Cup of Coffee: February 4, 2021

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Today we talk about why we shouldn’t laugh at the Rockies owner in the wake of his horrible press conference, we should be wary. I also offer a warning about a certain reporter’s work when it comes to labor matters and my most unpopular baseball opinion. And I mean unpopular. It might be more unpopular than my super unpopular “Field of Dreams” take! The good thing about both of those opinions, though, is that they are correct.

In Other Stuff I talk about the problems of ultra-rich people in ultra-tall buildings, so be sure to have your tiny violins ready. I also talk about how the Democrats are making a mistake in framing their 2022 midterm campaign and I talk about the legacy of the Flint Sit-Down Strike.

Wait, you don’t know about the Flint Sit-Down Strike? I can fix that! Get reading!

The Daily Briefing

It’s fun to laugh at Dick Monfort, but . . .

There were a lot of laughs to be had in the wake of the press conference held by Rockies owner Dick Monfort on Tuesday. I made some jokes. Marc Carig of The Athletic went hilariously thermonuclear. A lot of people on social media mocked Monfort and the Rockies for their ass-backward approach to running a baseball team as well.

Still, there’s something about it that’s not funny at all: Dick Monfort is the chairman of the Major League Baseball’s labor policy committee. Sure, Rob Manfred will be the guy whose photo tops every story about labor negotiations this year, but he works for the owners. Dick Monfort is actually the guy who will be in charge of the team heading into labor talks with the players later this year.

Maybe it’s funny that the Rockies have no interest in winning games, paying or keeping star players, or holding anyone accountable when the team fails year after year after year. But it’s not so funny — and it’s pretty damn telling — that the twenty nine other owners have seen how Monfort runs the Rockies and decided “yes, he is the man we want charting the course of baseball for the foreseeable future.”

Carig’s hilarious article about Monfort is headlined “The Rockies are oblivious to organizational failure.” What fans should ask themselves over the next few months is whether Dick Monfort and the Rockies define failure the same way they do. And, due to Monfort’s prominent role in labor negotiations, whether Major League Baseball does as well.

In other MLB-Labor news . . .

Ken Rosenthal is a fine reporter, but lately he has been spending a much larger portion of his time carrying water for Rob Manfred and Major League Baseball in their dealings with the Players Union than he usually does. And he usually does it quite a bit.

In recent days that has been done via columns in which he has chosen to ignore the legal ramifications of the players reopening the CBA as a means of disingenuously both-sidsing the matter. Last night it was just straight-up gossiping. In a story headlined “Union opted out of call with government, sensing pressure to delay season,” he writes:

There is no other point to that story other than to imply that the players were being unreasonable in not taking the call. Never mind that the Biden administration has no say over matters of bargaining between MLB and the MLBPA. Never mind that MLB has routinely attempted to get government officials to weigh in on their side in contentious matters in such a way that is calculated toward putting the players on the spot.

Oh, and never mind that Rosenthal’s own story notes that the players aren’t ducking the call, as his headline and tweets implied. They actually scheduled a call with the same official for a later date when they wouldn’t be sharing the line with MLB. Which is reasonable, as being on the line with MLB in that instance would risk transforming it into some sort of impromptu quasi-mediation that would serve no purpose.

The players, for their part, noticed this garbage from Rosenthal:

There is one side who has been leaking crap, and it’s not the players. The players see that, and it’s only going to complicate things as the league and the players sit down later this year to begin negotiating a new Collective Bargaining Agreement. In the meantime, this article exists for only one reason: Rob Manfred wanted to portray the players in a poor light and he or someone who works for him got Ken Rosenthal to do that for them.

Which is a thing you should keep in mind when it comes to basically anything Rosenthal writes about labor.

My unpopular baseball opinion: the baseball postseason kinda sucks

There was a Twitter prompt going around the past couple of days:

Here is how I answered it: “The postseason generally sucks and it'd be better if they just crowned a regular season champion and everyone went home on October 2 or whatever.”

To say that angered some people would be an understatement but, hey, she asked for an unpopular opinion and I gave one. I’m pretty sure I’m in the tiniest of all minorities in saying that I don’t much care for the postseason, but I stand by it. And I want to explain why.

