Cup of Coffee: September 19, 2024

Good morning! And welcome to Free Thursday!

Let’s get down to business, shall we?

And That Happened 

Here are the scores. Here are the highlights:

First off, congratulations to the Milwaukee Brewers, the first team to clinch both a division and a postseason spot this season. They did so while still sitting around their hotel rooms yesterday afternoon, by virtue of the Cubs’ loss to the A’s, but a clinching is a clinching. And they later won in a walkoff, so they got to jump around like loons anyway, so it was all good.

Not too bad for a club which (a) lost its head of baseball operations, its longtime manager, and its top starting pitcher before the season began; (b) which was without the guy who was supposed to replace the best pitcher at the top of the rotation for the whole season; (c) was without their top reliever for the first half of the season; and (d) was without their best hitter for the last two months of the season. Despite all of that, though, the Brewers have won the Central for the third time in four years and, this year, it was not particularly close.

Now they have to do something they really haven’t done: make a deep run in the postseason. They’ve been knocked out in the Wild Card round in three of their last four postseason appearances and lost in the Division Series in the other one. They last went beyond that six years ago when they took the Dodgers to the seventh game of the NLCS.

They can worry about that later, though. For now they have a week and a half or so to rest up and get healthy for October.

Angels 4, White Sox 3: Andrew Vaughn homered in the fourth and Taylor Ward doubled in the eighth to make it 1-1 at the end of regulation. In the top of the tenth Dominic Fletcher bunted over the Manfred Man and then Miguel Vargas hit a sac fly to push the Sox ahead. I wasn’t watching the game but I was watching the gamecast of this one in real time and, like a complete moron who has never seen a baseball game before in his life, decided that a 2-1 Chicago White Sox lead in extra innings was safe enough for me to write up the whole recap. No idea what I was smoking because as soon as I finished typing the words, “Chicago has won three of four and has taken two series in a row,” the Angels tied it up by bunting their Manfred Man to third after which Gustavo Campero singled him home to make it 2-2 and onto the 11th we went. And then on to the 12th it went. And then on to the 13th it went. And that’s when the Angels won.

I wasn’t following the gamecast at that point because I had to leave to go see Cat Power in concert — she’s touring with her “Cat Power Sings Dylan: The 1966 Royal Albert Hall Concert” album and was in Columbus last night — and that was FANTASTIC. Way better than paying even a lick of attention to a game between a 117-loss and a 90-loss team. But when I got home I did see that the White Sox had at least made something entertaining out of it:

It happens. Often, actually.

Anyway: you should make a point to listen to Cat Power’s Royal Albert Hall album. The acoustic half is positively mesmerizing. While the electric half isn’t quite as good, she still makes those songs her own, interpreting them in ways few people who cover Dylan ever manage to do. The way she she massages so many of those notes and phrases. The way she changes lyrics in key places to shade things just so. Perfection. And it was perfection live, too. The show was in a smallish theater and it worked, but she should do it in jazz or blues clubs. Did I mention it was perfection?

And yes: I know that Dylan’s famous “Royal Albert Hall” show — the one where the guy yelled “JUDAS!” because Dylan was playing electric — did not actually take place in the Royal Albert Hall. It took place in Manchester, at the Free Trade Hall. I also knew this several years go when I took a walking tour of Manchester and volunteered that information to the group when we arrived outside the Free Trade Hall. No one cared, though. They all wanted to hear about the Sex Pistols playing there. That happens too.

Athletics 5, Cubs 3: Tyler Soderstrom homered, drove in two, and scored twice and Zack Gelof hit a go-ahead RBI double in the eighth. The A’s pen tossed four and a third innings of hitless relief to give the A’s the rubber match. And, as noted above, the Cubs’ loss gives the NL Central to Milwaukee.

Diamondbacks 9, Rockies 4: Corbin Carroll homered in the first and the second innings, driving in three and scoring three in the process. Randal Grichuk also went deep and doubled. Eduardo Rodriguez struck out 11 while allowing two runs and working into the seventh.

Giants 5, Orioles 3: Mike Yastrzemski hit a leadoff homer — his second homer in as many days — Michael Conforto also hit a solo shot, Casey Schmitt hit a two-run single and the O’s continued to play generally sloppy baseball, the sort of which has caused them to lose eight of ten and all but fall out of the race for the division title. They’re still pretty safe in the Wild Card race but it’s probably a good time for them to stop farting around like they have been.

Atlanta 7, Reds 1: Spencer Schwellenbach allowed one over six, Michael Harris II and Marcell Ozuna homered, and Gio Urshela knocked in three via a two-run single and a ground rule double. A necessary win for Atlanta as both the Mets and Snakes won. They’re still two games out of the playoff picture.

