Cup of Coffee: July 18, 2024

Good morning! And welcome to Free Thursday!

What a week.

[Editor: When you wrote all of this it was only Wednesday, Lemon]

Yeah.

And That Happened

Note: due to the All-Star break, we now bring you a special “Classic” version of “And That Happened.” The following originally ran in the Cup of Coffee Pamphlet on July 18, 1932.

Tigers 8, Nationals 6, Tigers 2, Nationals 1: Even though it wasn’t a Sunday the Tigers and Senators played two. That was necessitated by the city’s streets being taken over by The Bonus Army the day before, which required the deployment of General Douglas MacArthur and two cavalry units to clear them. By the time they were done those mooching hobos were on the run, but it soon became too dark for baseball, necessitating the twinbill. Gee Walker and Billy Rhiel each drove in four for the Tigers in the first game while Earl Whitehill scattered 13 hits. And, unlike McArthur, he didn’t need tear gas and bayonets to scatter ‘em. The only General who took a loss in Washington yesterday was General Crowder, the Nationals hurler, who gave up two runs on six hits while going the distance. Maybe if he had shown some gumption and used torches to set fire to the Tigers clubhouse like MacArthur did to the Bonus Army shantytown along the Anacostia River he too would’ve tasted victory.

Red Sox 4, Indians 2: Smead Jolley drove in two via two RBI doubles and Johnny Watwood and Ed Connolly each knocked in a run. I was listening to this game on the radio but, I’ll admit, I was distracted by news of out of Altona Germany I was hearing from the wireless setup the missus keeps in the parlor. It turns out a bunch of violent right wing upstarts marched in Prussia, which seems like a precursor to the larger destabilization of Germany and, hoo boy, that could be trouble. I’m not too worried, though, because while President Paul von Hindenburg is 84 years old and has seemed pretty shaky lately, there’s no way those brownshirts could possibly take over with his steady opposition. Never replace a respected politician, even one who seems to have lost his effectiveness, even in a time crisis, I say.

Giants 13, Cubs 3: Freddie Lindstrom went 2-for-5 with a couple of doubles and knocked in three, Johnny Vergez went 4-for-5 with a triple, and Doc Marshall drove in two of his own. It fell to old hand Burleigh Grimes to perform some mop-up work for Chicago. At that point, however, any opposition to the Giants’ onslaught was about as effective as using the Stimson Doctrine to get the Japanese out of Manchuria.

Yankees 6, White Sox 4: Lou Gehrig and Tony Lazzari hit home runs but Babe Ruth didn’t. Indeed, the Bambino has only hit four round-trippers all month. I’m calling my shot: Ruth will never have a big moment again, in 1932 or ever. The Sultan of Swat is kaput.

Athletics 8, Browns 1: Are there any cities more quintessentially American League than Philadelphia and St. Louis? I can’t think of one! Anyway, Mickey Cochrane went 3-for-3 with a home run and Jimmy Foxx knocked in two without even getting a hit. Just an obscenely bad performance from Browns pitcher George Blaeholder. Though not as obscene as the upcoming cover of Vogue magazine that my editor just showed me:

This Depression has been tough on America, but it’ll be pornography like this which will drag us straight to the gates of Hell.

Phillies 5, Pirates 4: This game’s participants included men named Kiddo, Jumbo, Pinky, Arky, and Pie. It’s nice to see so many traditional names in a box score. Most of those spoiled Gen-Skidooers of the Gilded Age became fancy-pants parents and now we’re overrun by silly monikers like “Michael” and “Robert.” It’s shameful. Bring back tradition, I say. More guys named “Muddy” and “Sloppy,” please.

Dodgers 7, Cardinals 4: Van Lingle Mungo wasn’t sharp but he kept the Bums in the game before the Brooklyn bats mounted a late comeback. Not a surprise. That Mungo is young but he strikes me as a cool customer. No dramatics about him. Always keeps his head on the level and doesn’t create unnecessary problems. Ask anyone.

