Cup of Coffee: March 28, 2024

Good morning! Welcome to Opening Day! And welcome to Free Thursday!

As has been the case all week, I’m running a subscription sale. For a limited time, anyone on a Free/Thursdays only account can upgrade to a full premium account for 20% off the normal price, with the sale price lasting for a full year:

There are 13 baseball games today. There were supposed to be 15, but rain happens. But no matter how many games there are, they all count.

Hallelujah! Holy Shit! Where’s the Tylenol!

 The Daily Briefing

Orioles sale unanimously approved

Rob Manfred released a statement early yesterday afternoon announcing that MLB’s 30 owners unanimously approved the new ownership group of the Baltimore Orioles led by David Rubenstein. The official closing of the sale went through later in the day. David Rubenstein is now the Orioles’ owner.

Manfred:

Welcome to a new era, Orioles fans. If historical form holds, you will never like your team’s owner again as much as you do today.

Dodgers, Will Smith agree to a ten-year $140 million contract extension

The Dodgers have handed out a number of big deals of late, but they got one in just under the Opening Day deadline yesterday: they and catcher Will Smith have agreed to a 10-year, $140 million contract extension. There is a fair amount of deferred money, in the now-classic Dodgers fashion. It stands as the longest contract for a catcher in baseball history.

Smith, who turns 29 tomorrow, is just kicking off his sixth season in the bigs. He has hit .263/.358/.484 (126 OPS+) since coming up in 2019. Those numbers include his 5-for-10 start in the two games in Korea against the Padres last week.

Smith was due to hit free agency following the 2025 season. Now he’s locked up through 2033.

Two Opening Day games have been moved to Friday

Opening Day in New York, where the Mets were to host the Brewers, and Philly, where the Phillies were set to host Atlanta, have both been postponed until tomorrow due to rainy forecasts in both cities.

The Brewers-Mets game will now start at 1:40 PM tomorrow. The Atlanta-Philly tilt will go off at 3:05 PM. Adjust your schedules accordingly. And those of you who were doing dances and performing rituals to appease the Sun God: do better.

Yankees-Marlins-Rays swing a minor trade 

The New York Yankees have acquired utilityman Jon Berti from the Miami Marlins. It’s a three-way deal in which the Marlins will get outfield prospect John Cruz from the Yankees and outfield prospect Shane Sasaki from the Tampa Bay Rays. The Rays are getting catcher Ben Rortvedt from New York.

Berti, 34, can be expected to fill in at third base — or to fill in for whoever fills in at third base — given the absence of the injured DJ LeMahieu. He’s a useful player who hit .294/.344/.405 (103 OPS+) across a career-high 424 plate appearances with the Marlins last season. In 2022 he led the National League with 42 stolen bases. That 2023 batting line is pretty clearly at the top end of expectations for him, but as far as stop-gaps go he’s a pretty decent one.

Cruz, an 18 year-old outfielder, hit pretty well and showed some nice pop in 48 games of rookie ball last year but he’s obviously years and years away.

Sasaki, a third round pick in 2019, is 23. He posted an .840 OPS at High-A last year, which is in keeping with this overall production in 203 low-level minor league games.

Rortvedt has played 71 big league games, some with the Twins, some with the Yankees. He came to New York in the Gary Sánchez trade back in March 2022, but he hasn’t hit a lick at the big league level. He’s organizational depth for Tampa Bay, who don’t have much in the way of catching inventory.

That’s some good beef

Last week I shared a video of Jazz Chisholm Jr. talking about the bad environment in the Marlins clubhouse when an unnamed team captain was with the club. He was clearly talking about former Marlin and current Dodger Miguel Rojas, who was considered the team’s captain. The only part I saw from that interview was Chisholm talking about how Rojas would let players sleep through meetings or whatever. Seemed a bit weird to hear someone calling out an ex-teammate, but it was fairly innocuous overall.

But per this ESPN story, in which Rojas’ response to Chisholm is reported, it was apparently a lot more than that:

Rojas mostly took the high road in response, taking issue with Chisholm saying he was a bad person, but mostly just doing that veteran thing and talking about keeping things inside the clubhouse and accountability and all of that. He probably could’ve tore into Chisholm but decided to mostly leave it alone.

