Cup of Coffee: February 10, 2022

Good morning! And welcome to Free Thursday!

Today there is, I guess, good news about the CBA talks (we’ll see), some sad news about an ex-ballplayer, some icky news from the Washington Nationals, some fun and informative stuff from a Google Doodle, some more quirky minor league branding, and a guy who you may not know but without whom you might not be reading this newsletter has passed away.

In Other Stuff I won a big legal victory even though I don’t practice law anymore, I talk about the one product I would allow to sponsor this newsletter, I share a far better article about a Pacific Northwest apocalypse than the one I shared yesterday, West Virginia West Virginias, we talk about how ice fishing is FAR more exciting than we ever imagined it to be, and a subscriber has created an archive absolutely no one needs but is quite fun all the same.

The Daily Briefing

There will be substantive CBA talks this weekend

Evan Drellich of The Athletic reports that MLB and the MLBPA have scheduled a negotiating session for Saturday. Jon Heyman reports that the owners are expected to submit a counter proposal to the MLBPA on Saturday as well.

As I wrote earlier this week, the owners had previously said they would not provide a counter because they were too busy farting around with performative, disingenuous claims that they needed federal mediators while simultaneously trying to demonize the players by claiming that Scott Boras is some kind of puppet master. I suppose they realized that gambit wasn’t going anyplace so they figured, hey, why not try to actually talk?

In related news, Rob Manfred is expected to meet the press today after the conclusion of the owners meetings out in Palm Springs or wherever the hell they are. I have the utmost confidence that, in doing so, Manfred will say something that will poison the well for the weekend talks and make them somewhat pointless. He’s amazingly good for that.

Jeremy Giambi: 1974-2022

Former big leaguer Jeremy Giambi has died at the age of 47. As of this morning all that is officially confirmed is his death, but TMZ, citing law enforcement sources, is reporting that he died of suicide. Word on that will, obviously, come out one way or the other soon.

Giambi’s former teammate, pitcher Barry Zito, said the following to the San Francisco Chronicle, suggesting that he has heard the unconfirmed reports:

The Oakland Athletics issued a statement:

Giambi, a College World Series champion with Cal State Fullerton in 1995, was a sixth-round draft pick by the Kansas City Royals in 1996. He was a September callup in 1998 and spent parts of two seasons with the Royals before being traded to the Oakland Athletics in Feb. 2000, where he teamed up with his older brother Jason. Jeremy hit .271/.369/.439 with 33 home runs in 745 plate appearances over his two seasons in Oakland.

For better or worse, Giambi is best remembered for being tagged out at the plate on Derek Jeter's flip play in Game 3 of the 2001 ALDS. There Jeter took Shane Spencer's off-target relay throw from right field and flipped it to catcher Jorge Posada to nail Giambi at the plate before he could score the tying run. The play was pivotal in the series and Giambi was instantly made the goat because it seems that he would've been called safe if he had decided not to slide. It’s probably also worth noting that, had there been replay back then, there’s a chance the call would’ve been overturned. For his part, though, he was thoughtful and reflective about it. From an interview with The Athletic in 2020:

His manager, Art Howe, put that in perspective too, speaking yesterday after getting news of Giambi’s death:

Giambi was traded to the Phillies in May 2002 and then to the Red Sox in December 2002. Interestingly, he was signed a month before the Red Sox acquired David Ortiz, who profiled very much like Giambi did at the time as a player with patience and pop but, to date, more potential than accomplishments. Giambi, actually, began the 2003 season ahead of Ortiz on the depth chart but that soon changed. Ortiz, of course, would go on to mount a Hall of Fame career. Giambi would be released after the 2003 season and would finished his professional career in short minor league stints with the Dodgers and White Sox from 2004-05 before calling it quits.

In March 2005 Giambi publicly admitted that he knowingly used steroids during his playing career, becoming one of the first notable major leaguers to make such an admission. He had previously testified in private to that effect to a federal grand jury during the BALCO proceedings in December of 2003.

Rest in peace, Jeremy Giambi.

The Washington Nationals Lead the League in Ickiness

Chuck Klosterman has written a book about the 1990s and to coincide with its publication this week he has been writing columns and giving a lot of interviews. One of the themes he is hitting on in all of that is how, since the 1990s, the culture has sort of flattened and that it’s not as easy to tell the difference between movies or shows or things that came out in, say, 2003 from things coming out now in the same way that you might’ve been able to tell the difference between things that came out in 1965 and 1984 or what have you. That there’s a lack of readily-identifiable differences now between the technology, styles, and overall vibe in the culture that there used to be because we’ve been on a 20-year jag of sameness. In this, he argues, the 1990s were, in some respects, the last distinct decade.

