Cup of Coffee: September 12, 2024

Good morning! And welcome to Free Thursday!

And away we go.

And That Happened 

Here are the scores. Here are the highlights:

Mets 6, Blue Jays 2: Blue Jays starter Bowden Francis had a no-hitter through seven and he was at 102 pitches. Given that Francis has been pretty dominant lately — he took another no-hit bid into the ninth a couple of starts previously — and given that the Jays won’t be playing in the postseason and Francis can get some extra time off the rest of the way, he was sent out for the eighth. He finished off the Mets in the eighth on only six pitches so, hoo boy, why not send him out for the ninth too? John Schneider did so and on his third pitch of the inning Francisco Lindor jacked one out to right field to end the no-hitter and to tie up the game:

Was it a meatball? Sure. But it was still an epic dinger from a guy having a fantastic season on a team that, while not assured of anything yet, is increasingly feeling pretty damn special.

Francis was lifted after Lindor’s homer at which point the Mets immediately loaded up the bases, got a sac fly, loaded up the bases again, and got another sac fly. At that point the third Jays pitcher of the inning came in and Francisco Álvarez hit a three-run jack to make what was a no-hitter into a laugher for the team that had been getting no-hit.

Guardians 6, White Sox 4: Lane Thomas drove in four runs. That’s good. What’s kinda crazy about it is that those RBI came via two two-out, two-run infield singles (here and here). You can go months without seeing two runs score on an infield single at all, but to see two in the same game from the same guy is a hell of a thing. You ask for miracles Theo, I give you the Chicago White Sox and their inability to get a third out on plays which most other teams would’ve had no problem converting. The White Sox were swept, but that’s obviously not news. They’ve lost 17 of 19 and 114 of their last 147. Not news either but, Jesus Christ, it’s still a hell of a thing, eh?

Pirates 3, Marlins 1: Pirates starter Bailey Falter took a no-hitter into the seventh inning and ended up tossing seven and a third scoreless innings to pick up the win. Oneil Cruz drew a base-loaded walk for the first run of the game and Jared Triolo hit a dinger.

Diamondbacks 14, Rangers 4: A five-homer day for the Dbacks. Two of them came from Eugenio Súarez, who went 4-for-4. Ketel Marte homered and had four RBI. The other two came from Randal Grichuk — his 200th, NOT his 300th! — and Adrian Del Castillo, who hit a three-run shot. The only bad thing here for the Diamondbacks was starter Merrill Kelly leaving in the fifth because of cramping in his right hamstring. At the moment they’re not concerned about him as he’s had this happen before, but it’s worth watching. Arizona sweeps the two-game series and wins their fourth in a row.

Tigers 7, Rockies 4: Kerry Carpenter hit a triple, a double, an two singles, Trey Sweeney hit a three-run homer, Riley Greene went deep, and the pen gave A.J. Hinch four and a third innings of scoreless relief. The Tigers have won four in a row and five of six and go for the sweep tomorrow before playing nine games against the Orioles and Royals which will almost certainly decide if this late season surge is a true playoff run or merely something nice to build on for 2025.

Phillies 3, Rays 2: Nick Castellanos hit a two-run homer in the first, the Rays tied things up at two by the top of the sixth and then Weston Wilson singled in the go-ahead run in the bottom half, and that’s where things ended three innings later. Philly completes the three-game sweep. The Phillies magic number to clinch the NL East is nine.

Nationals 5, Atlanta 1: Jake Irvin gave up one run and two hits in six innings, CJ Abrams homered, and Dylan Crews added a pair of hits and an RBI for Washington. Atlanta falls a game back of the Mets for the third Wild Card.

Twins 6, Angels 4: Brooks Lee had been 0-for-his-previous-19 when he smacked a go-ahead, two-run double in the seventh. Matt Wallner homered. Royce Lewis had a two-run double that had initially been called a homer but was overruled on review due to it hitting off the top of the wall and back into play. Minnesota is two games behind Kansas City and three ahead of Detroit for the final AL Wild Card.

