Cup of Coffee: December 2, 2021

Good morning! And welcome to Free Thursday! Usually at this time I invite our visiting friends to subscribe at this point. And I will do so again. But I first wanted to let them know that, if they do subscribe today they can get 20% off either an annual or monthly subscription for one year:

Hey, if MLB is going to lock out the players and give us our first bit of official labor ugliness in over a quarter century that I may as well have a sale, eh?

Today I talk about that lockout and where things stand in the negotiating. I also talk about just how insanely biased and downright misleading the reporting is and will continue to be about all of this, which is another great reason to subscribe to Cup of Coffee. Go independent with your news, folks. Especially your labor news. With MLB and its rights holders owning most of the baseball media these days, it’s the only way to be sure.

Today I also talk about the transactions which went down just before the lockout hit, how gambling interests are NOT fans of that report from yesterday about MLB switching out dead and lively baseballs all willy-nilly last year, link to a list of the 100 best baseball books of all time, talk about Ichiro being Ichiro, and note the passing of a Cy Young Award winner whose career ended far too soon due to injury, addiction, and a baseball world that, at the time, was woefully deficient in dealing with both of those things.

Other Stuff is a bit abbreviated today what with all of the baseball news, but I did watch a chippy as hell soccer game yesterday with a bunch of drunken fans and that was all kinds of fun I also offer some criticism of how the Democratic party goes about its business that will likely piss off some Democrats but, hey, I piss off a lot of people so that ain’t nothin’ new.

Let’s get at ‘er.

The Daily Briefing

Welcome to the Lockout

The owners and the players had until midnight to talk last night. Realizing how far apart they were on everything, however, they broke negotiations off before 3PM Eastern time, got in their hired Escalades, Tahoes, and Suburbans, and made their way to the airport and home. At midnight the owners imposed the lockout we all knew was coming and with that we’re in the first lockout or strike baseball has seen in over a quarter of a century.

And to be clear: this one is a lockout — not a strike or “workstoppage” — despite what most people reporting about this will imply in an effort to make the players look like the bad guys.

Rob Manfred’s full statement on this is so long that he might’ve been composing it while the was still trying to negotiate. The whole thing can be read here, if you can stomach that much from that guy. In relevant part:

To be clear again: the owners were not “forced” here. This was a choice — their choice — to do this. Which is exactly what the statements from MLBPA and its Executive Director Tony Clark noted. The MLBPA:

Clark:

While that lockout freezes basically all interaction between teams and players outside of the representatives doing the negotiating, there’s not much different today than we had yesterday as far as everything else goes.

The owners have still not made a new economic proposal since their previous one, weeks ago, which was deemed by everyone besides the owners themselves to be unserious. The players’ most recent proposal — shortened tracks to arbitration and free agency, some major changes to revenue sharing, and a much higher Competitive Balance Tax threshold than currently exists — did not, it seems, impress anyone on the owner’s side.

Indeed, most of those terms seem to be off-the-table as far as the owners are concerned. From Evan Drellich of The Athletic:

There is something very Rob Manfred Era about that position. It’s an entitled, even spoiled kind of stance. It’s the bargaining table equivalent of a kid on a playground saying “I will not play with YOU unless we only play what I want to play!” Eventually someone’s mom will come over and say, “C’mon, Bobby. Why don’t you play Tony’s game for a little bit and then he’ll play yours.” There is always sulking after that kind of thing, but eventually they start playing.

Beyond that, Drellich notes in his detailed rundown that there are multiple topics about which the parties are talking, such as league minimum salary, increased luxury tax, changes in the draft to discourage tanking, and some others. I think it’s OK for the parties to be pretty far apart on such things — and they are really far apart — without us getting too discouraged just yet because, hey, they’re at least talking about ‘em. Eventually talking will lead to a deal. The real sticking points, it appears, will be the things upon which players and owners have not yet even agreed to disagree. Things like the length of time it takes to get to free agency and arbitration, revenue sharing, and service time calculation chief among them.

