Cup of Coffee: March 7, 2024

Good morning! And welcome to Free Thursday!

Let’s get to it, shall we?

 The Daily Briefing

Oh my God, someone sign Joey Votto

I don’t care if it makes any baseball sense or not, just sign him already because I cannot handle this:

Trevor Bauer signs!

. . . with a Japanese minor league travel team:

I’m sure there are some Bauer fanboys out there who think he should be at the top of the rotation for a contender right now, but this is pretty much the career he’s created for himself at this point. And if he gets lit up by Dodgers minor league players this weekend, I suspect it’ll be the last we see of him in an even remotely competitive baseball context.

Mike Zunino retires

Eleven-year big league veteran catcher Mike Zunino announced his retirement yesterday.

Zunino broke into the majors in 2013 and played his first six seasons for the Seattle Mariners. He then headed to the Tampa Bay Rays for whom he played from 2019 through 2022 before a final campaign with the Cleveland Guardians last season, during which he struggled to come back from thoracic outlet syndrome surgery before being released in June.

Zunino still had some fun, albeit unexpected highlights over the course of his career. Though known almost exclusively for his defense, he made the All-Star team in 2021 and finished 20th in American League MVP voting that year thanks to a power surge in which he smacked 33 homers despite playing in only 109 games. He, of course, still played strong D and ended up with 4.7 fWAR on the year.

For most of his career it was just the defense, however, with Zunino putting up a lifetime line of .199/.271/.407 (87 OPS+). He had some pop, yes, having hit 149 career bombs, but he didn’t walk much and he struck out a lot. Still, he was was among the best pitch-framers and overall receivers in the business and, all in all that made for a pretty nice career.

Eddie Rosario signs with the Nats

The Washington Nationals signed outfielder Eddie Rosario yesterday. It’s a split contract in which he could earn up to $4M with incentives in the event he makes the club. Which, given that it’s the Nats, I figure he will.

Rosario, 32, spent six seasons in Minnesota, half a year in Cleveland and two and a half seasons with Atlanta. Last year he hit .255/.305/.450 (100 OPS+) with 21 home runs, 24 doubles, three triples, and three steals in 142 games with the Barves. Those pretty much track his career numbers, but he did strike out considerably more last season than he has throughout most of his time in the bigs.

Still: he’s a perfectly cromulent baseball player and the Nats could use as many of those as they can get.

Where ballplayers live

There was a fun article in The Athletic yesterday talking about the living arrangements of major league ballplayers. No, it was not a “Cribs” or "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” kind of thing. It was about how it can be a pain to find someplace to live in a new city on short notice and the sorts of things ballplayers do to find housing.

Stuff like swap houses with guys for whom they were traded, which is satisfyingly efficient, in a Kate Winslet-Cameron Diaz in “The Holiday” sort of way. Stuff like guys keeping houses in cities where they signed as free agents years ago and, despite having moved on to new teams, renting them out to other players on their old team. I don’t have a movie analogue for that but maybe it could be a psychological thriller kind of thing in which the player who owns the house plants cameras all over it and uses the information he gets to pressure his tenants into showing up at his charity golf outings or something.

Anyway: the housing issues affect both high-dollar ballplayer real estate and the low-end of the market. On the high-end, former Dodgers pitcher Rich Hill has a place that’s only about a 20 minute drive from Dodger Stadium which he has rented out to a series of Dodgers players over the past several years. On the lower end:

Not that it matters, but I looked up Caleb Ferguson’s Columbus area home. It’s a suburban duplex of just over 1,000 square feet for which he paid $130,000 in 2019, back when interest rates were near all-time lows. Ferguson is not a super high-paid player, but he is making $2.4 million this season, so I think he can carry that loss on the condo, at least for a bit, given that the mortgage is probably cheaper than a lot of car payments.

This could all be avoided, of course, if we returned to the days of the residential hotel.

Extended-stay places still exist, primarily in suburban areas, and are often used as temporary homes by traveling nurses, construction workers, and the like. But America once had scads of in-town residential hotels which appealed to people up and down the income ladder. These ranged from single occupancy bedsits or rooming houses for the poor to grand luxury places for the rich. Residents would stay in them for months or even years on-end. It made all kinds of sense for certain sorts of people. Primarily people without kids but also people, like modern baseball players, who may only be in town for work for a few months or, at most, a couple of years before moving on.

Like lots of other useful urban institutions, residential hotels came under attack in the middle of the 20th century. Primarily the ones which catered to the poor, and were considered blights on cities. This was true to some degree, but a cycle developed in which cities would neglect areas in which residential hotels — by then re-named “single-room occupancy” buildings or “SROs” — sat, which led to more crime and blight, and eventually these places became targets of urban renewal or gentrification. In some places old SROs have been converted to chic boutique hotels or upscale urban apartments — the seedy flophouse from “Drugstore Cowboy” is now a hipster Ace Hotel in Portland! — but mostly they were whacked by wrecking balls. At the same time, zoning changes which sought to eliminate SROs likewise affected higher-end hotels, which steadily began to eliminate long-term stay options and services. No one “keeps a couple of rooms at the Ritz” anymore.

