Cup of Coffee: August 10, 2023

Good morning! And welcome to Free Thursday!

There was a no-no last night — baseball’s fourth in 2023 — and we talk about that below. We find new depths of Joh Angelos’ jackassery, the Dodgers signed Korea’s top amateur prospect, we talk about new Premier League kits, “Neurotic” voters, fiduciary snapshots and disappearing into one’s own head. Whatever that means.

And That Happened

Here are the scores. Here are the highlights:

Phillies 7, Nationals 0: Michael Lorenzen, making just his second start since being acquired from the Tigers at the trade deadline, hurled a no-hitter. Lorenzen struck out five, walked four, and threw [gulp] 124 pitches. This was the first Phillies no-hitter since Cole Hamels twirled one back on July 25, 2015 and was the 14th in team history. It’s the fourth no-hitter of the 2023 season overall. Even better: he did it wearing white Vans. Nick Castellanos had two home runs and three RBI in support.

Marlins 5, Reds 4: I’m actually in Cincinnati as this goes to press, having come down here late yesterday to see Rüfüs Du Sol last night with Allison and a couple of our friends. The three of them are way more into EDM than me but I try to be a good wingman.

When we rolled into town I saw a bunch of people in Reds gear walking. I wasn’t driving so I wasn’t paying attention to which direction we were heading. I assumed the people were walking toward the park for an evening game but it turns out they were walking away from the park after this early game ended. Which sorta killed the half-plan I had in the back of my head about disappearing from the show and going to the ballpark to catch late innings. I looked up, the lights were off, I checked my phone and saw the game was long over, and then I decided to just chill to Rüfüs Du Sol. It was a good night. It was a good night for Josh Bell too. He homered twice — once left-handed and once right-handed — and drove in four. Bryan De La Cruz hit the go-ahead shot in the ninth. I had a shot at the Blind Pig while walking back to my hotel room.

Brewers 7, Rockies 6: After Colorado took a 6-5 lead in the top of the tenth Mark Canha knocked in the Manfred Man on an RBI double to tie things up. Canha then scored the walkoff run on an Ezequiel Tovar throwing error — which was unexpected because Tovar is pretty damn slick down there — following a grounder by Andruw Monasterio. From the AP game story:

That’s a little zen for a Wednesday afternoon as far as I’m concerned but it’s his interview.

Athletics 2, Rangers 0: An Oakland bullpen game ended up as a four-hit shutout, with Freddy Tarnok serving as the bulk guy and throwing four scoreless innings to give him his first MLB win. Jonah Bride hit sac fly in the third and Zack Gelof homered in the sixth. Esteury Riuiz stole two bases. He has 46 on the year.

Tigers 9, Twins 5: Spencer Torkelson hit two home runs, both solo shots, in the fifth and in the seventh, Matt Vierling went 3-for-5 with an RBI, and the Tigers rattled out 17 hits in all against Twins pitching. Miguel Cabrera went 3-for-4, moving him past Robin Yount into sole possession of 19th place on the hit list with 3,145 safeties for his career. Next up: Paul Waner, who is seven hits ahead, and George Brett, who is only two hits above Waner.

Cardinals 6, Rays 4: Lars Nootbaar went 2-for-5 with a solo homer and a stolen base. Paul Goldschmidt hit a two-run single which out him up over 1,100 RBI for his career. José Siri homered twice for the Rays in a losing cause.

Astros 8, Orioles 2: Kyle Tucker homered for the second straight night, Jose Altuve went 3-for-5 with three RBI and a steal, Alex Bregman had three hits including a double, and the Astros put things away definitively with a four-run eighth. Houston goes for the sweep tomorrow.

Atlanta 6, Pirates 5: Ronald Acuña Jr. left Tuesday’s game after being plunked. I guess it’s safe to say that he’s OK given that he went 3-for-6 with an RBI here. Michael Harris II scored the go-ahead run in the eighth when he tagged up on a popup to right and scored on a close play at the plate, in which he was. initially called out for leaving third early but they cleaned that up on replay.

