelley poem “Ozymandias.” We’re here today and gone tomorrow and I can’t decide if it’s cooler to see photos which coldly bring that point home or photos which show defiance of that reality, if for only a short time. So I sort of gawk at both examples as I scroll on by.

There are two primary genres of photos from the Historic Film Locations I like the best. The first one is the simple “here’s where this scene was shot, spot the differences!” post. Here’s one from a 1919 Charlie Chaplain short called “A Day’s Pleasure”:

Here’s a more recent one, from “Jaws”

I look at these sorts of photos for a long time, noting changes to buildings and landscaping and things. I’m always surprised at how relatively quickly large trees can grow — check out that monster in the Chaplin pic which didn’t even exist 104 years ago! — or how often shrubbery gets ripped out, replaced, and then ripped out again. At the same time, there are some photos in the group which will show a crooked “One Way” sign next to an old house from a movie shot in 1966 and a photo of the same place in 2022 has the same damn crooked “One Way” sign. Some things never change.

Another thing that gets me about this genre is just how hard some contributors try to get the same angle and positioning as the original photo and how some people don’t give a crap and just take broad wide shots of a place. It leads to GREAT arguments in the comments about who REALLY cares about the project, such as it is. There are also big arguments about how taking photos of houses on studio backlots which get used for multiple shows and movies — the Griswold’s house in “Christmas Vacation” was also the house in “American Beauty” and many other films! — is “cheating” or “low-hanging fruit.” There is also a lot of ire surrounding photos of mostly undifferentiated countryside in Australia or Michigan which people post as “Mad Max” or “Evil Dead” sites. They may be accurate, but they’re just country roads, fields or forests with few defining characteristics, so the purists get angry. At the same time, there are also smartasses who post photos of ocean water that could be from anyplace and post the words “Titanic” or “The Abyss” or something next to it. God, I love looking into obscure subcultures like that.

The second genre of posts I like involves movies from the 1960s or 1970s which used then-new Brutalist or modernist architecture to portray futuristic worlds, some utopian, some dystopian. Stuff like an urban park in Fort Worth, Texas being used as a location for “Logan’s Run”:

Or Brunel University in London which was used in “A Clockwork Orange”:

Another great example of this is the movie “Conquest of the Planet of the Apes” which uses the modernist architecture of the then-relatively new Century City area of Los Angeles to suggest some cold, soulless, bleak future.

I’ve talked about this before, I believe, but though I am well aware of both the practical and aesthetic flaws with a lot of Brutalist and modernist architecture, I’m nonetheless fascinated with it for a number of reasons. Not least of which is the fact that when I was a kid that was the new stuff and in those days new stuff was still forward-looking. Just a few years later, in the 1980s, it seemed like the whole world began crawling up its own ass, employing a postmodern aesthetic that reflected the conservative political fascination with looking backwards rather than to the future. Which is to say that, yeah, a lot of Brutalist and modernist buildings are ugly, but at least they aspired to something new and unknown.

Ok, that’s all I got on this. I just wanted you all to know that I’ve been wasting an inordinate amount of time on these Facebook groups. You know, in case you held the mistaken idea that I have an interesting life or something.

Take it with a grain of salt

From the BBC:

That scientist would be chemistry professor Michelle Francl of Bryn Mawr, who after reviewing both ancient Chinese texts about tea-making and by studying the chemistry of tea, concluded that a tiny amount of salt can act as a blocker to the receptor which makes tea taste bitter, especially when the team has been steeped too long. The idea is that adding a pinch of table salt - a basically undetectable amount - one will counteract the bitterness of the tea.

That all sounds reasonable, but then you have to take into account the fact that scientific stuff which touches on anything relevant to everyday, normal life is rarely if ever reported accurately. So rather than say “an actual chemist made an observation in a book which checks out both scientifically and historically, even if it sounds weird to us” it was reported in the UK as “CRAZY AMERICAN THINKS WE SHOULD PUT SALT IN OUR BLOODY TEA!” Which, to be fair, is the same sort of thing we Americans do all the time when confronted with other cultures doing anything different than we would with respect to something over which we claim cultural supremacy.

The best part of this is that things have become so pitched that the U.S Embassy in London has gotten involved:

It's profoundly telling about both my own mental state and the state of the world that literally the only thing that has made me feel patriotic in what seems like ages is this act of abject trolling.

Whatever. Serves ‘em right after the horrible things those buggers do with coffee over there.

Have a great day everyone.