Cup of Coffee: March 21, 2024

Good morning! And welcome to Free Thursday!

And, more importantly, welcome back to the regular season, at least for a couple of days thanks to the Seoul Series. With the return of games that count comes my daily regular season recap feature, And That Happened, now entering its 17th year!

For those of you who subscribed since the end of last season, I do these recaps every weekday. They are not comprehensive. They are not objective. They are primarily a means of me dropping riffs and jokes and, to some extent, forcing me to pay attention to what’s actually going on in actual games given how easily I am distracted by business stuff, legal stuff, bashing owners, weird news, and spreading communist propaganda. Though I do that in the recaps a fair amount as well.

The only consistent complaint I’ve gotten about my recaps over the years is that I always put the winning team first and the losing team second, eschewing the convention of always putting the road team first and the home team second. I know it’s wrong. I know it annoys some people. But I grew up watching sports highlights on TV and TV guys always said the winning team first — “Gorillas 10, Teetotalers 3” — and I’m never gonna be able to shake it. If this confuses you terribly, I assure you, there are resources out there which can tell you where the game was played.

Anyway, let’s get on with the 2024 season, shall we?

And That Happened

Dodgers 5, Padres 2: I slept in yesterday — woke up at the ungodly late hour of 5:56 AM! — and almost missed the first pitch from Korea. I made it downstairs just in time, though, and caught a really sloppy game that may as well have been played in Peoria, Arizona.

There were thirteen walks, including a game-opening pitch clock violation, which set the tone. There were thirteen pitchers used. A bunch of runs scored on sac flies, double plays, errors, soft singles, and things of that nature. A ball that went right through the webbing of Padres first baseman Jake Cronenworth’s glove on what should’ve been an inning-ending double play gave the Dodgers the lead for good, which seemed appropriate to the morning’s vibe. Rob Manfred appeared in the ESPN booth at 7AM, referred to baseball games as “our product” and otherwise sucked all of the air out of the room. I realized that the Padres starting centerfielder is only seven months older than my daughter. The whole deal went over three hours. It was fantastic stuff, made tolerable only by the entire pot of coffee I drank while watching.

Being less of a shitbird, I’ll note that Shoehi Ohtani got his first couple of hits and his first RBI in a Dodgers uniform, stole a base before the catcher could even get the ball out of his mitt, and hit a foul ball with a 119 mph exit velocity and a single at 112 mph, so he seems ready for 2024. Which, given the news items about him below, is pretty impressive. Dodgers starter Tyler Glasnow had a basically decent debut as a Dodger, going five innings, allowing two runs on two hits, and striking out three (though walking four).

And hey, it all counted, which is more than we can say about the games which followed yesterday afternoon. Now, if you’re reading this before, say, 9AM EDT, go turn on ESPN because these two clubs are playing again.

The Daily Briefing

Bombshell

The Los Angeles Times broke a huge story yesterday afternoon: Shohei Otani’s attorneys have accused Ohtani’s longtime interpreter, Ippei Mizuhara, of “massive theft” tied to alleged illegal gambling. The Dodgers have fired Mizuhara.

But it also seems a lot more complicated than all of that.

The upshot, as it was first reported by the Times late yesterday afternoon: there is a federal investigation going on into the activities of an Orange County, California man named Mathew Bowyer, who the feds reportedly believe to be an illegal bookmaker. The Los Angeles Times was looking into this as well when Ohtani’s name came up. Ohtani’s lawyers, the Times reports, looked into the matter themselves and are accusing Mizuhara of “massive theft” from Ohtani, which was reported later in the evening to be at least $4.5 million, wired from Ohtani’s bank account to the gambling operation. The attorneys say they have referred the matter to law enforcement.

An ESPN report later in the evening, however, complicates this to no small degree. Per ESPN, a spokesman for Ohtani told ESPN that Ohtani had transferred funds to cover Mizuhara's gambling debts. What’s more, the spokesman put Mizuhara in front of ESPN reporters to explain himself:

That change on Wednesday is as fishy as fuck. As ESPN prepared to publish the story, the spokesman disavowed Mizuhara's account — and, indeed, disavowed the spokesman’s own statements — and said Ohtani's lawyers would issue a statement. That statement — "In the course of responding to recent media inquiries, we discovered that Shohei has been the victim of a massive theft, and we are turning the matter over to the authorities" — is a total contradiction of the initial story. And not a contradiction of a news story, but a contradiction of what was being said by other members of Ohtani’s very own camp.