Padres 4, Astros 0: Dylan Cease shut the ‘Stros out unto the ninth inning and couldn’t quite bring it home, but Tanner Scott got the final two outs in this two-hitter. Manny Machado hit two homers and Fernando Tatis and Donovan Solano went yard as well. San Diego takes two of three from Houston and stayed 2.5 games ahead of the Diamondbacks and Mets for the first NL Wild Card.

Dodgers 8, Marlins 4: Kiké Hernández, Will Smith, and Tommy Edman homered — Kiké’s was a three-run shot — and the Dodgers rode a five-run fourth to victory. Shohei Ohtani swiped his 49th base so he’s one steal and two homers short of 50/50. Los Angeles picks up its 90th win and remains 3.5 games ahead of second-place San Diego.

Guardians 5, Twins 4: It was 2-2 after nine and the Twins scored two in the top of the tenth but Cleveland scored three and that’s more than two so, well, you know. Brayan Rocchio singled in Andrés Giménez with the winning run to walk things off. With Minnesota’s loss and Detroit’s win, the Tigers are now just a half game back in the Wild Card race. Cleveland, meanwhile, reduced its magic number for clinching a playoff berth to one.

Red Sox 2, Rays 1: Trevor Story — remember him? — homered in the sixth and singled, stole second and stole third and then scored the go-ahead run on a Jarren Duran single in the eighth. Boston needed six pitchers but they scattered eight hits, allowed just the one run and struck out 11.

Mets 10, Nationals 0: José Quintana shut the Nats out for seven — that creep can roll, dude — and two relievers completed the three-hit shutout. Brandon Nimmo’s three-run homer capped a nine-run fourth and Luisangel Acuña homered in the eighth. The Mets remain tied with Arizona for the second Wild Card, two games ahead of Atlanta for the last playoff spot.

Tigers 4, Royals 2: Tarik Skubal picked up his 17th win with five good innings, Riley Greene homered, and Trey Sweeney doubled in two. Every time I see “T. Sweeney” in the box score I think of Terry Sweeney, who appeared on the ill-fated, yet somehow memorable, 1985-86 season of “Saturday Night Live.” He was SNL's first openly gay male cast member and I vividly recall him doing his Nancy Reagan impression many times, often breaking into non-sequitur musical numbers in character, which was a fun spin on things. Sadly, SNL seemed to only let Sweeney do stereotypically gay characters and drag work. I say sadly, but I don’t really know if it was sad. Maybe that’s what he wanted to do, but the balance of probabilities given the time and place suggested that he was ghettoized. And there was a famous story about Chevy Chase, who had returned to host the show, being a homophobic jackass to Sweeney. Chevy Chase, of course, is one of the biggest assholes in showbiz history, so I suppose that tracks. This newsletter is on Team Terry Sweeney.

Brewers 2, Phillies 1: As mentioned, Milwaukee clinched when the Cubs lost earlier in the day, but they still had fun thanks to Jake Bauers hitting a walkoff single to win it. Jackson Chourio was the man who scored, after leading off the inning with a triple. He’s also only 20 years old so he could not partake in the champagne/beer celebration afterward. As the photo above shows, they set him up with a bunch of alcohol-free stuff. Honestly, I’d rather have a Coke or something than that but that’s awfully nice of the Brewers to accommodate the youths.

Cardinals 10, Pirates 5: Jordan Walker hit a bases-loaded double, Brendan Donovan hit a two-run homer, and Masyn Winn added a solo homer as the Cards enjoyed a six-run seventh inning and cruised to victory. Sonny Gray wasn’t great but he struck out eight and that put him over 200 Ks for the year

Rangers 2, Blue Jays 0: Cody Bradford blanked the Jays for seven and two relievers finished the five-hitter. Adolis García’s two-run homer in the sixth was all the scoring here.

Yankees 2, Mariners 1: Anthony Rizzo’s RBI single in the second put the Yankees on the board and Nestor Cortes’ six shutout innings kept the M’s off the board. That changed in the eighth, though, when Justin Turner hit a solo homer off of Clay Holmes, giving Holmes 13 blown saves on the year. Can’t imagine giving him high-leverage innings in October, though I fear Aaron Boone can imagine it. Anyway, it was tied after nine and we went to extras. Once in extras Rizzo struck again, doubling home the Manfred Man on the first pitch of the inning and the M’s got bupkis in the bottom half.

The win clinches a playoff slot for the Yankees.

The Daily Briefing

Orioles DFA Craig Kimbrel

One day after Craig Kimbrel gave up six runs in the ninth inning of a 10-0 loss to the Giants, the Orioles have designated him for assignment.