I suppose we have Airbnbs and VRBO now, but that’s not really the same. And I don’t suppose rich ballplayers finding it moderately inconvenient to locate housing when they get traded is a constituency which needs me to, ahem, go to bat for it. But that part of me which likes to imagine he lives in the 1930s or 1940s often imagines living in a pleasant mid-to-upper-mid-range hotel in the middle of a city. I’d take my meals in the little cafe off the lobby, have my laundry sent out and delivered back to me, and get a nod and my mail handed to me by the bell captain when I come in from whatever I was doing each afternoon.

And yeah, sometimes the house dick would come by my table and let me know about the latest goings on. Or I him. You gotta keep your ear to the ground, after all. We’re all in this together.

You don’t say?

I was wryly amused by this column from the New York Times Magazine:

Someone should write a book about this.

Oh wait, someone already did.

Other Stuff

Happy Birthday, Curt!

I saw My Brother Curt Turns 53 Today open for Industrial Shithouse at Wembley. Show rocked, man.

This is the Republican Party

On Tuesday Republicans in North Carolina nominated a disgusting, bigoted, misogynistic antisemite for the governorship. Seriously: Mark Robinson, the nominee, is on record with the following:

• He has denied that the Holocaust happened and has made all manner of other antisemitic statements, including claiming that the movie “Black Panther” was created by greedy Jews in order to steal “shekels” from the pockets of Black people, whom he refers to using the Yiddish racial slur “schvartze”;

• He mocked school shooting survivors — children who watched their classmates die in hails of gunfire— by calling them “media prosti-tots.”

• He has criticized women protesting rape and sexual harassment in Hollywood for wearing “whore dresses”;

• He wishes women did not have the right to vote; and

• He has said that the acceptance of homosexuality will lead to pedophilia and “the END of civilization as we know it”;

And yeah, there are more awful things on his ledger in addition to all of that.

Robinson is just a walking, talking, disgusting excuse for a human being. And he is now the Republican nominee for governor. He has had and will continue to have the full backing of the GOP. He has already been endorsed by the former President of the United States and current Republican nominee, Donald Trump, who will no doubt campaign with Robinson in North Carolina, which is a critical swing state in the upcoming presidential election.

I predict, however, that the major newspapers and publications in this country will spend approximately 10% of the time focusing on a toxic, bigoted, misogynistic, and antisemitic man who has been endorsed by one of the two major political parties in this country and who could very well become governor of a large, important state than they have on the random comments some college students have made during campus protests. Because when it comes to politics, all that matters to them is the horse race. If you need any evidence of that, just look at the New York Times profile of Robinson that dropped after his victory. To them he’s just “a firebrand” who “leans into culture wars.” There is absolutely no mention of his toxic antisemitism. There is no effort to call him, objectively, what he is.

This should be a scandal. A major scandal which serves as a damning indictment of the Republican Party. It won’t be, however. It’ll just be both-sides’d to death because despite everything that has gone on in this country in recent years, its media, its leaders, and most of its people refuse to believe that anything our system produces can be illegitimate or that it can or should be considered something other than normal.

This is also the Republican Party

Or at least the member of it, New York Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, who desperately wants to be Trump’s running mate:

Memories can be weird things so don’t take my word for it, but I remember March 2020 a little differently than she does.

But hey: if you miss the days of mass death, pervasive fear, governmental indifference and denial to the point of malice, no toilet paper, no sports, no movies, no travel, and watching your children descend into mental illness, by all means, VOTE TRUMP!

This is Big Business

From the Wall Street Journal:

A lot of people have been critical of Boeing of late, accusing the company of allowing its once widely-praised safety culture in which engineers and experts ran the show to be taken over by bean-counters and business people. This criticism has been aimed at the 737 MAX program specifically, with multiple crashes and incidents being attributed by some to cost-cutting and poor oversight. Boeing denies this, claiming, like all businesses do, that the very things that it appears to have neglected were its “top priority.”

Seems to me that being unable or unwilling to provide answers to the NTSB about a high-profile incident that was almost certainly caused by Boeing’s negligence in the production and quality control process and which could’ve killed hundreds of people shows that the company has other priorities.

This is On-brand Craig Content

Because I am a Subaru owner I get an occasional newsletter called “The Subie Insider.” No, I did not sign up for it. It just began appearing several years ago. But yeah, I read it, because I know that I’m in a cult so there’s no sense in acting like I’m not, right?

Anyway, this was in it yesterday:

Ensign: set course for Planet Smug. Maximum warp . . . engage.

This is England

Normally if I link a random story out of England it’s going to involve either (a) music; (b) regrettable food (c) food that should by both its looks and description be regrettable but which I actually love; (d) hiking; or (e) some dead medieval baron about whom I have learned something perversely interesting.

This time, however, I give you a heartwarming tale that shows us that goodness and righteousness still exist in the universe:

I can only assume they want her to come forward so they can bestow upon her awards and honorifics beyond comprehension for her noble deed.

Here she is, by the way:

Most heartily we beseech thee, O Lord, with thy favour to behold our most gracious Sovereign Lady. The queen on the right, I mean. Not the bastard on the left.

Have a great day everyone.