Now we wait. Wait to see how long it’ll take them to get to yes on the stuff they’re reported to be negotiating but waiting longer, it would seem, for them to say yes to even negotiating the most important things.

Meanwhile, at Pravda . . .

I linked Evan Drellich’s story above because I think he has been the straightest-shooter of them all in covering the negotiations this week. He gets labor pretty damn well and has a handle on the process that allows him to deliver reliable information. Or as reliable information one can get from closed-door talks.

Not that there are many covering all of this about whom I can say nice things. There is one thus far, in fact, about whom I can say some pretty negative things: Mark Feinsand of MLB.com, who wrote a doozy of a propaganda piece the other day. Indeed, it was downright impressive in its shamelessness. You couldn’t even see Rob Manfred’s lips move.

Feinsand begins by casting the owners’ refusal to take up those issues I mentioned above as the players’ refusal to drop it (“the MLBPA hasn’t moved away from . . .)” To frame it like that is to say that the default reasonable state of negotiations is for one side to come in, right out of the gate, and say that most of what the other side proposes is non-negotiable. I mean, yeah, in my experience in negotiations there are people who do that, but they’re jackasses. Unlike Feinsand would have us do, most people just called the jackasses jackasses, too and don’t blame the people to whom they are being jackasses.

Even better was what came next. Feinsand listed those off-the-table items but did so in a way that characterized the status quo about those items as venerable institutions of the game as opposed to items that get negotiated every four or five years, even if they don’t change every time:

That first bullet point there is pulled right out of Fox News’ playbook. “First agreed to by union leader Marvin Miller” is deployed there the way some talk show shouter deploys “. . . which was actually a DEMOCRAT law” when talking about the Jim Crow Era. It’s meant to undermine a current party by tying them to their predecessors’ position regardless of what has happened in the time since. It’s to say “how hypocritical of the MLBPA to want five years to free agency when MARVIN MILLER only wanted six! The nerve!”

The parentheticals in the other two bullet points aren’t much better. The lawyers out there are already nodding their heads, having identified the “every agreement back to . . . ” as the language of rhetoric. Language used to cast the status quo as the superior position simply because it’s the status quo and to cast proposed changes to it as radical.

Up next was a paragraph that almost made me fall out of my chair:

Holy petitio principii, Batman, Feinsand begged that question so hard that it just tightened its grip on its Kate Spade bag, started walking quickly, and then asked a cop if he could be arrested for being out on the street.

I’ll be honest: when I saw those bullet points above part of me began to wonder if they weren’t just copied and pasted from notes texted or emailed to Feinsand by someone on the owners’ side of the table. The sentence, “which would make it more difficult for small-market clubs to remain competitive . . .” now has me convinced of it. That’s not just pro-owner spin, that’s owner-language. Like, it’s what someone on that side of the table would put out in a statement as a means of advocating their position. The lack of even a brief “the owners’ say . . .” gives the game away. It’s Feinsand simply asserting a venerable but basically debunked owners’ talking point as fact.

And how does he characterize the owners’ behavior so far?

Again, that is the sort of language one might see from an interested party typing out notes from the day, not a reporter writing from scratch. It almost reads as if Feinsand was given talking points and simply deployed them as-is or something.

Then he talks about the league’s “lack of urgency” in negotiations. Which I suppose could be read as a description of their tactical choices but it comes off like a criticism of lollygagging players.

Finally, he gives the rundown of the free agency action this year, hyping up the big contracts handed out thus far in such a way that it’s not hard to detect the implication that, hey, everything’s going great, so why do we need to change anything?

He also floats the suggestion that competitive balance issues have been resolved by saying that “the big spenders haven’t been the usual suspects, either . . .” His examples are the Tigers and the Rangers. Which, yeah, they’ve rebuilt and have lost a lot of games so they haven’t been too active of late, but each of them have also, fairly recently and fairly regularly over the years, carried some pretty damn big payrolls. It ain’t like the Pirates, Guardians, and Reds are spending too, so I don’t think it’s at all fair to make judgments about “the usual suspects.” That aside, anyone with basic objective permanence remembers how previous years have gone and knows that what we saw this week was a massive outlier that is in no way assured of repeating itself under the current system. As such, citing the free agent frenzy of the past few days in the context of a state-of-the-labor-negotiations piece is purposely disingenuous.