I am always skeptical of that kind of assessment, and thus I took a bit of a go at that on Twitter the other night, but since I haven’t read the book — and because, upon reflection, there is a core of a good idea in there that I’ve talked about in the past — I’m willing to withhold judgment for now. He might have a good point. He might not. I dunno.

But even if he has a point he can’t be completely right about there being no obvious cultural markers these days. How do I know that? Because I am 100% certain that we will soon look back mockingly on the extremely narrow period of time — say, 2020 through 2022 or maybe 2023 — during which everything in sports was sponsored by gambling and crypto. A period that will end, I suspect, with a bunch of indictments.

The latest such marker comes from the Washington Nationals, who (a) recently became the first MLB club to open up a sportsbook at their ballpark; and (b) announced yesterday that they’re doubling down on the ickier parts of modern capitalism by diving head first into cryptocurrency. From their website:

Nats owner Mark Lerner characterized this as “bringing powerful new fan experiences to Nationals Park.” Which shows that he does not know what the words “powerful” “fan” or “experiences” mean. He also said that the Nats might begin to accept crypto as payment at the ballpark as early as the 2023 season.

Which I suppose will make it easier to spot the douchebags at the ballpark and then avoid them, so there’s at least a silver lining.

Yesterday’s Google Doodle was Toni Stone

You may have noticed yesterday’s Google Doodle was a baseball player. A woman baseball player, actually: Toni Stone.

Stone was one of three women to play professional baseball — like, full-time, not as some one-off gate gimmick — for the Indianapolis Clowns of the Negro leagues. She’d also play for the San Francisco Sea Lions, The New Orleans Creoles, and the Kansas City Monarchs. At the time and for many years after there were a lot of tall tales about her playing career — a lot of it by design, as the Clowns were owned by a business partner of Harlem Globetrotters owner Abe Saperstein, from whom he learned a lot about the art of promotion and P.R. — but there was a whole book written about Stone back in 2010 which serves as a great history of her life and accomplishments.

I actually blurbed it! First book I ever blurbed, I think:

I think “myth-making” should be hyphenated or two words but no one said anything. I dunno. I’m just happy that I got a copy of the book and got to read about the life of Toni Stone. And I hope that, via yesterday’s Google Doodle, a lot more people who wouldn’t have otherwise known about Stone got a chance to as well. If you don’t want to buy that book, here’s a great place to start.

Another quirky minor league branding

I recently groused about how minor league baseball teams have made somewhat ridiculous, so-uncool-it’s-cool nicknames and branding a thing. That trend continues with a new Atlantic League club from Lexington, Kentucky: the “Kentucky Wild Health Genomes.”

The Genomes are not to be confused with the Lexington Legends, who will continue to play in town. Indeed, they’ll share the same field. Wild Health Field, that is, which like the team is named after a medical laboratory in town that bought the rights.

I’m not sure what the visuals and mascots and stuff for a team called the Genomes will look like but I have to assume . . . a double helix? “Felix the Double Helix” maybe? With big googly eyes or some such?

Like I said, quirky minor league branding is not really my thing.

Art Martone

I learned yesterday that Art Martone, who was once the sports editor at Providence Journal and, later, became the managing editor for digital at NBC Sports Boston, died on Tuesday night. According to Chad Finn of the Boston Globe, Martone had been stricken with a rare neurodegenerative illness recently.

People from New England may know who Martone was, as for several years he ran a Red Sox blog at the Journal that, for its time, was shockingly forward-thinking for a newspaper. He was into sabermetrics back in the dark, dark ages of that dark art and linked Deadspin and other sports blogs and things years before anyone else was doing it. Indeed, he was doing that when “blog” was a dirty word in sports media and the people who wrote them — at least if they were not long-tenured reporters who had come up through newspapers — were considered the enemy of journalism.

I was one of those alleged enemies of journalism back in the day (there’s a reason why the BBWAA never let me in), but Art Martone did not give a crap. He didn’t know me from Adam, but he stumbled upon my nascent blog back in 2007 within a month of me launching the thing and began linking stuff I wrote at the Providence Journal’s website. That didn’t provide me with a ton of traffic or anything but it did get me on the radar of a lot of other sports media folks, particularly in New England. Over the next two years I’d get a big enough readership that NBC Sports would come calling, but I do not think that would’ve happened — or that NBC Sports would’ve considered me for a job — if not for that early push Martone and a couple of others like him gave me which leant me a bit of credibility and legitimacy.