Mets 4, Cubs 3: Pete Alonso homered for the third game in a row and Jeff McNeil hit a tie-breaking shot in the sixth. Phil Bickford faced a bases loaded situaish in the ninth but struck out Ian Happ to lock it down for New York.

Red Sox 4, Royals 3: Tristan Casas homered in the second and, after Toronto took the lead, Alex Verdugo hit a two-run double in the fourth to put the Sox on top for good. The play of the game, though, was a weird ground rule double in the second. With two out and Matt Duffy on first base, Kyle Isbel hit a drive to left field that Masataka Yoshida dove for but missed, sending him crashing into the wall. When he got up he couldn’t find the ball. Turns out it smashed through one of the red lights on the Green Monster that tracks the number of outs. It was ruled a ground-rule double which pretty much saved Boston’s bacon because it kept Duffy from scoring. With Duffy at third base, Nick Pivetta got Maikel García to fly out to right field to strand two Royals runners in scoring position. Everything I read about this suggests that this was the first time that particular thing happened in Fenway Park’s very, very long history.

Blue Jays 1, Guardians 0: Kevin Gausman tossed seven shutout innings, three relievers finished the six-hitter, and George Springer went 3-for-4 with a solo homer for the game’s only run. Toronto has won five of six. The Guardians have lost nine of 12.

White Sox 9, Yankees 2: Mike Clevinger tossed six innings of one run ball with six strikeouts, Yoán Moncada went 2-for-3 with two doubles, a run scored, and an RBI, and Oscar Colás went 1-for-4 with a two-run homer. Luis Severino was blown up again, allowing four runs over two innings.

Angels 4, Giants 1: Mike Moustakas went 2-for-4 with a three-run homer to back Shohei Ohtni who allowed one run over six — it was unearned — to pick up his tenth win of the year. He has an ERA of 3.17 and a 165/54 K/BB ratio across 130.2 innings to go with that. Oh, and he’s the best hitter in the game. But other than that he’s, you know, OK I suppose.

Dodgers 2, Diamondbacks 0: Bobby Miller tossed six shutout innings, allowing just four hits. He didn’t get the win as Merrill Kelly matched him with six shutout frames of his own. The only runs in the game scored in the eighth when David Peralta hit a bases loaded two-run single.

Mariners 6, Padres 1: It was tied at one heading into the bottom of the eighth when the M’s dropped a five-spot on the Padres bullpen. Cal Raleigh dumped a two-run homer over the fence, Ty France doubled in a run, and Cade Marlowe and Dylan Moore singled in runs. Moore’s was a pinch hit number. Seattle has won seven straight.

The Daily Briefing

John Angelos’ greed is impressive

Last year Maryland’s outgoing governor, Larry Hogan, signed a bill increasing a bond authorization for Camden Yards by $600 million. The expectation there was that it would lead to renovations and upgrades to the stadium and the surrounding property and that, thanks to over half a billion dollars in financial incentives, the Orioles would sign a long awaited lease extension. It’s August now and the O’s have not signed an extension. The team’s lease expires on December 31.

Back in February, when the Orioles initially declined to commit to a new lease, I mused that maybe John Angelos just wants more money. Yesterday Ken Rosenthal confirmed my musings. Although it’s not necessarily more in direct money that he wants as much as he wants a billionaire’s playground:

This sort of reality defiance seems to be on-brand for Angelos. He wants his broadcasters to say that black is white and he wants land that does not exist. Who knows what Master John wants next, but if his nannies don’t give it to him I’m sure he’ll have quite a tantrum.

In other news: old heads like me remember that, thirty years ago, Camden Yards was the poster child for “if you build it they will come” stadium rhetoric. The idea that a new ballpark would revitalize neighborhoods and bring massive economic benefits to cities and even entire regions. While the Inner Harbor got some degree of a boost from it and other development for a period, that has mostly petered out and it’s hard to say that Camden Yards, however beautiful it is, does anything other than give the Orioles a nice place to play ball. Now the team’s owner is demanding that the State of Maryland give him hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars in cash and real estate in order to create the sort of development that some folks would have us believe magically appears by simple virtue of a ballpark existing.

