Cup of Coffee: March 8, 2024

Good morning!

The Sox extend a future ace, the kids get a weekend to shine, and a really bad publicly-financed arena project may be averted.

In Other Stuff: more on the missing princess, something about the Lindbergh Baby, toaster steaks, don’t be a sucker, and some seriously preposterous and appalling security theater.

 The Daily Briefing

Red Sox, Brayan Bello agree to a long-term deal

The Red Sox and starter Brayan Bello have agreed to a six-year, $55 million contract extension. The deal also includes a $21 million club option for 2031. Which I’m supposed to believe is a real year I guess. Bello had been eligible for free agency after the 2028 season.

Bello came up in 2022 and put in an OK but not great 57.1 innings. Last year he improved while lodging 157 innings over 28 starts and posting a 4.24 ERA (107 ERA+). Those numbers are a tad misleading, however, in that they included some rough early starts during which he was battling an injury before an early-season demotion to Triple-A. In 21 starts between April and August he posted a 3.20 ERA, walked very few hitters and induced a lot of ground balls, which is the sort of stuff that allowed him to go from a not-much-heralded international signee to one of the better pitching prospects in the game. He did revert to less-than-great form late last season, likely due to his significantly increased workload.

Whatever we think of that one mostly-full big league campaign, the Red Sox believe they have in Bello a rotation anchor for most of the next decade. And now he’s locked up.

“Spring Breakout” is coming 

I think this was previously announced months ago, but I can’t remember if I talked about it or not. Anyway: from March 14-17, MLB clubs will hold a four-day, 16-game prospect showcase, called “Spring Breakout.” The Spring Breakout will consist of games featuring its top young prospects facing off against their opponents’ top young prospects.

These are showcases as opposed to some sort of tournament or playoff. Which is appropriate for spring training, I think. The point here is to let fans see the top young players in a straightforward manner rather than just getting glimpses of them during games in which they may play or not or may start or not. These are dedicated games, most of which will be played as part of a doubleheader in front of or on the back end of the day's regularly scheduled spring training game.

All 16 of the games will be broadcast, be it on MLB.com, MLB Network or the clubs’ various regional sports networks. You can find the whole schedule for Spring Breakout over at MLB.com.

The Wizards/Capital arena project in Northern Virginia is mostly dead

At least for now, as Virginia lawmakers have stripped plans for a publicly-financed arena from the state budget.

Like most things in government there are other means by which Virginia’s Governor, Glenn Youngkin, can gift billionaire team owner Ted Leonsis billions more for his own private businesses, but it’ll be much harder to do now. To the point where, I suspect, Leonsis will look to either stay in DC or for other ways to pay for the arena he desires.

The primary obstacle to the public financing plan was Democratic state Senator Louise Lucas, who chairs the Virginia Senate Finance and Appropriations committee. She was sharply opposed to the scheme and was responsible for keeping appropriations for it out of the budget. On Thursday evening she posted this:

Which was objectively hilarious to almost everyone except for a Republican political operative named Matt Whitlock, who whined about it in the replies:

You will not be shocked to learn that our friend Mr. Whitlock here, who was once a spokesman for Republicans in the United States Senate, normally does not care much for welfare or socialism:

Maybe he should go tell Youngkin and Leonsis that. At least when he stops crying.

Other Stuff

More on the missing Princess

You may or may not care at all about the whole Princess Catherine stuff I mentioned last week. But if you are interested in that, or if you’re simply interested in a the profoundly bizarre world of royal reporting, there is a fantastic Q&A over at Neiman Lab you should read.

The interviewee/writer of the piece is Ellie Hall, who for a decade covered all things royal for Buzzfeed. While, again, that may not be a thing you care about, Hall is a legitimately good reporter who, esoteric as her beat happens to be, does a fantastic job explaining how royal reporting works, how it doesn’t work, and what the various conspiracy theories about Princess Catherine mean and do not mean.

Some of it — like the parts where official sources clearly favor certain outlets over others in putatively widespread press releases — reminds me a bit of how baseball reporting works. Other parts of it, such as how getting official statements from on-the-record sources is unusual while anonymous stuff is the norm, makes the royal beat seem like Bizarro World. Whatever the case, Hall is straightforward, non-gossipy, and frankly fascinating when talking about how the royal reporting ecosystem works.

At the end of the piece Hall provides a clear timeline of the Princess Catherine affair as a means of showing what news items or bits of gossip set off the conspiracy theorists and which of it serves to dispel conspiracy theories. Again, straightforward and clear-eyed stuff that anyone with even a passing interest in this business will find interesting.

All of that said: I am 94% convinced that this is a “Roman Holiday” situaish and that Kate is currently slumming it with whoever passes for Gregory Peck these days. Ryan Gosling? Adam Driver? Mark Ruffalo? Andrew Garfield? Ethan Peck?