I don’t hate the postseason. I obviously watch nearly every inning of it every year and have for basically 40 years. Some of the greatest moments in baseball history have happened in that time and I have experienced and enjoyed them all. I’ve also been lucky enough to cover four World Series in person and saw some fantastic and memorable performances in those World Series. When postseason baseball is great it’s truly great. Let nothing I say here be understood otherwise.

But the postseason is not what I love about baseball, and I’d still very much love baseball if it were gone and a champion was decided English Premier League-style.

A great deal of the reason for that is the “championship or bust” mentality that an the modern postseason and modern sports fandom and commentary engenders. The idea that if you don’t win it all you’ve failed. This notion has become increasingly prevalent in sports discourse, with people asking before last October if the Dodgers — who have been outrageously successful for years — were failures because they hadn’t won a title in this particular run. Well, now they have, and I’ve actually seen people move the goalposts further, suggesting that they’d be a fluke if they only win one title, as if a dynasty is required for a team to be considered truly great. People have said this stuff about LeBron James too. They even said it about him after he had multiple titles.

I hate that kind of talk for much of the same reason I hate the Hall of Fame debates, which also carry with them an all-or-nothing kind of vibe. Just as I think that it’s a shame that we talk about and appreciate certain players less because they have not made it through the random gauntlet that is the Hall of Fame voting process, I hate that we discount genuinely enjoyable, genuinely good or genuinely great teams simply because they have not made it completely through the very random, very small sample-size of games that is the modern postseason.

The 2001 Mariners were a great, fun team, but because they fizzled out in the postseason, they’re almost always referenced in terms of failure of a certain kind. The 1990s Braves were a fantastic team which gave me hundreds of games of fantastic entertainment for years on end, yet we tend to reduce them their one World Series win and a much greater volume of “playoff choker” discourse. The same goes for any number of other teams and seasons that are all but erased from our memories because, in the end, they weren’t the last team left standing. I think that’s bullshit. As Major League Baseball increases the size of the postseason — and it will — we will introduce even more randomness into the mix that will only add to that bullshit.

Mostly, though, my unpopular opinion is based on the fact that what I most love about the game of baseball is primarily found in regular season baseball and is almost completely absent from October baseball.

I love baseball for its lazy, comfortable rhythm. For the hundred and eighty-odd languid days in which the importance of any single win or any single loss approaches zero. I love it for the low stakes dynamic which allows those games to be enjoyed rather than obsessed over and which gives the game its friendly, genial character. I love regular-season games which, above all else, represent an invitation to slow down and relax as opposed to the winner-take-all hysteria of October baseball in which crowds erupt with every pitch, every at-bat takes on outsized importance, and every game leaves you reaching for the Pepcid AC.

Those things, and many other things, disappear in the postseason. Things like the importance of consistency and the importance of depth. Some of the things I like least about baseball these days include the diminishment in importance of starting pitching, long games with massive lags between pitches, and damn near obsessive over-managing. All of that is beginning to creep into regular season baseball, of course, but they started in the postseason and are ratcheted-up like crazy once October arrives. If you’re into cut away from super close-up of a pitcher to super close-up of a manager, to super close-up of a batter, to super close-up of some fan with their hands clasped over pursed lips, and than maybe halfway back around again before a pitch is actually throw, hey, October baseball is for you. I think that all kinda sucks.

As I said, postseason baseball can be exciting. It can be historic. And, of course, baseball is a competitive sport and postseason the playoffs are how we’ve decided to crown a champion. It’s kinda the point. But it’s a different game in October. A different game than the pleasant and relaxed affair that it is between Opening Day and Game 162. That latter time is a time when you can leave the room for a while, come back, and not feel like you missed something. A time when you can have the game on the radio while you’re planting flowers, doing the dinner dishes or washing your car and not be concerned if you mentally fade out for a bit before mentally tuning back in. A time, for that matter, when you can just give Tuesday night and Wednesday night’s game a miss entirely if real life takes priority and tune back in for the afternoon game on Thursday without having lost the thread.

Regular season baseball is something which becomes intertwined with your life summer after summer, fading in and out of the background. I greatly prefer that to postseason baseball, which dominates your life and gets cranked up to 11 each October.