Red Sox 5, Orioles 3: Anthony Santander hit an eighth inning homer to tie things up and eventually force extras and Emmanuel Rivera gave the O’s a tenth inning lead with an RBI single. A Jackson Holliday error in the tenth put two on, however, and then Tyler O’Neill hit a walkoff three-run homer to give the Bosox the win. The O’s are now a game and a half back of New York because . . .

Yankees 4, Royals 3: . . . Jazz Chisholm Jr. hit a walkoff infield single which plated the Manfred Man in the bottom of the 11th. Juan Soto homered earlier to give the Yankees their only two runs in regulation. It was a fairly dramatic homer as far as early, non-game-deciding homers go, because earlier in the at-bat Soto fouled one off of his foot and went down to his knees in pain. Even had to be checked on by the trainer before staying in the game and continuing his at-bat. Many Yankees fan drawers were soiled during that plate appearance, that I can tell you.

Cardinals 2, Reds 1: Nolan Arenado’s solo homer in the fourth tied things up at one and Paul Goldschmidt’s eighth inning RBI double put the Cards ahead to stay. Lance Lynn allowed one over five and the St. Louis pen held Cincinnati scoreless over the final four.

Athletics 5, Astros 4: Kyle McCann hit a two-run homer in the sixth to turn a 3-2 Houston lead into a 4-3 Oakland lead and Brent Rooker’s second RBI single of the game later that inning gave the A’s a cushion. Oakland goes for the sweep this afternoon.

Mariners 5, Padres 2: Bryan Woo took a perfect game into the seventh before allowing two runs but it was good enough. Luke Raley had a two-run single in the third and J.P. Crawford added a two-run double in the sixth. Cal Raleigh singled one in in the third. The M’s and Pads split the two-game set.

Giants 13, Brewers 2: Mike Yastrzemski homered and drove in four, Jerar Encarnacion also homered and had three RBI, Matt Chapman went deep, and Tyler Fitzgerald and Patrick Bailey each had three hits. The Giants were up 8-0 after two so not a super competitive contest. Blake Snell allowed one run with eight strikeouts over five.

Dodgers 10, Cubs 8: Looked like a wild one. Michael Kopech came in to close things out with a three-run lead in the ninth but he walked the bases loaded with no outs, gave up a sac fly but then Will Smith caught a runner stealing and Kopech struck out Michael Busch to end the threat and the game. Tommy Edman went 2-for-5 and had two homers for the second game in a row — one from each side of the plate last night — and four RBI. Shohei Ohtani went 2-for-4 with a homer, three RBI, and a stolen base. He’s now at 47-48 for those keeping track. All of that offense was necessary to overcome starter Bobby Miller allowing six runs over four and a third, helping the Dodgers blow an early four-run lead. He’s pitching his way out of the Dodgers rotation, which is a hell of a thing given the state of the Dodgers rotation is something akin to the Russian Imperial Army in early 1917. Like, Dave Roberts is gonna be running 50 year old guys out there without cleats pretty soon.

The Daily Briefing

Jerry Reinsdorf makes a statement

White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf, the man ultimately responsible for putting what is arguably the worst major league team in baseball history on the field this year, issued a statement yesterday. Feel the accountability:

1. It IS the end of the season, so what in the hell are you waiting for?

2. Unless the more you have to say is “I am selling the Chicago White Sox,” no one really cares.

Edwin Uceta suspended

Major League Baseball announced yesterday afternoon that Tampa Bay Rays reliever Edwin Uceta has received a three-game suspension and an undisclosed fine for intentionally throwing at Nick Castellanos during the bottom of the eighth inning of Tuesday night’s game in Philadelphia. As noted in the recaps yesterday, Uceta got lit the hell up and pretty obviously threw at Castellanos out of frustration, leading to the benches clearing.

Per the rules which automatically discipline managers for pitchers throwing at the other team, Rays manager Kevin Cash got a one-game suspension and a fine as well.