Look, I do not expect MLB.com to present radical pro-labor takes or anything. Yes, its writers often claim that the Commissioner’s Office has no say over its reporting and does everything it can to portray themselves as objective, but I know who owns the building and the computers and stuff. Which is to say that, in my criticism of Feinsand’s piece, I am not retiring to my fainting couch as a result of my detecting some inadvertent institutional bias or anything.

But that’s not what his piece is. It’s a putatively objective news story that not just slips into op-ed territory, but which sounds like it was pecked out on a Moskva 8M typewriter at MLB’s Ministry of Truth, was sent through a pneumatic tube to Feinsand’s office and landed on his austere metal desk behind which hangs a portrait of Rob Manfred staring off triumphantly into the eastern sky.

Instructions to “print with only minor alterations, comrade” came separately via courier.

Marcus Stroman to sign with the Cubs

News of one more big free agent signing before the lockout came out yesterday evening. The signee: Marcus Stroman. The reporter breaking the news: also Marcus Stroman:

He then tweeted:

Looks like someone read my piece on cheap heat and pandering yesterday. And that someone knows that Chicagoans LOVE to be told that they live in a big important city by people from New York. They won’t admit it, but they do. If it makes you feel any better, Chicago friends, know that people where I live do the same thing with Chicago. Columbus, Ohio people CRAVE the approval and acknowledgement from actual cities. The inferiority complex: it burns.

As for the signing: It’s a three-year, $71 million deal that includes an opt-out after the second season. He’ll make $25 million in 2022, $25 million in 2023 and $21 million in 2024. It includes $2M escalators for 160 innings pitched in ‘22 and ‘23. Which is a decent amount of coin for a Cubs team that hasn’t spent much coin of late to spend.

Stroman was as steady as it comes last year, leading the NL in games started and posting a 3.02 ERA in 179 innings. He’s now the ace of the Chicago Cubs pitching staff for the next couple of years.

Red Sox get Jackie Bradley Jr. back in a four-player trade

Minutes before the lockout, The Boston Red Sox and Milwaukee Brewers made a four-player trade with the latter sending outfielder Jackie Bradley Jr. and infielders David Hamilton and Alex Binelas to Boston in exchange for outfielder Hunter Renfroe.

Bradley, 31, returns to Boston a year after he left via free agency. His one season with the Brewers was a nightmare, though, as he hit only .163/.236/.261 (34 OPS+) in 134 games, though he did at least continue to be a capable defender. He is still owed $9.5 million in the final season of the two-year contract he signed and there is a team option for 2023 with an $8 million buyout.

Renfroe, 29, is coming off a nice season in Boston in which he hit .259/.315/.501 (112 OPS+) with 31 home runs in 144 games. He has two years of team control remaining, and is eligible for arbitration this year. Renfroe will slot into Avisaíl García’s spot in right field at whatever they’re calling Miller Park these days.

The minor leaguers, Hamilton and Binelas, were selected in the draft in the past two years.

Dodgers bring back Chris Taylor

The Los Angeles Dodgers re-signed All-Star utilityman Chris Taylor to a four-year, $60 million deal that includes a club option for a fifth season. Taylor is the first free agent the Dodgers have retained this winter, having previously seen Corey Seager Max Scherzer and Corey Knebel walk.

Taylor has hit .265/.343/.461 (114 OPS+) with 78 home runs in five full seasons with Los Angeles. Last year he hit .254/.344/.438 with 20 dingers. He has played everywhere on the diamond except for first base, catcher, and pitcher, though he spent most of his time in the outfield and at second base.