Gotta say: Chisholm got pretty personal there. So even though I tend not to side with the veterans when they get into it with younger players over clubhouse culture, I’m on team Rojas here. If he and Chisholm get into it with one another around second base when the Dodgers play the Marlins, I’ll probably be rooting for the veteran.

Other Stuff

I’ll pass 

English Premier League club Chelsea is set to face fellow Premier League club Manchester City in an exhibition match at Ohio Stadium here in Columbus in August. We’ve had Premier League and other top European clubs come through here for such matches before and I had never really considered going, but I had it in my mind that, yeah, I’d go see Chelsea-City this time around.

Except I logged on to Ticketmaster yesterday when the match went on sale and the cheapest tickets were $190 before what are no doubt massive fees and service charges. Most tickets, even not particularly good ones, are over $200 and truly good ones are north of $400. Which means if two of us want to go we’re paying at least $500 before buying a beer. In the hot August sun. For an exhibition match. Featuring teams almost certainly fielding worse players than even your usual exhibition matches given that the Euros are this summer and all the stars are gonna be taking a breather after that tournament ends and before their club seasons get underway. I mean, I’d like to think they’d put on a show for the Yanks, but Pep Guardiola is not gonna make Kevin de Bruyne and Erling Haaland drag ass around an American football field in a meaningless game so that some central Ohio car dealers and insurance agents can watch them in bemusement while asking each other why the clock doesn’t stop when the ball goes out of bounds.

I suppose this is what British baseball fans feel like when asked to pay £200+ to see a couple of ballgames via bad sight lines in London Stadium each summer. But hey, at least those games count and feature the starting lineups, consisting of players who are actually trying.

In closing: television is a wonderful thing. As is the fact that I have a local club that just so happens to be the reigning MLS champions, and I’m pretty sure that I can get into their games for under $200+ a head if I want to. Hell, I think I can get into matches in Stamford Bridge and Etihad Stadium during the actual season cheaper than that and at least then (a) it wouldn’t be so hot; and (b) I wouldn’t be in Ohio.

Great, my irony-o-meter broke

In a stunning reversal from literally everything which defines and animates it, Fox News is now apparently very, very interested in combatting misinformation, bogus imagery, and the like. From a Variety story from a couple of months ago that, somehow, I and a lot of other people missed:

The article suggests that this is also about Fox wanting to protect its IP, which, sure. Fine. But I can think of another reason for Fox to develop and publicize this sort of effort. An objective which can be achieved whether or not this technology works which, based on a conversation I had yesterday with a Friend Who Knows Things, probably won’t actually work all that well, actually. The objective: plausible deniability.

Fox News has had its ass handed to it in multiple defamation lawsuits in recent years, during the course of which it has become abundantly clear that no one at the network gives that much of a crap about the things they say being, you know, true. Indeed, by legal definition Fox has been found to have shown reckless disregard for the truth. But if it had a magical tool which seeks to determine the veracity of photos and audio and things no man can say that they didn’t try! And that’s the case even if it turns out that, yes, they have aired more bogus information, because an allegedly good faith effort via technology was made. It’s like having a Get Out of Malice Free card!

It’s actually kinda genius. At least if you’re the sort who has conditioned themselves to tread the swollen waters of modern cynicism rather than resigned themselves to drown in them.

Great Moments in Chutzpah

My electricity provider is AEP. They’re headquartered here in Columbus, actually, and with a few, limited exceptions, they basically power the whole area and a huge portion of the State of Ohio.

Back January it was reported that AEP has a lot of work to do to in order to service some huge business developments out near my old stamping grounds of New Albany. That’s where huge technology companies like Intel, Microsoft, Google, and Facebook have built and are continuing to build massive, new, and power-thirsty-facilities, including a microprocessor plant and large data centers. And folks, those places need juice:

Hey, you gotta do what you gotta do I guess. Those projects, particularly the Intel plant, are some of the most significant industrial developments in the history of the state and every politician and business leader from Ada to Zanesville has lined up to back them.

Then this appeared in yesterday’s paper:

So these businesses — some of the largest and wealthiest corporations on the planet, all of which are getting taxpayer subsidies to build here — are going to require massive amounts of new grid capacity. So much so that AEP has to run new transmission lines — those huge towers and lines that carry electricity cross-country to whole areas, not your standard wooden pole electrical hookup — in order to service the new demand. And the entities which require that demand and who will use that electricity to make large profits do not have to pay for it. Rather, everyday users who do not require new transmission lines and infrastructure will foot the bill. In addition to subsidizing these companies with billions of taxpayer dollars, of course.