Reds sign Nicky Delmonico

The Cincinnati Reds have signed first baseman/outfielder Nicky Delmonico to a minor-league deal with an invite to big-league spring training.

This is a choice signing for a team that seemed primed to compete before trimming talent, making the roster too lean. Still, a poor division may present a rare opportunity for the Reds to compete, raising the steaks for even a medium-talented club like Cincy. This is an A-1 addition of a seasoned veteran. Well done.

Brewers sign Kolten Wong

Kolten Wong has signed a two-year, $18 million deal with the Milwaukee Brewers. There’s a team option for a third year which, if exercised, would make it a $26 million deal.

Wong, 30, is probably the best defensive second baseman in the game. He has played his entire eight-year big-league career with the St. Louis Cardinals. The Cards had a 2021 option on him but did not exercise it, making him a free agent.

The Diamondbacks sign Joakim Soria

The Arizona Diamondbacks have signed free agent reliever Joakim Soria to a one-year, $3.5 million contract. As is the case with Sean Doolittle going to Cincinnati, this is a good landing spot for Soria, as the closer role in Arizona is wide open.

Soria, 36, posted a 2.82 ERA with 24 strikeouts over 22.1 innings last season with the Athletics. He has 223 career saves, which ranks fourth among active major league pitchers.

Twins sign Alex Colomé

The Twins have signed reliever Alex Colomé to a one-year contract with a mutual option for a second year. Mutual options are bullcrap, by the way, so ignore that part. Colomé will make $5 million in 2021.

He'll also likely be in the mix for the closer role. His strikeout rate is down over the past couple of seasons but he has been a consistent ground ball pitcher who posted a 0.81 ERA last season.

The Phillies sign Chase Anderson

The Philadelphia Phillies have signed pitcher Chase Anderson to a one-year, $4 million deal.

Anderson, 33, went 1-2 with a 7.22 ERA in 10 appearances for the Toronto Blue Jays last year. It was his worst season in the bigs but (a) he’s been a tick better than a league average pitcher for the rest of his seven-year career; and (b) as I often note here, we probably shouldn’t be holding bad results in 2020 against guys, especially pitchers.

The Orioles sign King Félix

Here’s one that, well, I dunno: Félix Hernández has signed a minor league deal with the Baltimore Orioles.

Hernández signed a minor league deal with the Atlanta Braves last year but opted out before the regular season began due to coronavirus concerns. When he last pitched he was finishing his 15-year career with the Mariners at the end of the 2019 season. It was a bad season: he went 1-8 with a 6.40 ERA in 15 starts for and lost his place in the rotation. Hernández has not even been an average big league pitcher since 2017 and he has not been the King Félix who dominated hitters since 2014.

Still, no harm in offering a legend a minor league deal. Maybe the year off has helped his arm. I wouldn’t bet a ton on that, but you never know. Worst case, we add another guy to the “former greats who ended their careers in strange uniforms” file, along with Warren Spahn with the Giants, John Smoltz with the Boston Red Sox, and Steve Carlton with, well, like four teams.

Other Stuff

“Everybody hates each other here”

Several years ago I was taking a cab from LaGuardia into Manhattan. It was the first time I had been to New York in couple years, and as I looked at the skyline I was surprised to see a super tall, super skinny not-quite-completed-rectangle of a building shooting up into the sky at the north end of Midtown Manhattan. I took a photo of it and tweeted it, asking my New York friends, “what the hell is that ugly thing?”

The answer was 432 Park Avenue, which was about to become the tallest residential building on the planet. It has since been surpassed in that department, but it remains the most noticeable building to result from a boom of ultra-tall, ultra-expensive residential towers in New York over the past decade.

These buildings were built to cater to affluent all-cash buyers, most of whom remain anonymous thanks to the transactions being made in the name of shell companies. Many of the apartments in these buildings are only occupied part of the year or, in some cases, are not occupied at all. It’s something of an open secret that a great many of these apartments were purchased by shady interests, many from overseas, in order to park money in real estate. Or, perhaps, launder it.

That all seems sketchy as hell, but at least the condos are nice, right? Well . . .