Kimbrel has had an awful year. Overall he’s sporting a 5.33 ERA (71 ERA+) and has given up 40 hits and has walked 31 batters in 52.1 innings. He’s been particularly bad of late, posting an ERA of 6.52 in ten games in July, a 7.57 ERA in nine games in August, and a whopping 22.09 in four games in September. That run has coincided with some bad overall play by the Orioles to which he has certainly contributed.

Kimbrel was signed to a one-year $13 million deal before the season. He was the only significant free agent acquisition by Baltimore last winter and it was the biggest free agent contract the Orioles have handed out in years. Whoops.

There was a time when Kimbrel was one of the best if not the best closers in the game, but he has become increasingly unreliable in recent years. As Joe Sheehan noted yesterday and discussed at length back in December, The Orioles “are the sixth consecutive team, dating to the 2018 Red Sox, to reduce Kimbrel's role or get rid of him entirely” in the course of the season. That’s a hell of a thing.

It seems highly unlikely, given how poorly he has performed of late, that anyone will pick him up for the season’s final week and a half. And even if they did, he would not be eligible for anyone’s postseason roster at this juncture. The more relevant question is whether Tuesday night’s game against the Giants was Kimbrel’s final appearance in the big leagues.

Baseball in North Korea

Officially speaking, baseball is not played in North Korea. It once was, with the game arriving and being spread throughout Korea via some combination of the country’s imperialist Japanese rulers and American missionaries. The game almost completely disappeared after the country’s partition, however, as the dictatorship which has ruled North Korea for decades has sought to stamp out as much Japanese and American culture as possible.

This story in The Guardian, however, suggests that baseball isn’t completely extinct in North Korea. Most people there today — especially people under 50 — have had no exposure to the game whatsoever. There are, however, a random bits of evidence to suggest that memory of the game has not been completely lost. Some cartoons. Some images on a postage stamp that may or may not have been created for propaganda purposes. Some fading memories of people who played bat-and-ball games in their youth. A satellite image which appears to show a baseball diamond.

Fascinating stuff.

The last Woj Bomb

ESPN’s NBA reporter Adrian Wojnarowski announced yesterday that he’s leaving sports media to take over as the administrator — I’ve also seen the term “general manager”; I don’t know how college sports work anymore — of the basketball program at his alma mater, St. Bonaventure University.

Wojnarowski, known by most readers and fans as “Woj,” became famous as a transactions scoops reporter, with his tweets of free agent signings and trades coming to be known as “Woj Bombs.” His scoops led to considerable fame and millions of social media followers. It’s a model followed in football by Adam Schefter and in baseball by Ken Rosenthal and, more recently, Jeff Passan, among others.

Woj was well-loved by basketball fans — and even a lot of non-basketball fans — for dropping his bombs at seemingly any hour of the night or day, which had the effect of injecting a considerable amount of excitement into the online sports discussion. But that reporting model, both on his part and among his counterparts in the other sports, always seemed kinda pointless to me. It does wonders for the careers of the scoop guys themselves, but I never understood how it helped their employers, what with all of the big news going out on the reporters’ social media feeds rather than on ESPN or wherever. And it’s not like the teams or the league or the players themselves, not to mention a dozen other reporters, wouldn’t all have that same information minutes or sometimes seconds later. It can be great fun, sure, but I never understood who, exactly, that kind of thing served.

I could be wrong about that, of course. If there wasn’t some sort of advantage for ESPN having those kinds of guys on staff it wouldn’t pay them what I assume to be pretty big salaries. And maybe basketball fans are better off getting news of a signing at 11:47PM as opposed to 1:10 AM or, for that matter, 8AM the next morning. I’m not that kind of fan, really, and a couple of minor scoops back in my NBC days notwithstanding, I’ve never been that kind of reporter.

But something Adam Schefter said yesterday when asked to comment on Woj's retirement really does make me wonder what in the hell we’re doing here:

Sounds like a pretty crappy life just to get that tweet out 16 seconds before the competition or the official press release. So good for Woj leaving it, even if I wonder why guys like Schefter and Passan and the rest keep with it.

Other Stuff

Donald Trump and J.D. Vance are domestic terrorists 

The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that, no, J.D. Vance was not merely sharing rumors he heard when he decided to start spreading shopworn blood libels about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, and no he did not, as he claimed, eventually figure out the truth only to keep up talking about it to make some overarching political point. He was knowingly lying about it from the get-go:

Trump and Vance continue to spread this knowing lie. As a result:

• As of Tuesday evening, thirty-six bomb threats had been logged by local authorities;

• Municipal buildings have been closed;

• Public school was canceled and not resumed until the governor called in the state troopers, who remain in the city;

• College classes and sporting events at Wittenberg University have been canceled;

• A security tower with cameras was erected outside City Hall; and

• Hospitals have gone into lockdown on three separate occasions in response to threats.