Someone has to be lying, right? Either Ohtani bailed Mizuhara out by covering his debts — a story Ohtani’s spokesman initially backed — or else Ohtani knew nothing and he was a victim of theft. The most innocuous explanation possible — that Mizuhara lied to the spokesman, got the spokesman over his skis, and only later was found out and called out by the lawyers — doesn’t pass the smell test to me given the detail about Mizuhara speaking to the whole clubhouse about it. Ohtani was in that clubhouse and he’s not gonna just sit there on Tuesday and listen to his interpreter lie about him and then go on through Wednesday’s game as if nothing was amiss. And that’s how Wednesday played out. Mizuhara was seen in the dugout during yesterday’s game joking around with Ohtani and shooting the breeze.

None of this adds up. It definitely makes the initial story that Ohtani was the victim of a theft seem overly simplistic, to the point of misleading. It raises a lot more questions about this affair. Questions that law enforcement, and I believe, Major League Baseball’s Department of Investigations will soon be involving themselves in if they are not involved already.

If the initial story about this is somehow validated, Mizuhara will inevitably be charged with felonies. But if the ESPN report is to be believed, it may be a much more complicated matter than all that. All that can be certain right now is that if Ohtani was involved in this in any capacity other than his being an ignorant victim, it’ll be the biggest story in baseball in years. And it’s already pretty big.

Bomb Threat

The business with Mizuhara was obviously the worst news Shohei Ohtani had to deal with yesterday, but there was other bad news too:

The threat was sent via email to the South Korean consulate in Vancouver, British Columbia. It was written in English, by someone claiming to be a Japanese lawyer. According to Korea’s Yohap News Agency, there were several other, non-specified threats sent via similar means last year, also by someone claiming to be a Japanese lawyer, so we may have a serial threat-maker on our hands.

Being the most famous baseball player on the planet is not all fun and games, man.

Bad take

This made the rounds yesterday. And it was only the most notable of many similar takes:

No one familiar with my work is ever gonna accuse me of being a cheerleader for Major League Baseball as an entity, but this is a stupid-ass take.

This series, like all of the international games MLB plays, isn't for the U.S. audience. It’s for the Korean audience. The same Korean audience a subset of which has been waking up in the wee hours of the morning to watch MLB action for years. MLB obviously has commercial aspirations with these sorts of games, but even if it didn’t, giving Korean fans — and Japanese fans for that matter — a chance to watch two games worth of MLB action featuring a number of notable Korean and Japanese players in the evening, their time, is not too much to ask. We have like 2,500 games that will be more convenient for us, so I think we can spare them.

Not that I think this dude really cares. He’s a sports talk radio guy and in my experience, most of those guys ignore baseball, spending almost all of their time with football, unless they have a reason to bash baseball. And they never, ever consider sports that exist outside of our borders, so nah, not taking this business seriously.

Hi-ho, Chan-Ho!

Having ex-MLB’er — and former Dodgers and Padres pitcher — Chan-Ho Park throw out the first pitch in a Dodgers-Padres game in Korea makes all kinds of sense. And I suppose that split jersey was inevitable. But the highlight of that “uniform” is definitely the fact that you can’t see through those pants. Take notes, Nike.

$100 haircuts?

The Athletic has a story that is, ostensibly at least, about how Alex Verdugo is trying to rehab his reputation for being a bad clubhouse guy by being a good guy to the young players on the Yankees roster. The example which frames the piece:

I appreciate that I am the absolute last person who can weigh in on anything related to hair care, but I gotta ask: are dude’s haircuts $100 now? I mean, I realize that decent cuts from highly-skilled people are more expensive than going to Great Clips or getting your 75 year-old barber to give you a once-over with the clippers or whatever, but $100 still seems steep. I dunno. Just a world that isn’t really relevant to me anymore.

In other news, I find the whole Alex Verdugo spring arc to be amusing. This is like the third article I’ve seen in the past month in which the same guy who was mostly loathed in both Los Angeles and Boston is being portrayed as a changed man and credit to the clubhouse. I really don’t give a crap about the guy, but I am gonna bookmark a couple of these so I can humorously compare them to the stories which come out in July in which he’s beefing about playing only once a week because he dogged it or pissed off his teammates or something.

Mets lay off 25 front office workers

Front Office Sports reports that the Mets laid off about 25 members of its business operations staff Tuesday. No one from baseball operations was laid off.

This is being cast as a rightsizing as opposed to a downsizing, as it’s the work of M. Scott Havens, the guy who took over as the Mets’ new head of business operations in January. According to Front Office Sports he came in and had the 2024 equivalent of the Bobs from “Office Space” figure out what people DO here and then sacked those he considered to be superfluous. Havens claims that the Mets business staff was way bigger than that of most other MLB teams. I don’t know how anyone on the outside could verify that, but that’s the word.