The details in the story are kinda delicious in an eat-the-rich sort of way. I mean, water damage and engineering failures are what they are — no one expects or can predict those things — but people complaining about a tower built halfway to Heaven creaking in the wind and experiencing elevator issues? The trash chutes being super loud due to garbage hitting terminal velocity? The uber-expensive private restaurant where residents are required to pay a certain amount of money per year seeing its rates jacked up? I’m not sure what anyone was expecting.

And before you are tempted to have sympathy for these people, make damn sure you understand the sorts of people you’re dealing with here:

Not that I don’t have at least a small soft spot for Ms. Abramovich, who seems like she tells it like it is:

Someone think of the billionaires in their high rises.

The House Democratic Campaign Committee is, once again, missing the point.

The campaign committee for the U.S. House Democrats plans to center their strategy for the 2022 midterm elections on casting the Republican party as the party of QAnon. They launched their first TV ad campaign yesterday, spotlighting supporters of the fringe conspiracy theory such as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Republican representatives and candidates who refuse to condemn QAnon and their ilk and saying, basically, that that’s the modern Republican Party.

The money quote from the article comes from Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chair Sean Patrick Maloney who said, “They can do QAnon or they can do college-educated voters. They cannot do both.”

On the one hand, yes, the Republican Party has been effectively taken over by loonies, be they actual adherents to fringe conspiracy theories or simply those who are happy to court the support of such loonies and who refuse to stand up to that portion of the base. I mean, check this out from last night:

There’s nothing wrong with pointing that connection out repeatedly, because the extremist fringe that has taken over the Republican Party is dangerous and a moral and intellectual stand should be taken against it. Politically speaking, if there’s a means to do so, there is nothing wrong with highlighting the beliefs of these psychopaths as a means of sowing division in the GOP by making mainline Republican officials pick a damn side.

As a campaign message aimed at actual voters, however, I can’t help but think that the “you get QAnon, we get the college-educated voters” thing is doomed to failure.

We have specific, recent evidence of this sort of messaging not working, don’t we? I mean, highlighting and elevating extremist elements of the opposition and attempting to shame Republicans and Republican voters into withdrawing support for them was exactly what the Democrats tried to do with Donald Trump in 2015-16, is it not? They’re crazy! They’re deplorable! If you support that you support crazy and deplorable!

That failed miserably, obviously. It failed in part because it galvanized the base, and you really don’t want that if you’re trying to beat a party who depends greatly on a galvanized base. For another thing it greatly overestimated the shame quotient that mainline Republicans have. Which is zero. A lot of them got on board with the “we are not the party of Trump” thing in 2016 and did an about-face the moment he won. They won’t make that mistake again. They will not alienate the looney fringe if they can help it.

Beyond that, the whole idea of “people into QAnon and other crazy shit are uneducated idiots, so if you fall in with that we’ll get all the smart voters” is simply wrong. In reality, the backbone of the Q movement, of the “stop the steal” movement and every other fringe, conspiracy theory-driven force in the GOP right now are suburban white people, most of whom are educated and/or own businesses and stuff. Marjorie Taylor Greene is a college graduate who runs a business. The creator of QMap, which onboarded people into QAnon, was revealed to be a Citigroup tech executive.

Just look at the main figures involved in that world. Look at who was arrested for the goddamn insurrection and you’ll see that it’s not the unwashed, uneducated masses running that show. The people who are into this stuff because are not into it because they’re stupid or uneducated. They into it either because (a) they truly believe that their political enemies are evil incarnate and that they should be eliminated (i.e. they’re nuts); or (b) because they’re desperate and lost and are latching onto things which at least superficially sound like antiestablishment sentiment in an environment when no one else is offering anything along those lines that appeals to them.

Even if that wasn’t the case, I don’t know what voters you’re attracting by campaigning on “the other side is stupid and crazy.” Voters want you to stand FOR something and to run ON something, not just hash out cultural and philosophical distinctions. Run on making the economy work for everyone. Run on rebuilding a country that is in many, many ways falling apart. Run on health care and equality, and being prepared for emergencies. Contrast all of that with how Republicans stand for absolutely nothing but corporations and the wealthy.