Call me crazy, but I’m beginning to think this is just a big scam designed to enrich the owner of baseball teams.

Dodgers sign Korea’s top amateur prospect

The Dodgers signed Korea’s top amateur pitching prospect, Hyun-Seok Jang, to a $900,000 contract on Tuesday. The 19-year-old chose to bypass the KBO draft in which he was expected to be the first overall selection in order to field offers from Major League clubs.

Jang is said to has a four-pitch mix including a fastball in the high-90s. At his age he’s obviously years away from the bigs, but it’s an interesting signing to be sure.

Other Stuff

The new kits

The Premier League season starts this weekend. Seems like the last one just ended. Probably because it just did end, finishing a little over two months ago. Man, wouldn’t it be cool if the baseball offseason was that short? I mean, apart from the massive number of game cancellations we’d get in January if it were?

I know a lot of you don’t care about soccer stuff here, but as someone going on his third season as a Premier League convert I’m reading everything I can about the upcoming campaign while still trying to maintain as casual a fandom as I can in order to maintain my sanity and to make sure I enjoy it all. Ideally I’ll remain a “just watch the games and follow the couple of big headlines a week” guy as opposed to becoming an obsessive. As the final item in today’s Other Stuff suggests, I should be able to do that but sometimes it’s hard.

I will share one fun thing I read this week: a preview in The Guardian of all the changes in the kits worn by the Premier League clubs for 2023-24.

A great deal of the article deals with little details only die-hards might care about. Changing the outline of logos, adding stripes here or there, or the adoption of a strange alternate kit. There is, however, a recurring theme in the piece that is near and dear to my heart. See if you can spot the pattern:

Everton, Fulham, West Ham, and Wolves get the same treatment.

The author of that piece, Hannah Jane Parkinson, is now my favorite football writer going.

“Neurotic” voters

Pundit Matthew Yglesias tweeted this in the wake of Ohio’s Issue 1 going down on Tuesday night:

Every word except one in that tweet makes sense. The one that does not is “neurotic.” What in the hell does he mean there?

After taking a lot of immediate heat for that comment, which most construed to be Yglesias taking a swipe at pro-abortion voters, particularly women, as being irrational or hysterical or something, Yglesias attempted to explain himself. He did so by citing an academic study which analyzed political ideologies against the backdrop of the Big Five psychologically diagnosed personality attributes: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. And yes, per that study there is a correlation between neuroticism, broadly defined, and political liberalism. Except there are two problems with that as it relates to Yglesias’ tweet.

The first one is that the study explicitly states that the link between neuroticism and liberalism involves economics, not social issues:

So even if you buy that Yglesias used that term because he is a big adherent to the findings of this study and believes it to be relevant to his observation here, he’s dead wrong as it would not apply to abortion under its very terms.1 Which means, at the very least, Yglesias is full of shit here in applying the “neurotic” label in this context.

More broadly, however: have you every seen Yglesias, or any other pundit, routinely cast adherents to a given political cause in this way? Has he ever talked about Republicans’ “conscientious” or “extraverted” base? I spent a great deal of time searching his timeline yesterday and I couldn’t find him using that construction with respect to any of the five personality traits vis-a-vis political ideology. The example from Tuesday night was the first and only time I could find him doing that.

Here’s what I think: I think that Yglesias, though consistently pro-abortion in his politics, is preternaturally obsessed with his personal brand. That brand, upon which he has based his entire career, is characterized by him casting himself as The Most Reasonable Man In The World while everyone else is excitable and nuts. A brand in which anyone who exhibits political passion, as opposed to his intellectual, often contrarian-for-its-own-sake stances, is a fool. Yes, he’s pro-abortion, and yes he’s likely pleased with the outcome of Tuesday night’s vote, but he has great distaste for the campaigning and messaging and, yes, passion, required to obtain such a result, so he looks down on those who exhibited it in order to get that outcome. They’re “neurotic” in is eyes, and yes, he means that in a negative way.

Which is pretty shitty. But a hell of a lot of what Matt Yglesias says and believes is pretty shitty, even if he tends to fall in with a lot of the positions with which I agree in the end.

Fiduciary snapshots and disappearing into one’s own head

Yesterday morning, at about 8:30AM, a man walked by my front door, dressed for work, walking his dog, talking on his phone rather loudly. The sidewalk is pretty close to my door. As the man passed the only thing I could clearly make out, was “. . . I may address the issue of a fiduciary snapshot . . . “ I know what all of those words mean in isolation but I do not know what they mean together. Is that a legal term? A financial one? An insurance one? I turned it over in my head to try to make sense of it and I really couldn’t. I tweeted something about it and then forgot it for the rest of the morning.

It was a short and silly little moment, but I thought about it again later in the day. It reminded me that I don't really know anything about how business or the law works anymore. Indeed, I know less and less every year that passes.

That should not be surprising. I went to law school for three years and practiced law for 11 years. I’ve not practiced law for 14 now. That part of my life has not been the most significant part of my professional identity in spirit for some time, but it’s just about to the point where it’s no longer the most significant in terms of sheer mileage either. I could probably still speak fairly intelligently about litigation concepts because that was my speciality, but at some point I lost most of my understanding of the substance about which I litigated. Businessy things and the like.

I’m OK with that because, at heart, I’m a dilettante. A dabbler. I like to dip my toe into various areas of interest for a while and then take it out and dip it into something else. It’s why I could never have been an academic, I don’t think. With the possible exception of baseball I lack the attention span to pursue truly deep knowledge of any one thing and I’m far too interested in so many other things that even attempting to examine anything truly deeply makes me feel like I’m missing out on stuff. I like knowing a little about old movies and a little about politics, and a little about sports, and a little about music and a little about history, and a little about literature, and a little about a dozen other things.

Litigation was actually pretty good for that, by the way. The practice area is set up so that you have to learn a bunch of stuff about a business or industry for a case, but then that case ends, and you get another case and have to learn about another business or industry. For example, in 2001-02 I spent a little over a year representing Schlotzky’s restaurants in a case against its franchisees, so I know enough about restaurant franchising to be dangerous even if I don’t know enough to be truly knowledgable. On a car ride to Cleveland with Carlo last week he mentioned the unevenness of various burger chain locations he’s been to and, drawing on that case from over 20 years ago, I had all kinds of things to say about how that works and why. Same thing has happened over the years with election contests, numismatics, construction schedules, ethical rules for public officials, and more.

Being a litigator was great for a dilettante like me. I pitied the lawyers who spent decades dealing with nothing except, like, reinsurance or the Employee Retirement Income Security Act or what have you, even if those guys could more easily get in-house jobs someplace where that deep level of expertise is useful. No one ever seemed to need a guy in-house who knew a little about a dozen things.

Still, it was strange to hear someone using words like “fiduciary snapshot” that, in my past life, I may have understood but about which now I am completely baffled. When I mentioned the dog walker on Twitter yesterday morning someone said that the guy I described sounded like a fictional character. I suppose that’s fair based on how I described him. To me — a person with less-and-less real world context every day due to working at home and generally living inside my own head — almost everyone eventually skews toward the fictional. It’s what comes, I think, from observing more than interacting, which is a weird and sometimes dangerous side effect of the sort of life I’ve created for myself. I’m not sure how else I could’ve ended up given the way I’m wired and the path I have taken, but I suppose it’s good to remember that that’s what I do sometimes.

No point to any of this besides navel-gazing, really, but I do hope the dog walker’s colleagues and/or clients were impressed with the fiduciary snapshots.

Have a great day, everyone.