Uceta has decided not to appeal his suspension and he began serving it during last night’s game. Cash also served his suspension last night, as managers have no right to appeal discipline.

Derek Shelton to return as Pirates manager next year 

The Pittsburgh Pirates 2024 season has been a disappointing one, particularly in the second half. They’re 70-76 with a minus-45 run differential and in last place in the National League Central. Despite this, manager Derek Shelton got a vote of confidence yesterday.

That came in the from of general manager Ben Cherington telling reporters that he believes Shelton is the “right person to manage this team in 2025” and that he fully expects Shelton to return. Which, the slight equivocation in that statement notwithstanding, seems fair to me.

Shelton, 54, is in his fifth season as Pirates manager and the Buccos stand a decent chance at finishing in last place for the third time in those five years. Still, the team has improved each year during his tenure, and the young talent that the club has developed has met or exceeded expectations once they’ve made their way to the bigs, which usually speaks well of a manager.

The thing keeping the Pirates from breaking .500 and at least entering the postseason discussion is not Shelton. It’s the unwillingness of owner Bob Nutting to spend more money on talent. The Pirates have the second-lowest payroll in all of baseball, ahed of only the Oakland A’s, which are closer to being an insurance scam or a tax shelter or a real estate play than a major league baseball team as far as their owner is concerned.

Shelton signed a contract extension last year, but the club never did reveal its terms. One suspects that it only took him through this season. What’s more, earlier this summer Nutting suggested that Shelton was on the hot seat, so I suspect that Shelton is currently a lame duck. Still, I don’t think Cherington says what he said yesterday, even with the slight equivocation, if he and Nutting hadn’t decided to bring Shelton back for another year and if they didn’t at least talk to Shelton and determined that he’s amenable to it.

Shelton seems like a solid guy. It’d be cool to see what he could do with more talent at his disposal.

Reynaldo López placed on the IL

The Atlanta Baseball Club placed All-Star righty Reynaldo López on the 15-day injured list yesterday with right shoulder inflammation. As mentioned in yesterday’s recaps, López was removed from Tuesday night’s 12-0 win over the Nationals after just one inning and 25 pitches, many of which were below his usual velocity.

To replace López, the club called up righty Daysbel Hernández from Triple-A Gwinnett.

López, 30, has an 8-5 record with a 2.03 ERA (205 ERA+) and 137 strikeouts in 128.2 innings over 24 starts. He’s a huge reason why Atlanta’s pitching staff has been so damn strong this year. Losing him, on top of all of the team’s other injuries, is almost sickly comical at the point. Performance art of some kind.

Anthony Banda suffers an emotional immaturity injury

The Dodgers placed reliever Anthony Banda on the injured list before Tuesday night’s game. It seems that he suffered a hairline fracture in his left hand on Monday night after allowing two runs on three hits in his one inning of work in the Dodgers’ loss to the Cubs.

How did he injure his hand? Manager Dave Roberts said that Banda experienced “a moment of weakness and frustration which he decided to take out on a solid object.” In other words, Banda got mad and punched a wall.

Cubs reliever Colten Brewer did that back in July. We get one or two of these every year. Maybe one day there will be a cure for the emotional immaturity of young men, but until then all we can do is treat the symptoms.

Cubs reliever experienced an elevated heart rate in Tuesday night’s game

Chicago Cubs closer Porter Hodge got the save in Tuesday night's 6-3 win over the Dodgers, but there was some scariness involved as well.

With two outs in the ninth Hodge stepped off the rubber and walked around the mound. He then appeared to rub his chest and then went down to one knee. The team trainer and his teammates talked to him for a bit, he composed himself, and then he finished off the save. After the game manager Craig Counsell said this:

So this wasn’t the first time Hodge experienced an elevated heart rate. Concerning to be sure.

Other Stuff

Look, he’s not wrong

Yesterday Patrick Gathara of Al Jazeera wrote about the presidential debate in the way the American press tends to describe the rest of the world.

And it just goes on from there.