Above all else, run on things that will be of significance and importance beyond the next couple of news cycles and which voters can grab onto and believe that, yeah, voting for these guys would make my life better. Save the granular messaging about which demographic segments of the population will do what for the Nate Silvers of the world.

Lessons from the Flint Sit-Down Strike

In a conventional strike, union members establish a picket line outside a place of work to discourage other employees from entering and preventing the employer from operating. In a sit-down strike, the workers physically occupy the workplace, keeping management and others — including would-be strikebreakers — out.

This is what happened in Flint, Michigan when, from December 1936 through February of 1937, overworked, underpaid, and generally frustrated autoworkers who were members of a highly balkanized United Auto Workers which was not yet recognized by General Motors occupied three GM plants. After forty-four days, GM caved, agreeing to recognize the UAW. Due to the Flint Sit-Down Strike, the UAW would soon become the nation’s most important union, helping set wages for industrial workers and, basically, creating the American middle class.

I was born in Flint, Michigan. My parents were not autoworkers, but basically everyone else I knew was. All of our neighbors. All of my friend’s parents. There were 80,000 people working for General Motors in Genesee County, Michigan in 1980 when I was seven years old, and almost everyone in my life worked at the shop or was supported by someone — someone who was part of that middle class created by the Sit-Down Strike — who did.

The idea of the middle class existing is generally taken for granted by most people — it just is, right? — but it was presented as something different to me as a kid in Flint. Mostly because there were a lot of UAW workers in my life who reminded me of that in word and in deed.

Our neighbor across the street, a man named Larry Alvord, was a teenager when his dad took part in the sit-down strike at Fisher Body 1, just a couple of miles from our house, on South Saginaw Street and he told us what he remembered from it. Larry also told us how, if it was not for that strike, he would not have been able to come back from the war, get a job at the shop with just a high school education, and basically live the American Dream, complete with home ownership, car ownership, family vacations, and sending his kids to college. Larry was in his 50s and 60s when I knew him and there were a lot of men like him in our neighborhood who had that story. There were a lot of younger men too — men my dad’s age — who owned homes, bought new cars, and maybe even a boat or an RV, took vacations with their families and all of that who never would’ve been able to if it wasn’t for their union jobs.

I’m sure a huge part of why I’m wired the way I am when it comes to politics and economics is because, when I was a little kid, I just assumed that was how things were for all workers and that’s how it should always be. As I grew older and all of that started going away for the autoworkers and other unionized workers I never forgot that that sort of thing was at least possible.

I understand how the world has changed since then. I do not harbor delusions that large factories employing tens of thousands of people will set up shop and support entire communities again, but for the past 30+ some years I’ve operated on the assumption that that broad state of affairs might return or could return. One in which working class people could expect to work one job that would allow them to live a life of comfort, safety, health, and dignity, be they in the factories that remain or in the more common places where the working class can be found these days: in retail, in hospitals and healthcare facilities, in landscaping, in agribusiness, at call centers, in truck cabs, or in freight and package distribution facilities.

There’s a new book out by a writer named Edward McClelland about the Flint Sit-Down Stike. It’s called “Midnight in Vehicle City: General Motors, Flint, and the Strike That Created the Middle Class.” I haven’t read it yet, but McClelland has an essay adapted from it up over at Belt Magazine that I read last night. It sets forth the legacy and the lessons of the Sit-Down Strike and talks about whether another, similar sort of labor action — maybe at an Amazon distribution center? — can catalyze things like the Sit-Down Strike did.

There’s a passage in the essay which perfectly encapsulates a thought that began gnawing at me a several years ago. A thought that, when people started to appreciate just how great the gap between the haves and have-nots in this country has become and how destructive that gap is to the lives of so many people, began to push back at my assumptions about the lot of working people improving again:

I try to be optimistic when I have thoughts along those lines. I try to believe that we can make things better and value work again in this country like we once did, but the suspicion that I’m hopelessly naive about that — the suspicion that humanity is simply wired for a peasantry and an aristocracy and the latter will never again make the mistake of letting the lot of the former improve, looms over me.

It looms like a 1,400-foot-tall luxury high rise filled with billionaires whose problems make front page news while the problems of working people very rarely do.