I dunno, but they’re probably having a load of fun.

A Lindbergh Baby conspiracy theory

On the one hand, a theory that Charles Lindbergh, rather than Bruno Haumptmann, abducted and killed his own son in some twisted eugenicist plot has virtually no evidence supporting it and has almost no chance of being true.

On the other hand, Charles Lindbergh was a piece of crap, so if a story claiming the foregoing discomfits his ghost even a little bit, well, I’m OK with it.

Great Moments in Cultural Appropriation

Seen on the Internet:

Jesus. This is OUR thing, man. You don’t get to just show it to the world. It’s erasure of our culture.

Don’t get sucked in, folks

Yesterday it was announced that Mike Tyson will take on YouTuber-turned- boxer Jake Paul on July 20 in a match that will be streamed live on Netflix. Tyson is 58, hasn’t fought since 2020, and hasn’t fought in an actual professionally-sanctioned fight in 19 years. Paul is 27 and, while the quality of his opposition has improved over the course of his ten fights, he mostly still fights tomato cans or old dudes who can provide gimmick appeal in matches that are far closer to being medieval entertainments than professional boxing.

My first thought when I saw this was “what is the point of this?” but a millisecond later I remembered “money — it’s always money.” But it’s still worth digging into the thing actually being sold, because it sure as hell isn’t a decent boxing match. Indeed, what I think is being sold more than anything else is generational warfare.

Netflix is almost certainly counting on the majority of the viewership of this fight being people around my age or a little older who still remember when Mike Tyson was a fierce, seemingly indestructible punching machine. A lot of those people will want to see old Iron Mike stick it to the Millennial/Gen-Z divide-straddling punk who they’ve been conditioned to resent for reasons they probably don’t fully understand. It’s the same audience, to call back to an item from earlier this week, who like to think that Michael Jordan would wipe the floor with LeBron James.

Not that this is unique to Gen-Xers. In this my generational cohorts are doing exactly what our Boomer predecessors have done with respect to sports and music and everything else. Battles in this regard are played out primarily in cringey Facebook memes during which it is frequently asserted that Led Zeppelin was the last real rock band and that real football stopped being played when they actually began enforcing the roughing the passer penalty.

Anyway, the promoters of this spectacle are counting on us to tune in so that we might see Mike Tyson beat up a far-too-online person who we barely know and whose fame we do not understand but which still bothers us on some level. They’re also counting on us to forget that for whatever celebrity rehabilitation Tyson has attempted via self-deprecating cameos in movies and a move into the world of legal weed sales, he’s a convicted rapist and an abuser.

Which is to say: Jesus, don’t root for that guy in anything, even if you hate Jake Paul for some reason. Even if you hate young people for some reason and think they need some comeuppance. Even if you enjoyed seeing Mike Tyson knock the snot out of Marvis Frazier in 30 seconds live on ABC that one time back in the 1980s. Which, man, he knocked him the fuck OUT.

Anyway, let’s just give this a miss, shall we?

Do you feel safer, Citizen?

The Governor of New York, Kathy Hochul, has ordered armed National Guard units to patrol subway stations and has empowered them to stop people and ask to go through their bags and stuff:

This is an absurd, unnecessary spectacle — an act of pure theater — that was fueled by sensationalistic local news coverage of some isolated incidents as opposed to actual crime on the subway which remains near historic lows:

Hochul, by the way, went on TV yesterday and admitted that her deploying the national guard is not based on the facts on the ground. To the contrary, she acknowledged that the crime stats are not anywhere near as high as they have been in the past. Rather, she said, she’s doing this because of people’s “feelings.” That’s right: our nation’s largest city is experiencing an unprecedented show of theatrical authoritarianism because of vibes.

Hochul is the sort of Democratic politician that I hope, one day, we’ll soon be rid of: the sort who got into politics in the late 1980s or early 90s and who still wakes up in a cold sweat at night worrying that the ghost of Ronald Reagan will call her “soft on crime.” So, like Bill Clinton and a bunch of other Boomer Dems she overcorrects and does everything she can not to be outflanked on the right. Meanwhile, this grotesque militarization of a public space will do nothing but (a) make New Yorkers feel like they’re living in a dystopia; and (b) make the sorts of people who already fear coming into the city or riding the subway due to their being brainwashed by talk radio and Fox News feel validated.

You know what people want from the subway? For it to work. For trains to be frequent and on time and to allow them to get to where they’re going quickly and efficiently. Putting a bunch of semi-automatic rifle-wielding men in desert camouflage fatigues in Grand Central to accost middle aged women carrying NPR tote bags doesn’t do that. All it does is stoke fear, misery, aggravation, and annoyance. It’s a stupid act from a governor who is in way, way over her head.

Have a weekend everyone.