The Daily Briefing

Evan Longoria is unofficially retired

Longtime Rays and Giants third baseman — and short time Diamondbacks third baseman — Evan Longoria told Marc Topkin of the Tampa Bay Times that he’s not officially retired but that he’s pretty unofficially retired:

Longoria isn’t dumb so he knows that’s not gonna happen. And given that he wasn’t even briefly signed by anyone this year pretty much means he is, in fact, retired. I’m guessing all we’re waiting for is for him to talk to the Rays and for them to arrange an “Evan Longoria Day” sometime next season for which he’ll sign a one-day contract to retire as a Ray and, probably, get his number retired in the bargain.

For his career Longoria hit .264/.333/.471 (119 OPS+) with 342 homers and 1,159 RBI over the course of 16 seasons. He was the 2008 Rookie of the Year, a three-time All-Star, a three-time Gold Glove winner, and he received MVP votes in six different seasons. Not too shabby. Not too damn shabby at all.

What was your favorite part of Dallas Keuchel’s Brewers career?

Dallas Keuchel cleared waivers and elected free agency after being designated for assignment by the Brewers. I hadn’t seen the DFA happen, but I suppose I miss a lot of stuff. Not that it was hard to miss Keuchel’s tenure with Milwaukee. He made four starts for the Brewers, posting a 5.40 ERA while giving up 23 hits in 16.2 innings, striking out 11, and walking eight.

I’ve declared Keuchel’s career dead like three times already so I won’t do it again, but dudes, it’s probably dead now.

The White Sox signed Nick Senzel

This actually happened during the All-Star Game but it was made official yesterday: the White Sox signed Nick Senzel.

Senzel was cut by the Nationals earlier this month after posting a .663 OPS (91 OPS+) with seven homers and one steal in 64 games. That actually stands as the best sustained performance of his six-year career, the first five seasons of which came with the Reds. They were five mostly disappointing years for the once highly-touted prospect, too. (.239/.302/.369 77 OPS+).

At least with the White Sox Senzel should get a little playing time which could, at least in theory, give him a platform to show teams that he’s worth signing this winter.

The White Sox DFA’d Martín Maldonado

The White Sox designated catcher Martín Maldonado for assignment last night.

Maldonado, 37, signed a one-year $4.25 million deal before this season to be a defensive-first, pitcher-whisperer kind of veteran. With him you accept some poor hitting but (a) even his defense was down this year; and (b) his hitting was so poor — .119/.174/.230. (14 OPS+) — that it’d be impossible for even a crap team like the Chisox to continue to send him out there. And that line may have been a bit deceiving: over his last five games before the break Maldonado went 6-for-15 with three homers.

Stadium corruption will be on display in St. Pete today

The Tampa Bay Rays have spent years and years trying to get a new stadium. Today, it appears, they will finally have something official in the works as the St. Petersburg City Council is poised to vote on a development agreement for a new stadium and mixed-use project. If it all goes as planned, the Rays will begin play in a new ballpark in 2028.

A preliminary vote a couple of months back suggests that the Rays will get what they want here. Still, there are council members who are opposed. One is named Richie Floyd. While he opposes the stadium deal he sees that it’s going to pass, so he at least tried to make the best of it. From Axios:

And that, folks, is why so many of these things pass when elected officials, rather than the public, vote on such projects. At bottom, public officials feel important and special — regular VIPs — when they do the bidding of sports owners. They get photo ops and they get to use the teams’ names and logos and stuff as part of their whole branding and campaigning. And, as we see here, they get free luxury box tickets they could never afford on a public servant’s salary.

It’s as corrupt as hell, all the way down.

The BBWAA tries to get ahead of gambling scandals

Baseball writers vote on awards. They know who they’ll vote for ahead of time, they probably have a good idea about who at least some of their colleagues are voting for ahead of time, and they spend a lot of time cranking out columns about awards voting in the leadup to the actual awards unveiling. Also: people now bet on awards legally, which creates a potential ethical problem for writers given the foregoing.

To that end, the Baseball Writers Association of America — an organization that doesn’t have the guts to accept me as a member! — has adopted some rules about all of this. Which, hilariously, I could not find a single published article about so I’m going with a light paraphrase of Maury Brown’s summary of the adopted rules, as he tweeted ‘em out yesterday:

• BBWAA members who have been selected to vote for any of the major awards (MVP, Rookie of the Year, Cy Young, Manager of the Year) are not allowed to wager or advise others on wagering nor communicate their vote ahead of official announcement;

• BBWAA members may not create or produce any MLB-related content in a full-time, part-time or freelance capacity for a media outlet that offers, primarily, gambling content; and

• BBWAA members who create a conflict of interest involving sports betting will be in violation of the BBWAA’s ethical expectations and will be subject to disciplinary action which could include suspension of voting privileges or suspension and/or expulsion from the BBWAA.

To be fair, most ballwriters I follow, which constitutes the majority of the active, award-voting members of the group, already adhere to most of this stuff. The people who are tasked with voting for one award — and they’re only tasked with one award per year — will almost never talk about that award in any specific way until after the results are made public. Sometimes they telegraph their vote, but that began long before gambling was so common. Many have reeled even that modest talk in over the past few years. I don’t think anyone explicitly said they were reeling it in for gambling reasons as opposed to basic propriety and integrity, but the same considerations apply.

I’m likewise unaware of any awards voters who are employed by outlets which are “primarily” gambling concerns but, man, ESPN and a lot of the other historically mainstream sites are making such distinctions difficult to make. I suspect at some point this part of things will be revisited or at least publicly challenged given how there’s an increasingly fine line between what is and is not considered gambling content these days.

Anyway, a good move by the BBWAA to head off what could’ve been a scandal, even if it would’ve been a pretty damn minor and possibly hilarious scandal.

Other Stuff

Getting stung by Beehiiv

This week, like the week before and the 26 weeks before that going back to January, have seen me spending a significant time each day dealing with newsletter delivery and functionality issues.

This week a bunch of Comcast customers have had their emails held up for no real reason. It’s happened with other email platforms in the past. Many of you get emails bounced for no reason. Some of you are double charged for no clear reason. Others are not notified when subscription renewals are imminent or when subscription renewals fail due to expired credit cards or something. Some of this is directly the fault of Beehiiv. Some of it is a function of subscriber email servers being suspicious of Beehiiv emails which, of course, is ultimately on Beehiiv too. On a personal level, I have been able to write the whole newsletter the night before this week and have been scheduling it to go out at 6AM. It publishes on the Beehiiv website at that time but it has taken anywhere from 10-25 minutes each morning for the emails to actually go out. No one at Beehiiv has managed to explain to me why that is yet, and it’s not for my lack of asking.

To say this has taken a toll on my mood is an understatement. The fact that I have to take so much time away from writing each day to track down and resolve delivery and subscription problems is a drag (note: if you do have problems, PLEASE still contact me about them! I am bitching here, not telling you all to suffer without asking for help). But if it keeps up this is obviously the sort of thing that will cause many subscribers to just leave, believing that it’s not worth the hassle or the money

At the moment Beehiiv says it’s trying to work through this stuff. Indeed, I’ve been in direct contact with its CEO, Tyler Denk, for several days now. But it says a lot that (a) it requires that level of escalation to fix what should be basic functionality problems; and (b) the only reason I could even elevate things to the CEO level was because I was a big dick about it on Twitter the other day, getting his attention after so many efforts to work through Beehiiv’s tech support got me nowhere. I’d like to think that going all Karen and talking to the manager about this will right the ship, but at this point I’m pretty discouraged.

Switching platforms back in January was pretty daunting and exhausting on my end and was probably at least moderately annoying on your end. And that’s before you all encountered the functionality issues discussed above and the substandard commenting system we’re all still dealing with. Because of that hassle and because I just did it six months ago, I don’t have an immediate plan to switch platforms again. But I am at least thinking about it and I’ve had a couple of preliminary discussions about it. At the moment Ghost seems somewhat attractive — I considered them in January as well but went with Beehiiv for reasons I can’t quite recall now — but again, I’ve not done anything yet and. If I do act I will do so more deliberately this time and I will give you all plenty of warning.

I mention all of this partially to keep you in the loop, but also because your feedback, be it here or in private messages to me, is always welcome. Before you contact me, however, know that, to the extent I have made inquiries so far, I have communicated some absolute, non-negotiable requirements, which include (a) actually robust commenting; and (b) seamless migration as far as currently existing subscriptions, sale prices, comps, gifts, etc being accounted for. I will not consider anything that will require you all to reenter credit card information again, for example, and I will continue to use Stripe as a payment processor if I do change platforms.

But yeah, I’m at the end of my rope here. I wanted to let you all know that. And to let you know that I am committed to keeping this place running as best as it can. Which, frankly, is usually better than it’s been doing of late.

The latest on Biden

As the world, somehow, quickly forgets that one of the nominees for president almost had his head turned into pink mist five days ago, we have returned to our nation’s least-favorite reality show, “Should Joe Biden Stay in the Race?”

Yesterday afternoon three things specifically related to that came bubbling out:

• California Congressman Adam Schiff, who is running for Senate against Steve Garvey, called for Biden to bow out. This came days after Senator Chuck Schumer did the same;

• There were multiple reports about how Nancy Pelosi, a backbencher now, but a close ally of Schiff and still very powerful and influential behind the scenes, was working the phones and stuff, with the idea that she is trying to orchestrate Biden’s exit somehow; and

• The New York Times reported that, earlier this week, Biden said that he would reevaluate whether to stay in the presidential race if — and presumably only if — a doctor told him he had a medical condition that made leaving necessary.

After all of that I tweeted this:

Then, like two hours later, it was announced that Biden has COVID. You may put that wherever you’d like on the severity-of-ailments continuum.

So, here’s my thing: I remain mostly agnostic as to whether or not Biden stays in the race or should stay in the race. As I said last week, he should bow out if he can’t campaign and look sharp doing it, but unlike some of my friends on the left who seem convinced that him quitting solves every problem, I could see things going messily sideways if he does. Ultimately, I think this is beyond any of our ability to confidently game it with any certainty because we’re in pretty damn uncharted waters.

But I will say this: the Schiff-Pelosi-Biden-COVID four-step comes off as pretty damn planned to me.

A guy in a safe seat and a safe race like Schiff can say things that someone like Pelosi can’t, but he may be saying it because she wants him to say it (she’s done that kind of thing before; see John Murtha’s seemingly lone wolf stance against the Iraq War back in 2005). Biden, meanwhile, may be seeing the writing on the wall — or the reality of the situation; however you wanna characterize it — and may be looking for a face-saving out. All of which opened the door for a medical diagnosis — COVID! — as opposed to an embarrassing “OK, you’re right, I’m too old and feeble to do this” moment. Or, for that matter, something far worse that Biden and the White House are really loathe to let the public know.

Does Biden really have COVID and, if so, is it serious? I dunno. But if this is a work, I suspect Biden is in on it because it gives him a clean and hard-to-criticize way out. A way which makes him more sympathetic than feeble and which pushes the Democrats away from their biggest current weakness and source of distraction from the campaign message.

All I ask is that this reaches the end game quickly. Partially because I don’t think this drama is sustainable. Partially because it does sort of seem that, even if I am still kinda agnostic, we are slowly approaching critical mass among Democrats to try to get Biden to step back and if there’s no reeling that back in you gotta resolve it somehow.

And partially — I’m not gonna lie — because I think Harris can win. I think she can win if she stays on Biden’s rough current trajectory and I think that she has potential upside that Biden could never tap into which, if realized, could turn this into a rout. Especially once the nation starts to remember how much they hate Trump and realize how much of a piece of shit J.D. Vance is. And that’s before more attention is paid to Project 2025 and the actual implications of a Republican win.

But also: it’d be the most hilarious thing ever would be to switch out Biden for Kamala Harris an hour or so before Trump is supposed to speak at the RNC tonight. It’d totally throw him off his game. Without all of his “Sleepy Joe” material he’d probably autopilot to nothing but racial and misogynistic slurs he usually saves for when he’s off-mic.