I never did meet Martone in person, even after he joined NBC Sports Boston a few years later, but I did send him a couple of thank you emails. His responses were warm, gracious, and selfless. He was, in my experience, a nice, smart, and selfless guy who wanted to share stuff I and others wrote with people, regardless of whether or not we had the write credentials or some sort of “insider” status.

I wish I had gotten a chance to meet him. May he rest in peace.

Other Stuff

I did not mean for this to happen, but today’s Other Stuff skews SHARPLY meta and navel-gazing. Apologies if this is all too self-indulgent, but I’m pretty sure my soccer content is way more annoying to you all than my self-indulgent content and at least I’m not going on about Brentford getting beat by Manchester City yesterday, right?

Right.

A question of ethics

I scored a very satisfying legal victory yesterday. Specifically, I was cleared of allegations of violating legal ethics. That’s quite the trick for a guy who hasn’t practiced law in over 12 years, but I managed it anyway.

Background: back in the mid-2000s I represented the then-Ohio Speaker of the House Larry Householder, who had come under a criminal investigation alleging, well, a lot of stuff. The good news was that the heat eventually blew over and Householder was never charged with anything back then. Not because I did anything particularly special, mind you. I mostly just hung around while federal agents took possession of Householder’s files and financial records and crap and tried not to say or do anything dumb. Later, when Householder left the Ohio Legislature he ran for a county office, I represented him in an election challenge mounted by the guy he beat at the polls. I won that one too and, at that point, we parted ways.

Many years later Householder would mount a remarkable political comeback, making it back to the legislature and regaining his Speaker’s gavel. He then proceeded to get arrested and indicted in the biggest public corruption scandal in the history of the State of Ohio. He’s still awaiting trial on that, but despite my being 2-0 in representing him, he hasn’t called me since he got arrested. I consider that to be a tactical error, but I suppose I’m biased. I did, however, write about Householder at Columbus Alive when his arrest made the news last summer, in a column entitled “My Life With Larry Householder.”

Writing such a thing about a former client can be dangerous business, as an attorney’s ethical obligations to their clients last forever. That’s the case even if, like me, that attorney puts his license on inactive status and spends the rest of his life ranking the handsomeness of baseball managers. I know that one subscriber, the Honorable Louis Schiff, would’ve told me, had I asked him about it, that “if you have to ask yourself if you should do it, you shouldn’t do it.” But (a) I’m shameless when it comes to turning my life into content; and; (b) I’m no idiot and, that headline aside, I was not going to share privileged information or anything like that. The column was mostly about my impressions of that time and of Householder which, really, aren’t any different than anyone else had of the man who was once — well, twice — Ohio’s most powerful politician.

Someone — and I can guess which someone but I really do not know — didn’t like that I did that, because last fall I got a letter from the Ohio Supreme Court’s Office of Disciplinary Counsel informing me that a complaint had been lodged against me, claiming that I shared things I shouldn’t have shared. I responded to it — quite gleefully, actually, because I know I had not done anything wrong, includeding the necessary receipts — and then I waited.

And then I forgot all about it until yesterday when I finally got this letter:

It’s not every day that you can literally send in newspaper clippings which explicitly absolve you of doing the stuff someone claims you did, but then again, I never would’ve written what I wrote last summer if I didn’t know they existed. I may be a lot of things, but reckless is not one of ‘em.

Anyway, I consider myself 3-0 in Larry Householder cases now. And, like I said, his trial is coming up later this year. He really should call me.

From the Inbox Part Two

I got a second fun email yesterday:

I almost sent this to him:

But then I thought better of it because he was nice and he was just doing his job, so I just thanked him and politely declined. We all gotta eat.

For what it’s worth, the inquiry was not about a sponsorship for a particular product. Rather it was from some marketing company who wanted to go out and snag sponsors for me so I don’t have to handle “the administrative hassle.” Which, while a little depressing, is one of those jobs that helps people eat.

Either way, I am extraordinarily confident that I will never accept sponsorships around these parts — you all pay my salary, you’re very generous in doing so, and I am not inclined to transform you from my bosses into my product any more than the subscription model already implicitly requires — but if I did (a) it’d be for a specific product; and (b) it’d be something kickass and super on-brand for me. Like, I dunno, whiskey that turns you into a communist or something.

Just thought I’d share that. I went nearly a year and a half without getting someone knocking on my door for that sort of thing and I thought it was amusing when it finally happened.

“Our operating assumption is that everything west of Interstate 5 will be toast.”

Yesterday’s item from the New York Times regarding the dangers of a massive earthquake in the Pacific Northwest caused many of you to point me in the direction of this far, far better and more thorough story about the dangers of a quake at the Cascadia Subduction Zone fault from the New Yorker. It’s from back in 2015 and its writer, Kathryn Schulz, won a Pulitzer Prize for it. I actually read the story when it came out but totally blanked on it yesterday when I linked the new one. I’d like to say my excuse is that I live in Ohio and thus I don’t think as hard about earthquakes and tsunamis as much as some people, but Kathryn Schulz is from Ohio too so there goes that excuse.

Anyway, it’s an amazingly engrossing article with all kinds of details that are simultaneously fascinating and terrifying:

Those basic facts are scary, but scarier still is the tick-tock Schultz crafts of the eventual earthquake and tsunami, starting with all the dogs barking for no apparent reason — they can sense the initial shockwaves; we can’t — and ending with people being swept away in rising seas filled with cinderblocks, sheetmetal, and pickup trucks, either drowning them and then battering their corpses or simply battering them to death before they have the chance to drown.

I also linked the Warren Zevon song “Life’ll Kill Ya” yesterday, so no need to do it again, but it is worth remembering just how quickly and easily Planet Earth can shake us off of it and into oblivion if it gets the notion to do so.

Never change, West Virginia

I moved to West Virginia in January 1985. On the very first day in my new 6th grade class the teacher, Mr. Whitacre, led a prayer. Seriously, he said “now everyone should take a few moments of personal time to be silent or to engage in contemplation or prayer.”

That little bit — “silence, contemplation, or prayer” — was a gambit evangelicals in state government were attempting at the time to allow prayer in schools while claiming that it was actually not Christian prayer because, if we wanted to, we could be praising some other god or contemplating the universe or thinking about Issac Asimov or something. That didn’t pass legal muster and, eventually, the courts made schools stop doing that. But even if it did pass muster, Mr. Whitacre, and I’m sure a ton of other teachers in the state, took it one step father and actually led a prayer, out loud, from the front of the class. We’re talking genuine evangelical “Jesus our Lord and Savior” and “protect these children from the wickedness of the world” stuff. I actually liked Mr. Whitacre as a teacher — he was pretty sharp and he was super nice — but hoo boy.

I offer all of that to say that, while I am appalled at this story from down in Huntington, West Virginia, I am not particularly shocked:

You'll never stop this shit down there. You can only sue the hell out of them and make them stop for a few years. They’ll be doing it again eventually. These are people who, in addition to the Bible, worship certain parts of the Constitution, but could not give a diddly-durn about other parts.

And yes, I first heard the term “diddly-durn” from Mr. Whitacre in 1985. I rather liked it and every once in awhile I trot it out again for fun. Like I said, Mr. Whitacre was alright apart from that whole praying in class stuff.

Report: Ice fishing, obviously, leads to prostitution

Hudson, Ohio is a tidy, wealthy little town a little north of Akron and a little south of Cleveland. It also has a mayor who is absolutely batshit insane.

His name is Craig Shubert. Not too long ago he made the news because he made baseless claims that school board members should be criminally prosecuted because, in his mind, they were peddling child pornography. That caused him to get spanked — in a non-pornographic way — by the Summit County prosecutor. It also caused him to get high-fives from Ohio’s psychopathic U.S. Senate candidate Josh Mandel, because of course it did.

Now Shubert in the news again because he’s claiming that ice fishing leads to prostitution. I wish I was making this up:

In that column I wrote about Larry Householder last summer I said that I could never run for political office, “because I simply do not think my brain is wired the way politicians' brains are wired.” This is not really what I meant by that, but it’s certainly consistent with what I meant, however extreme it is.

Every Cup of Coffee video

I’m Facebook friends with subscriber Mike Sixel. He’s an empty-nester who lives in Portland, Oregon — good luck when The Big One hits, Mike — and posts a lot of photos of scenic hikes, beer tastings, and golf outings to beautiful courses overlooking the sea. As I will be an empty nester in a couple of years I often look at Mike’s feed and think “life goals.”

You’d think living such a life would not give one time for silly crap, but Mike packs some of that in too. Specifically, he want back over every Cup of Coffee post I’ve made and made a YouTube channel setting forth every video I’ve embedded in newsletters since I launched this jawn back in August 2020. That adds up to 276 so far. Well, I suppose the ice fishing/prostitution video makes it 277 and that he will update it forthwith. He’s gonna have to keep adding ‘em up if he’s seriously committed to this bit.

Screw it, let’s make it 278:

Have a great day, everyone.