Other Deals

Also going down before the lockout hit:

• The San Diego Padres agreed to terms with right-handed starter Nick Martinez on a four-year contract worth $20 million. Martinez, 31, will return to the majors after spending the last four seasons in Japan, where he pitched for the Nippon Ham Fighters and the Fukuoka Softbank Hawks. The paperwork on this one didn’t get done before the lockout hit, but the agreement is reportedly in place;

• Lefty Rich Hill signed a one-year, $5 million deal with the Boston Red Sox. The 18-year veteran will be 42 next season but was nonetheless a combined 7-8 with a 3.86 ERA for the New York Mets and Tampa Bay Rays over 158.2 innings. Hill has been with the Red Sox on two previous occasions, pitching in Boston from 2010-2012 and again in 2015. He was with the club in 2014 as well but didn’t make any appearances for them before moving on and then heading back. So yeah, he knows the way to Fenway Park;

• The Twins signed right-hander Dylan Bundy to a one-year, $5 million deal. He makes $4 million in 2022 and there is a club option for 2023 with a $1 million buyout. Bundy went 2-9 with a 6.06 ERA in 90.2 innings last season for the Angels, starting 19 of his 23 appearances. He would not likely be an upgrade anywhere except Minnesota, frankly;

• The Philadelphia Phillies signed infielder Johan Camargo to a one-year deal worth $1.4 million. Camargo had previously been non-tendered by Atlanta; and

• The Orioles signed righty Jordan Lyles to a one-year deal worth $7 million

Way to get ‘em in under the wire, everyone.

The changing baseballs impacted gambling

Yesterday’s I linked the story from Business Insider's Bradford William Davis about how Major League Baseball used two different batches of baseballs over the course of the 2021 season, some of which were more homer prone than others. In talking about it I made a point to mention that the players might be upset with the changing balls and how that might sow distrust, but I forgot about a Major League Baseball stakeholder which is even more important than the players. The casinos!

I didn’t see any major national baseball writers pick up Davis’ story — which is crazy given that a basically identical scandal forced Japan’s commissioner to frickin’ resign in disgrace just a few years ago — but I saw some gambling-affiliated figures talking about it, and you what? They’re kind of pissed!

Major League Baseball has long jerked the players around when it comes to the composition of the baseball. It probably realizes that the players can’t really do anything to them about that but complain. Intentionally inserting artificial and unquantifiable randomness into the proceedings will GREATLY piss off any respectable sports gambling operation, however, because those who set the odds and the lines for them REALLY HATE artificial and unquantifiable randomness.

I realize that the CBA talks are the big story right now, but I am surprised that this baseball switcheroo story has not blown up bigger. Because I suspect that it will have some really big implications beyond just the baseball.

The 100 Best Baseball Books Ever Written

Pretty much what it sounds like. This list is from Alex Belth at Esquire. While any list of the 100 best anythings will stir up argument and controversy — which is the whole point from the publication’s point of view — this is a pretty solid list all around. All of the biggies you’d expect to be on such a list but a great many you’ve likely never heard of.

Ichiro being Ichiro

This is fun: earlier this year a group of Japanese high schoolers wrote Ichiro a letter asking him if he'd come to their baseball practice. This past Monday he showed up at their school and proceeded to hit a bunch of homers off buildings across the street from the field. You can see video of it here. He also gave them base running tips.

As for the letter the high schoolers wrote, Ichiro said “The letter oozes with your passion. I have put it in the drawer where I keep important things and I’ll treasure it.”

Insert the usual “never meet your heroes” and “we don’t know celebrities, not really” disclaimers, but everything I’ve ever read about Ichiro suggests he is an amazingly cool and decent sonofoabitch and I love to read stories about him.

LaMarr Hoyt: 1955-2021

On Tuesday afternoon former White Sox executive Dan Evans tweeted that 1983 Cy Young Award winner LaMarr Hoyt has died. The Chicago White Sox confirmed Hoyt’s death in a statement yesterday, saying he passed at his South Carolina home after a “lengthy illness.”