At present, numerous Republican politicians and operatives are planning rallies and appearances in Springfield, and that has caused the Proud Boys, the KKK, and other neo-Nazis to show up there, looking for trouble. If Trump or someone else from the campaign does show up there it will only fan the flames and, in all likelihood, lead to violence.

If you or I spread malicious, knowing lies that led to bomb threats, school closures, Nazi marches, and required the governor to call in the State Troopers, we'd be in a box someplace inside of an hour and would probably be shipped to ADX Florence by the time things were said and done. Trump and Vance, however, are somehow able to incite fear, hatred, and the strong possibility of violence on a small Ohio town with impunity.

They’re domestic terrorists. We should call them what they are.

Haitian immigrants are saving Springfield

Sticking with this for a moment, I implore you to read and share this newsletter post from Radley Balko.

At the outset he calls out what J.D. Vance and Donald Trump are doing in clear terms, which is certainly welcome. But the bulk of the piece presents a detailed analysis of how, actually, Haitian immigration has benefitted Springfield, Ohio in multiple measurable ways. The same goes for other communities, both in history and the present day, which benefitted from immigration the sort of which Springfield is experiencing.

In addition to debunking the vile lies and incitement of the domestic terrorists atop the Republican ticket — just yesterday afternoon Vance proclaimed that he would still call them “illegal aliens” even though they have legal immigration status — it explains how stupid and counterproductive it is to demonize immigrants who are saving once-dying middle American towns for which people like Vance and Trump claim to speak.

People who traffic in the kind of hateful, racist rhetoric Vance and Trump do cannot be reached. But all of us know many people who, even if they do not care for that stuff, remain skeptical of immigration in general and are potentially susceptible to nativist appeals. Those are the people who need to read this kind of analysis. I highly recommend you share it with you social networks so some of them may appreciate what is really going on.

You can’t pay for this kind of advertising 

From a Delish report on the most unhealthy fast food french fries:

That may be because, based on my experience with Five Guys, an order of their fries contains approximately five pounds of potatoes. Indeed, I’m pretty sure that you get more fries at Five Guys when you order “no fries, please, I mean it!” than you get in a super-sized order of fries everywhere else. I’m also pretty sure that if you go to Five Guys and order an unsweetened iced tea and nothing else it comes with at least a pound of fries in it. I once ate at a totally different restaurant at a food court, forgot to get a napkin, grabbed one from the nearby Five Guys instead and nearly died of Vitamin B6 toxicity. They give you a LOT of fries is what I’m sayin’ here. Also: their fries kinda suck, but we’ll save that for another day.

The healthiest fast food fries, though that’s relative of course: In-N-Out and McDonald’s. I can only assume that after those results were published all of the executives of those companies resigned in disgrace for failure to fulfill the central mission of fast food restaurants, which is killing people young, before they become drains on society. I’m pretty sure I read that somewhere once.  

OK, Boomer

I have no idea why this showed up on my Facebook feed. Probably because I liked some Bob Dylan thing or something. But I saw it and now you have to as well:

I attempted to reply to the post by noting that the motor vehicle fatality rate per 100 million miles traveled has fallen from roughly 4.75 around when this photo was taken in the early 1970s to 1.35 in 2022 (it was as low as 1.08 in 2014). I added that, perhaps, increases in vehicle safety has had a hell of a lot to do with that. But when I hit “enter” to post my comment I got a message telling me that since I wasn’t a member of the group and that it would first be reviewed before it would appear. Then a few minutes later I got a notice saying my comment was rejected.

Contrary to what generational discourse would have you believe, there’s great variation among Baby Boomers. But “not wanting to hear facts that are inconvenient to their nostalgia-infused beliefs” seems to be a pretty pervasive trait.

Death? Pfft.

Look, I realize I routinely share scientific articles and studies which I barely understand and which are, often, full of crap or are at least seriously flawed. But (a) I know I’m a mark so I don’t care; (b) no one is coming to me for actual scientific information; and (c) if you sell your study as being about “Creatures” — a way better word than “organisms” in my view — which “occupy a 'third state' beyond life and death,” well, you got me on the hook, Cochise:

Again, I’m not going to pretend to know what this is all about. But if we can defeat mortality and somehow destroy the veil between the world of the living and the world of the dead, the first thing I’m gonna do is wake up Marry Shelley, set her up with a newsletter, and encourage her to go crazy writing cautionary tales, because even if this is all cool, contrarian game respects contrarian game.

Have a great day everyone..