Do I agree with all of the characterizations of the column? No. He gets over his skis a bit at times, detracting a bit from what it otherwise wonderfully biting satire. But he’s also not wrong about most of it if you’re being objective, and some of it is downright hilarious.

Always a good reminder that (a) the way we, as a country, think of the rest of the world is pretty ignorant and condescending most of the time; and (b) America is not exceptional, no matter how hard everyone here insists that it is.

Billionaire to walk in space today

Before today there was only one category of human beings who have had the opportunity to walk in space: highly-trained astronauts, most of whom have military backgrounds and have spent much of their adult lives learning the skills and nuances of space exploration. As of today there will be two categories: the astronauts and billionaire tech executives with connections to Elon Musk:

Isaacman is a private pilot with a lot of experience flying military aircraft because, per his Wikipedia page, he “co-founded Draken International, a Florida-based company that trains pilots for the United States Armed Forces.” Before reading that I would’ve assumed that the United States Armed Forces trained pilots for the United States Armed Forces, but I suppose you can’t have the military-industrial complex without the industry. Which, in this case, is probably doing a hell of a job seeking rents on the public dime. The genius of capitalism, babies.

In addition to the military jet training Isaacman has at least been up in a SpaceX orbiter before, so he’s not a newbie. But he’s done nothing like this, and despite all kinds of lip service being paid to the research and data collection he and his crew will be doing on this flight, there appears to be no real mission here. At least nothing that hasn’t been done our couldn’t be done by actual astronauts. Indeed, it sounds a hell of a lot like a vanity project, made possible only because one billionaire knows another billionaire.

I’ll never root for harm to come to almost any person, and I certainly do not want to see any harm come to Isaacman or the people on the ship with him. But this all strikes me as something far more akin to those people diving down to see the wreck of the Titanic in that janky sub with the Xbox-controller for a steering wheel than it does real science or real exploration. When it comes to that sort of thing I tend to believe that Nature, Physics, and The Universe have a house advantage. Shit like this just gives off all of the Icarus and Daedalus vibes.

”Cola Wars” 

I read in Variety yesterday that there’s a movie called “Cola Wars” in development. Per the story, it focuses on “the battle for soda supremacy that kicked off in the mid-1980s as Pepsi aimed to challenge Coke’s longtime dominance in the soft drink space.” Judd Apatow is directing. Steven Spielberg is producing, so it’s got some heavy hitters behind it.

This is just the latest in a series of movies about the development of consumer products. Last year we got the movie “Air” with Matt Damon and Ben Affleck about the making of the Nike Air Jordan. Earlier this Jerry Seinfeld made “Unfrosted,” a movie about the invention of Pop-Tarts. There was also a movie last year about the rise and fall of BlackBerry, starring Glenn Howerton and Jay Baruchel. I didn’t see the first two. I did see “BlackBerry,” however, and it was actually a fantastic movie. Which, to be honest, sort of threw a wrench in my whole “the dramatization of a corporate product is not the stuff of good cinema!” stance which I held before I saw it. Of course me getting mad for liking something that I had convinced myself that I’d be certain to hate out of principle and nothing more says a hell of a lot more about me than it says about those movies.

Even if I hadn’t liked “BlackBerry” I’d actually be inclined to keep an open mind about “Cola Wars,” because that whole 1980s Coke/Pepsi thing was fascinating to me. It was probably the first major commercial/business news story to which I paid a lot of attention, due to my starting to read newspapers front-to-back when I was about 11 years old. We weren’t a Wall Street Journal house so I didn’t really get the stock market or finance or anything yet, but we did have a subscription to USA Today and the “Money” section of that paper was loaded with consumer product news ever single day. Cars. Fast food. Personal computers. The entertainment industry. And of course the Cola Wars. I ate that stuff up in my admittedly boring and ultimately fairly pointless precocity.

Some of you probably remember “The Pepsi Challenge” campaign in which they did blind taste tests between Coke and Pepsi. More people picked Pepsi over Coke in those taste tests and Pepsi made a whole marketing campaign out of it. Some fun things about it:

• I actually took the Pepsi Challenge at some state fair or auto show or something my family went to in the early 80s. My dad and my brother picked Pepsi. I picked Coke. My mom abstained because she hates soda;

• The taste-test thing was likely misleading because they only gave people a sip. If people only get a sip or a small taste of something they are more likely to prefer the sweeter thing, but if they have more — like a can or a bottle — they’re more likely to prefer the less-sweet one, because sweetness has diminishing returns. Pepsi is a bit sweeter than Classic Coke, so it tended to win the Pepsi Challenge on the sip;

• Coke severely overreacted to the Pepsi Challenge campaign specifically and to Pepsi’s growing market share in the 1970s and early 80s in general. Yes, Coke had lost a lot of market share over the years, but its earlier dominance, born of the fact that it was practically the only game in town for decades, was not sustainable. Diet drinks and other beverages naturally took away some of that market share and it was inevitable that Pepsi or some other challenger would eventually grow in stature. Coke executives seemed not to really grok that, however, they panicked, and that panic is what led to the development of New Coke, which was sweeter, like Pepsi, and which was released in 1985;

• Before the release of New Coke, Coca-Cola conducted its own focus groups comparing Classic Coke, New Coke, and Pepsi, and New Coke’s success in those tests convinced Coke executives that New Coke would be a winner. The problem: those focus groups were likely skewed by the same small taste bias for sweeter drinks, but Coke apparently didn’t realize that;

• A bigger problem: Coke’s R&D process for New Coke seemed to greatly discount the idea of brand loyalty and all of the emotion and irrationality tied up in such things. They accepted blind taste test results as gospel but discounted feedback from the focus groups about their discomfort about changing Coca-Cola as a brand.

Most of you know what happened next: New Coke was an utter calamity. The grand emotional, public backlash to the very idea of changing Coca-Cola was obviously the biggest reason the launch was such a disaster, but that small sip bias was likewise a big part of the problem too. The more people drank the new stuff the less they liked it, and the less they liked it the more they wondered why in the hell Coke would do this to them. Just a negative feedback loop from which New Coke never recovered.

Most consumer product/corporate crap is pretty uninteresting to me now, but I still have a hard time believing that things went down the way that they did with Coke. I mean, arguably the most enduring product and brand in the history of the human race got so shook at its competitor achieving a modest sales uptick based on a couple of good marketing initiatives that it almost drove itself into a ditch in response.

Coke, of course, recovered quite well after all of this went down. They introduced “Classic Coke” — the same old formula that had been used for nearly a century — less than three months after New Coke launched. They also changed their marketing, hiring Max Headroom to do edgy-for-the-time commercials, which helped them claw back a huge chunk of the youth market which Pepsi had won over the previous decade or so and what helped fuel Coke’s panic in the first place.

They also slowly phased out New Coke. You could find it on the shelves for a couple of years, but it became harder to find over time. In 1990 they rebranded New Coke as “Coke II” which was sold on only a few markets. I had never even heard of it until I saw a 2-liter of it on a shelf in frankly scary liquor store/bar combination someplace in West Chicago at midnight during the late summer of 2000 (don’t ask, please; it was a day and night from which I am still psychologically recovering). They discontinued Coke II a couple of years later. The word “Classic” was phased out on Coke cans and bottles over a 20-year period. By 2009 it was all gone and with it any front-facing acknowledgment that New Coke ever happened.

Yeah, that’s probably a bit too much to write about some corporate brand, but it was all pretty astounding to witness in real time. Several books have been written about the whole Cola War saga. It even got name-checked in a horrible Billy Joel song. So why not a movie? I’ll go see it.

What, you thought I was gonna end on that horrible Billy Joel song? Please. Oh, and if you wanna know why I didn’t put the far more famous Andrews Sisters version of “Rum and Coca-Cola” here, read on, my friends, read on. It’s a hell of a story. It even involves Maury Amsterdam! But despite all of that I still love the Andrews Sisters version. It’s a banger.

Have a great day everyone.