Hoyt was a fifth round draft pick of the Yankees in 1973 but was dealt as an extra in the Oscar Gamble trade in 1977, sending him to the White Sox. He came up with them in September 1979. Originally a reliever, he moved to the starting rotation in 1982 and won his first nine decisions en route to an AL-leading 19 wins that year. He won even more in 1983 — 24 games! — while helping the Chisox win the AL West crown.

At a time when wins were usually the best predictor of who won the big awards, Hoyt predictably took home the Cy Young that fall despite a pedestrian 3.66 (115 ERA+). Not that there was not a lot of value there, as he was outrageously stingy allowing baserunners, walking only 31 batters in 260.2. Indeed, he led the league in fewest walks per nine innings each season from 1983-1985. Pinpoint control was always Hoyt’s calling card.

The White Sox took a step back in 1984, as did Hoyt's performance. His record fell to 13–18 — he went from leading the league in wins to leading the league in losses — and his ERA shot up to 4.47 ERA. After the season he was traded to the Padres in a deal that, most notably, sent Ozzie Guillen to the White Sox, beginning a decades-long relationship between the man and the club.

Hoyt would make the NL All-Star team for the Padres in 1985, starting the game and winning its MVP Award, and won 16 games for the defending NL Pennant winners while continuing to exhibit his trademark control. Soon after the season ended, however, he was arrested twice — once in January and once in February 1986 — on drug-possession charges. In the first arrest he was found to be carrying marijuana, Valium, and Quaaludes. In the second he had pot and was carrying a switchblade. He was sent to a rehab program following the second arrest, causing him to miss spring training.

Once Hoyt returned to the Padres he injured his shoulder — he’d eventually describe it as “shredded” — tried to pitch through it and, predictably, pitched terribly. Hoyt would start 25 games that year and would return to the bullpen for ten more, but his 5.15 ERA was a far cry from his norms and his 68 walks in only 159 innings represented a more than quadrupling of his walk rate from the previous year.

Hoyt — who in addition to his shoulder problems was going through a lot of bad things in his personal life and suffered from a sleep disorder — is someone who, in hindsight, needed a lot of help. In the “Just Say No” and War on Drugs mid-1980s, however, there wasn’t much help available to addicts. This was especially true on a Padres team that was owned and run by anti-drug zealots Joan Kroc and her son-in-law Ballard Smith who often turned their back and cut bait on players whom they knew used drugs at the drop of a hat. Kroc sent Hoyt to rehab that first time, but when Hoyt was arrested again for drug possession soon after the 1986 season ended so too ended his time as a Padre. Following a 45-day jail stint and a suspension by Major League Baseball, the Padres released him midway through the 1987 season, the day after he was reinstated.

Hoyt attempted to mount a comeback but was arrested on drug charges for a fourth time in December 1987 after which he was sentenced to a year in federal prison. Hoyt never played affiliated baseball again. He was, like a lot of players with drug problems during that period, basically shunned and exiled from the game. Treated more like a criminal than the addict he was.

Hoyt had not been in the news for decades as far as I can tell. I hope the third act of his life was a better and healthier one than the second. May he rest in peace.

Other Stuff

My Football Wednesday

Another midweek match and, of course, it was the Liverpool Derby, with Everton taking on Liverpool F.C., and the former absolutely pasting the latter 1-4.

The biggest takeaway besides the result: an 8:15 PM-start UK time and thus a very boozed-up crowd + big violence on the pitch = some enormously enjoyable soccer-watching. Someone on Twitter told me that they used to always schedule the Everton-Liverpool matches early in the day specifically to avoid this sort of rowdiness, but apparently there has been some backsliding on that score.

Anyway: if you get a chance to watch a game, in any sport really, where fans are piss drunk, throw bottles and smoke flares onto the field, refuse to give equipment back that happens to make its way up into the stands, and are eventually dragged out by the police, by all means watch that game.