Project 2025 wants to eliminate NOAA and the National Weather Service

It’d be hard to imagine a government agency which does more for ordinary Americans and which has less to do with politics than the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration It’s an organization dedicated to climate, oceans, weather, the country’s coasts, and environmental matters in general. It’s staffed with scientists, technicians, and administrators who, for the most part, pursued their careers out of a passion for the stuff NOAA deals with on a day-to-day basis.

The National Weather Service in particular, which operates under NOAA’s aegis, does just a couple of basic yet critical things but it does them very well: it forecasts the weather and issues warnings about severe weather. It makes the data it gathers and the forecasts and warnings it promulgates available to the public for free. It’s just an amazingly useful service. People may take it for granted but that’s also proof of just how useful and seamless it is. People assume it will always be there because it always has been there. And people like that it’s there.

But it won’t be there if Donald Trump gets elected and Republicans enact Project 2025, which seeks to basically eliminate it. From The Atlantic:

Republicans want to do this for two reasons, one old, one newer.

The old reason first reared its head back in the 1990s when the private company AccuWeather lobbied Republicans — particularly Senator Rick Santorum — to hamstring the National Weather Service. It did this so that AccuWeather could better monetize its own service without a free competitor. Never mind that AccuWeather and other such companies get most of their raw data and much of their forecast modeling for free from the National Weather Service in the first place. In short: it’d be a straight money play for well-connected private sector players who want nothing more than to be rent-seekers.

The newer reason: Republicans don’t like that NOAA is observing the effects of climate change and it would like as few people to know about what’s really happening as possible. Again, NOAA is not politicizing this stuff. It’s not got a dog in the fight. It does not have employees writing op-eds or anything. It’s just collecting the data and conducting the modeling about what is actually happening in the world. Republicans don’t want people to know what’s happening in the world, however, because knowledge of what’s happening in the world immediately renders most Republican political priorities insanely unpopular.

I will admit that I am not wholly unbiased when it comes to this topic. As I’ve mentioned before, my father was a meteorologist technician and then a field office manager at the National Weather Service for nearly 40 years. A “weatherman” generically speaking. Because of that I saw first hand what the National Weather Service does, what it doesn’t do, how it interacts with the public, with aviators, with business, with TV news and even those rent-seeking private weather outfits. Sometimes I am accused for being too pro-government and New Deal-eyed optimistic about what it can do, but if I am a lot of that comes from watching how much good and useful stuff can come from a part of the government which seeks to do nothing other than provide a service for the public. It’s an agency that is as benign as could be, staffed by non-political people who overwhelmingly got into it because they simply love talking and thinking about weather. Sometimes they’re wrong about which way the wind blows, but with all apologies to Mr. Dylan, you do need a weatherman.

We can’t have that if Republicans take over, however, because that interferes with their mission to (a) privatize as much public money as they possibly can; and (b) hide factual information which complicates their economic and ideological agendas. That matters more to them than you or me knowing if a dangerous storm is coming or a farmer knowing if it’s a good time to plant. At least if we aren’t rich enough to pay some private company to tell us.

In case anyone wants to share . . .

I read a deep dive from POLITICO yesterday about the “55 Things to Know About J.D. Vance.” Do you know what was not mentioned in any of those 55 things? That he loudly and proudly espoused the fascist Great Replacement conspiracy theory while campaigning for the U.S. Senate.

One would think that a central tenet of the man’s only political campaign to date — a toxic, deeply racist, and deeply antisemitic idea he has never been challenged on, let alone thought about recanting — would be important right now, but apparently POLITICO and every single other media outlet I’ve seen has decided to give it a complete miss. The fact that the man who stands to be a heartbeat from the presidency subscribes to an ideology shared with Benito Mussolini and fascists everywhere is far less interesting to them than the fact that he hated the reviews of the movie version of “Hillbilly Elegy.”

Like so many things these days, I feel like I’ve taken crazy pills. Like I’m the only person who cares that we’re poised to turn America over to the brownshirts. But what the hell can I do? For now all I can think to do is to put the section from yesterday’s newsletter about Vance’s adherence to fascist conspiracy theories up on my WordPress site in case anyone wants to share it.

Maybe, eventually, it will break through to someone who has the ability to even slightly shape public opinion.

Have a great day everyone.