In Memoriam

Each year for the past decade or so Paul Sullivan of Sully Baseball has produced an Oscars-style In Memoriam segment for baseball. Except, unlike the Oscars, Sully has yet to omit multiple major figures from his montages or, like the Oscars did this year, portray them in the tiniest of print while focusing on some opera singer. Sully simply does it better. Does it better than MLB does with its periodic in memoriam tributes as well. As I’ve said many times before, they should just pay him to do it for them.

From well-known figures like Vida Blue, Tim Wakefield, and Brooks Robinson to far lesser-known people like Don Leppert and Larry LeGrande, here is a thoughtful and touching rundown of those who have moved on to Baseball Valhalla since Opening Day 2023:

Other Stuff

M. Emmet Walsh: 1935-2024

Character actor par excellence M. Emmet Walsh has died. He was 88. It was reportedly cardiac arrest.

Walsh’s filmography was, to say the least, impressive. “Blade Runner” and “Blood Simple” are the first two of his films which come to mind, but Walsh was excellent in high art and low art, good movies and bad. An absolutely underrated gem was his turn as a corrupt parole officer in the Dustin Hoffman film “Straight Time.” He was in “Critters.” He was in “The Jerk.” He was in “Back to School,” “Raising Arizona,” “Fletch,” “Ordinary People,” “Twilight” (the Paul Newman neo-noir, not the vampire movie), “Reds,” “The Best of Times,” and countless others. IMDb lists 233 acting credits for Walsh, but that somehow feels llight.

Like any good character actor, Walsh made an indelible mark in nearly everything in which he appeared and, as noted above, he was better than almost any character actor I can think of. He had range, too. He could be a lovable father or, later, grandfather figure. Or he could be the most malevolent villain imaginable. The latter was so effective because his first impression was usually one of a lovable father or grandfather figure.

What a career. If there is a Hollywood Valhalla, Walsh is now in its main hall. To be sure, he’s standing just off to the side of the main hall, not right in the center, but the hall is better for his being there. Things were always better for his being involved. May he rest in peace.

Beware of vibe-based fear

Boeing has been in the news quite a bit lately thanks to some high profile incidents and accidents involving its aircraft. While I have noted some of those incidents here — and while I have shamelessly joined in on the Boeing mockery/meming because, frankly, some of it is fun — I have been wondering about how significant the Boeing problems and airline problems in general actually are. Are more incidents occurring or is this one of those deals in which one high-profile incident — the hatch blowing off that Alaska Airlines plane a couple of months ago — is leading to much more coverage and the reporting of things that never would’ve made the news before, thereby making it seem like a bigger problem?

I’m not the only person asking that question, obviously. Yesterday I saw a pretty decent and measured take on it from Charlie Warzel at The Atlantic. While not discounting Boeing’s well-documented issues over the past couple of years, and while noting how much the overall misery that is air travel these days casts a pall on almost everything related to it, he suggests that there is something else going on:

So there are three things, then: (1) the actual incidents, obviously; and (2) the increased coverage of them that I mention above. But the vibes/algorithm factor is not to be discounted. Not only is there more coverage but more of it is being shoved at people who evinced interest in the stories to begin with.

I consider myself a pretty savvy and sophisticated news consumer, but even I forget about the distorting nature of algorithm-driven news distribution. I know immediately that I’m gonna see a million cat videos on Instagram because I’ve watched some cat videos, but I somehow forget that this happens with news too. I imagine most people do.

“The Invisible Shield”

There’s a documentary coming out on PBS next week called “The Invisible Shield,” which talks about America’s public health infrastructure. The summary from the producers:

I’m particularly interested in it because one of the public health experts featured in it is Dr. Amy Acton, who was the director of the Ohio Department of Health when the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020. Ohioans and those of you who read my Pandemic Diary four years ago might remember Dr. Acton, who I wrote about fairly extensively. For those who are unaware, I’ll give you a (kinda) brief summary version.

In the first month or two of the Pandemic Ohio officials, against all odds, were considered to be handling the pandemic better than basically any other state officials in the country. Our Republican governor, Mike DeWine, initiated early, proactive action in response to the pandemic which received rave reviews nationally. Those actions were all taken in close consultation with Dr. Acton, who appeared by DeWine’s side at his daily briefings and who, eventually, took over most of the substantive parts of the briefings. Hers was a simultaneously authoritative, realistic, yet calming presence, which is not an easy trick to pull off when the news is as bad as it was in early 2020.

DeWine gave Dr. Acton considerable, and at times nearly exclusive credit for whatever it was he was doing, noting how he relied on her for her expertise and counsel. In all of this DeWine was widely praised for eschewing politics and basing his often tough decisions on medical and scientific expertise. For her part Dr. Acton was described by The New York Times as “not only the brains behind the state’s early, aggressive coronavirus response; but also its most effective messenger.” Donald Trump and the federal government may have thrown us to the wolves, but Ohioans felt, for good reason, that we were in good hands with DeWine and Dr. Acton.

Things went as well as they could have gone under the circumstances through the end of April. At that point, you will recall, there was severe fatigue setting in with respect to business and public facilities closures and there was building pressure, particularly from the political right, to reopen everything as soon as possible with little regard to whether it was actually prudent to do so.

At this time DeWine and Acton, resisting the increasingly loud voices to start pretending the pandemic was over, announced that a stepped reopening plan would eventually be implemented based on quantifiable metrics with respect to available COVID testing, contact tracing, protective equipment availability, improvements with respect to infection numbers, and the capacity of hospital resources. DeWine and Acton made it clear that, contrary to the demands of the “open everything now!” crowd, Ohio would have a situation in place in which people who were infected could know it and could isolate themselves in order not to infect others, thereby making the reopening of society a reasonably cautious and prudent endeavor before there were mass openings. It was not, by any stretch of the imagination, an unreasonable ask. Indeed, it felt like the people in charge were being adults and trying hard to do the right thing.

Then, in the space of ten days, everything changed.

On May 7, 2020, Governor DeWine announced the opening of bars and restaurants, barber shops, hair salons and other personal care businesses. Within days he announced the opening up of basically everything else. Less than month later, while the pandemic still raged, it may as well have been 2019 again. Or Ohio may as well have been Ron DeSantis’ Florida. There were no restrictions. There were no rules. COVID infections and deaths, quite predictably, skyrocketed in the state.

These changes did not come about because those metrics DeWine and Dr. Acton cited were met. No, things changed because Republicans in the Ohio Legislature freaked out and revolted. They passed a bill seeking to basically strop Dr. Acton and her department of all of their power. DeWine vetoed it but they overrode the veto. Republicans also led and encouraged personal attacks on Dr. Acton, some of which compared Acton — who is Jewish — to Nazis. Right wing extremists began to mass outside of Acton’s house and issue death threats to her and her family. DeWine, who before then had Acton’s back and claimed she had his total confidence, completely caved to the right wingers and left Acton twisting in the wind out of pure political cowardice.

Acton, citing exhaustion with the long hours and pressure of the job but diplomatically sidestepping any mention of the ugly campaign against her, resigned her position as the state’s top doctor not long after all of this went down, essentially ending her career in public health. A woman who dedicated countless hours trying to save the lives of Ohioans and who, in return, was compared to a Nazi and had her power threatened for doing so, was pushed off the stage after being stabbed in the back by a cowardly governor who used her for good PR until the moment he lost the political will to care about COVID.

What we were left with, and are still left with, is a state whose public health policies and programs are now beholden to the gerrymandered Republican supermajority in the Ohio legislature. People who say and believe things like this:

The state senator who said that, by the way, is a doctor. While the medical practice which employed him fired him for those comments, the following year he was appointed to lead the Senate Health Committee by Ohio’s Senate President who happens to be his cousin. This is who, if a new pandemic hits tomorrow, will be one of the two or three people leading Ohio’s response to it.

I had the opportunity to talk privately with Dr. Acton in the months following her resignation from the Department of Health, and I’ve spoken to her a few times more recently as well. While the substance of those conversations were either personal or off-the-record, I can tell you that she has consistently taken the high road about all of the bullshit that went down in 2020. She’s not in denial about it, of course, nor is she pretending that what happened with Ohio’s pandemic response was anything other than appalling, but she has chosen to look forward rather than back and to continue to do what she can to make Ohio a better place. If it were me I’d be burning the whole goddamn state down with a flamethrower, but from what I’ve seen of Dr. Acton she’s a better example of humanity than I am.

In the PBS documentary that airs next week, Dr. Acton will reportedly talk about the need for some sort of authoritative commission — perhaps modeled on the 9/11 commission — to objectively determine, with reference to actual data and analysis as opposed to politics, what worked and what did not work in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Her hope is that by doing so a compelling explanation of why public health efforts should be bolstered, rather than decimated as Republican politicians have inexplicably pushed for, is in order and what form that bolstering should take. It’s the sort of thing that makes manifest sense and which any halfway sophisticated society would naturally pursue. In the ridiculously backward age in which we find ourselves, however, it will almost certainly never happen. Almost everyone in a position to make such a thing happen has a political interest in memory-holing the pandemic rather than trying to learn from it and to help make the next public health crisis more manageable.

That, like almost everything else that has happened in public health since spring 2020, is profoundly depressing. But part of me is nonetheless encouraged that people like Dr. Acton aren’t as discouraged as I have become about the state of things. I fear that their hope is in vain, but dammit, that hope is still inspiring.

Have a great day everyone.