But it gets better!

The entity in Ohio which approves rate hikes is the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio, or PUCO. I’ve mentioned them before inasmuch as the previous PUCO chairman — who actually lives across the street from me now! — has been indicted on bribery charges. Specifically, he made favorable decisions for a different electrical utility in exchange for over $4 million in kickbacks. I’m not suggesting that anyone is taking bribes in connection with this AEP decision, but PUCO members are appointed by politicians and, invariably, do the bidding of those politicians and big business, even if they aren’t, strictly speaking, biddable or bribeable themselves. The fix, legal or otherwise, is almost always in.

I swear to God if you met me when I was in my 20s you’d have encountered a person of a pretty moderate disposition who, while at least leaning to the left on most things, had a general sense that people in power were trying to do the right thing and often did so. Oh, that sweet summer child, whose accepting equanimity was rudely trampled upon by his poor decision to pay attention to the world for even a little while.

The Jacksonville Jaguars’ HR department could use a shakeup 

I wrote a couple of times about that Jacksonville Jaguars employee who stole $22 million via the team credit line he oversaw. He’s heading to prison soon. Yesterday I learned that another former Jags employee is heading to prison. Or, should I say, back to prison:

The timeline:

• The man was convicted of sexually assaulting a 14-year-old boy in Alabama in 1998 and was required to register as a sex offender. It is unclear if he ever did so register, but if he did he eventually stopped doing so;

• The Jaguars hired the man in 2013 to consult on the design and installation of their new video board network and to operate the Jumbotron on game days. They apparently did not know that he was a sex offender. Whether they bothered to do any sort of background work on the guy is unclear;

• The Jags, having since learned of the man’s background somehow, declined to renew his contract when it was up in 2018. Before that happened the man, who no doubt knew his time was up, installed devices on the servers which operate the video board that he later used to hack and remotely control the video board from his home. The video boards were, in fact, hacked on a couple of occasions. I do not know what he put on the board, but based on the next bullet point, I probably don’t wanna know;

• The Jags, with the help of law enforcement, figured out the hack and traced it back to the fired employees’ house. This was in July 2019. The FBI executed a search warrant and found (a) evidence of his hacking; and (b) thousands of images and hundreds of videos of child sexual abuse, some of which was perpetrated by the man himself, on children under his care, all of which occurred not long before the raid. Oh, and they also found guns he was not supposed to have as a previously-convicted felon;

• Our man got wind of the raid before it happened and hoofed it to the Philippines. I’m guessing the FBI did not find any “which countries do not extradite criminals back to the US” searches on his devices, because the Philippines deported his ass back here in early 2020 when they got wind of his whole deal, leading to this conviction and, for all practical purposes, lifetime imprisonment.

I don’t know what the Jaguars knew about this guy’s background when they hired him, and I’ll allow for the possibility, unclear from the articles I read, that he (a) did not register as a sex offender as he was supposed to; and (b) he otherwise made efforts to hide his tracks. But I also know that, registry or no registry, the ability to easily search someone’s background for criminal convictions predated his hiring by the Jags by a good decade or more, and I’d be curious to know what sort of vetting they did of him before hiring him.

Either way, I’m pretty down on the Jags’ Human Resources hygiene at this point. And that’s before you get to the fact that they once hired Urban Meyer!

“Something has to change”

In late February, a 26 year-old Columbus, Ohio man named Colin Jennings was experiencing a mental health crisis during which he attempted to harm himself with a kitchen knife. His boyfriend called 911 and told the dispatcher what was happening, stressing to the dispatcher that Jennings was experiencing a mental health crisis. It was a long call during which there was no suggestion made that Jennings was threatening his boyfriend or anyone else and, for that matter, he wasn’t truly doing any damage with what his boyfriend said was a pretty dull knife.

Less than 15 minutes later Jennings was dead, shot and killed by Columbus police. Not long after that his boyfriend died by suicide, having blamed himself for making the 911 call that brought the police to their home.

The entire story of that tragic episode, Jennings’ life until the moment, and the woeful state of emergency mental health care in Columbus, and no doubt in many other places, can be read in this story by Andy Downing over at Matter News.

I don’t like to share personal stuff in this space that is not 100% my stuff to share, but suffice it to say that this story channels the nightmares of anyone who has ever had to deal with a loved one in a mental health crisis. Especially one in which police are or may be dispatched. The person is going through one of the worst, most traumatic experiences of their lives and their acting predictably, even if they are in no way acting violently or threateningly to anyone else, is by no means a given. In an age in which police increasingly shoot first and ask questions later — and in which they very often get away with doing so without any consequences — it’s not hard to fear the worst.

Efforts must be made to establish systems in which non-police are dispatched to deal with people experiencing mental health crises. Experts and/or counselors who are trained and able to deescalate such situations rather than police who are encouraged by their superiors, colleagues, and the entire incentive structure which surrounds them to consider themselves to be under siege by anyone and everyone not wearing blue at all times.

The rich guy who wants to overthrow the United States

Rolling Stone has a fascinating feature on a man named Fergie Chambers. He is an heir to one of America’s wealthiest families, the Cox Family of Atlanta, whose cable, broadcast, and newspaper holdings, among other things, has their collective net worth at something north of $34 billion.

Except Fergie is a communist. And not one of your run-of-the-mill “I’ve read some Marx and dislike capitalism” communists or one of those “I pretend to be a communist on the Internet” communists. He’s a radical who cashed in his shares in the family business for like $250 million and, to hear him tell it, he has dedicated his life and his money to overthrowing the United States. He says things like "We need a revolution . . . I see success as the dissolution of the United States government and an end to the U.S. empire.”

To the extent anyone can truly walk that walk, I suppose he’s making at least something of a go of it. He has used his money to found a heavily-armed radical collective called “Babochki,” which, at least to some extent, protests the sorts of things normie lefties like me are keen on opposing. But the ideological similarities are only superficial. I mean, the guy lionizes murderous dictators like Stalin and Vladimir Putin and strongly supports Russia’s war against Ukraine. He’s pro-Hamas. Not just pro Palestine, mind you, but he openly praises Hamas.

Then there’s the personal stuff:

So, in addition to being a rich guy from an impossibly privileged background who praises dictators and terrorists but SWEARS he’s on the side of the people, he’s a megalomaniac who is pretty obviously fostering a cult of personality. Oh, and he was arrested, though never formally charged, of beating his ex-wife, which he essentially admits to in the piece. These days he’s living in Tunis, Tunisia, in the aftermath of some violent protests he organized that have seen several of his followers get indicted on serious criminal charges and which threatens to get Chambers himself charged under federal RICO laws. He says at the end of the article that he has recently converted to Islam and hints at how cool it would be to become a martyr. You can only imagine where this is going.

Armchair psychology is always a fraught enterprise, but separate and apart from his revolutionary pretensions, there is a lot of stuff in this article about Chambers’ mental health struggles when he was a child and a young man. As someone who is intimately familiar with adolescent mental health issues, diagnosis, and care, I can tell you that all of my alarm bells were going off when reading about this dude.

Among the most alarming parts of his story is the fact that he has come to denounce all mental health care as nefarious — they’re tools The State uses to oppress people! — and is off all of the meds someone put him on for very good reasons when he was younger. Add that to this obvious black-and-white, all-or-nothing view of the world, his control-freak tendencies and messianic pretensions, his history of substance abuse and violence, and a bunch of other stuff mentioned in the article and it’s not hard to arrive at at least a reasonably accurate take as to the cut of his gib. It’s a gib that should not, under any circumstances, be armed, I can tell you that.

Guys like this pop up every so often in this country. Things tend not to end well for them or for anyone near them. A notable man once sang, “If you go carrying pictures of chairman Mao, you ain't gonna make it with anyone anyhow.” I’ve always thought, and still believe, that that was a bit too precious a statement as there are always going to be people who are misguided or naive in some respects who are otherwise well-meaning and potentially successful. But if you carry those pictures — and Stalin’s and Putin’s and Hamas’ — and you’re obviously mentally unstable, heavily armed, and prefer settings in which everyone listens to you because you have a monopoly on righteousness, yeah, you can count me out. Way, way the hell out.

Have a great day, everyone.