Democrats doing Democrat things

Yesterday arguments were held in the case before a Supreme Court which seems destined to uphold a Mississippi's law which bans abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy. The inevitable decision will gut and possibly completely overturn Roe v. Wade, which in turn will essentially outlaw abortion in half the country.

This item, however, is not about the substance of that. It’s about something which spun off of it yesterday.

As the arguments were going down, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee tweeted this:

Silly me. Here I thought that Democrats controlled both houses of Congress and held the presidency, thereby enabling them to, theoretically at least, protect abortion rights by simply passing a law that would do so. You know, like this one.

Yes, I’m being flippant here, as I know all of the political and practical reasons that that law or others like it have not been advanced let alone passed and will not be any time soon. Which is the point where, usually, Democrats’ thinking on this ends and their shaking of fists at Republicans begins.

I think it’s important to go further, however, and to remember that all of those political and practical considerations which preclude Democrats from passing a law to protect abortion rights — and any number of other things putatively on their agenda but seen as impossible to achieve — are the result of choices, not absolutes of the universe. Choices about legislative priorities. Choices about which candidates to back and which candidates not to back. Choices about the things upon which to spend political capital.

Some of those choices make a great deal of sense and some of them do not make much sense, but they are choices all the same. They are choices made by the same Democratic leadership which is in charge of the committees which make tweets about how voters need to simply vote harder and which never seem to want to acknowledge that all of those choices are being made. Which, in its simplest form, can be described as choices to decline to do what voters expect them to do per the platforms upon which they were elected.

What pisses me off here are not those choices as such — like I said, I understand a great deal of them; I am not some starry-eyed idealist on that score — but Democratic leaders’ refusal to talk to voters seriously about them. Their refusal to say that, in the case of abortion rights, for example, it would require the strong-arming of the more conservative Senators, the elimination of the filibuster, the passing of that law I linked above or one like it and, in relatively short order, the adding of multiple Supreme Court justices to ensure that the current lot simply doesn’t invalidate the law the moment it’s challenged. Because really, that’s what ensuring abortion rights across the country would require.

All of that, obviously, is a CRAZY tall order. An order, though, that I don’t think a huge number of rank and file voters fully understand because Democratic leadership refuses to level with them on that score. But it’s nonetheless an order that voters, who favor abortion rights in pretty overwhelming numbers, may very well want to see placed if and when they are leveled with and told that’s what it takes. Instead we get “vote more!” Which, while a necessary precondition of that tall order, is certainly not a sufficient one.

Maybe that never happens with abortion — I actually doubt it will — but the thing I keep coming back to in all of this is that, if you claim you support something, you have to support the realistic means of accomplishing that something or else you’re all bluster. And if you bluster about important things long enough you run the risk of losing credibility with your voters who will come to believe that you don’t care or that you’re ineffective. Then they’ll become cynical and apathetic and cease participating in the process and things will get even worse.

To avoid that, Democrats need to be frank with voters and build the consensus to actually do the things they claim they want to do. And yeah, that may take time. But unlike simply saying "Vote for Democrats!" — which again, while a necessary step to accomplishing the things Democrats want to accomplish, is by no means a sufficient one — it’s at least a plan with an objective as opposed to the cyncism-ensuring gambit that is empty sloganeering like that DSCC tweet from yesterday afternoon. It all boils down to this: Democrats cannot claim their party is dedicated to protecting abortion rights but then champion candidates who do not care all that much about protecting abortion rights, work to defeat candidates who consider abortion rights a top priority, avoid any of the hard, substantive legislative work that might protect abortion rights and then turn around and tell voters "hey, if you care about abortion rights, maybe vote for more of our candidates, eh?”

That pattern applies to a great many other issues Democrats claim they stand for but which they never seem able or interested to advance. And that’s one of the biggest reasons why they don’t accomplish many of the important things they claim they want to accomplish.

OK, enough of that. Now let’s focus our attention on happier things. Like the sport we all love getting driven into the ditch because billionaires really, really, don’t like to share.

Have a great day, everyone. And don’t forget: subscriptions are 20% off if you act now: