Cup of Coffee: January 14, 2021

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Today we talk about MLB acting like it’s taking a political stand but doing no such thing and the Blue Jays keeping a steady hand on the rudder, even if it’s a hand I don’t much care for. Also, t h e s l o w e s t p i t c h e r i n b a s e b a l l s i g n ed w i t h a n e w t e a m.

In Other Stuff, Donald Trump is 2-for-2 in impeachment appearances, and now he’s set to walk, the Capitol looks like there’s an actual civil war going on, not just an ideological one, a terrorist doesn’t know what “terrorism” means, a guy has lost a password worth $220 million, someone makes a call for a new New Deal for artists, and an axe murderer’s house is for sale. No, not that axe murderer’s. A different axe murderer.

Let’s get at ‘er.

The Daily Briefing

Great Moments in Eyewash: MLB suspends political donations

The Associated Press reported late yesterday afternoon that Major League Baseball is suspending all political contributions in the wake of last week’s insurrection. MLB, you may know, has an active political action committee that has donated just under $700,000 to candidates since its creation in 2016. About 54% of those donations have gone to Republicans over the past four years but, in recent cycles, more has gone to Democrats.

The headline to that AP story scans in an appealing way, but a couple of things about this move make it pretty empty, however.

First off, stopping donations to all parties, not just Republicans or to the specific Republicans who directly instigated the insurrection and spread the lie that the election was stolen, renders this a pretty meaningless act as far as responding to last week’s events go. It’s joint discipline, the sort of which parents impose when we don’t know which of the kids broke the vase in the living room and neither will own up. Here we know who broke the vase, so to speak. If MLB had any balls, they’d punish the people who did it rather than throw up their hands like this this. That, however, would require making a stand that might upset some people and Major League Baseball wouldn’t do that.

More broadly, it’s worth noting that the cessation of donations is just for the league PAC. This is not a cessation of donations for the the 30 team owners who, collectively, donate way more than the league does and who donate to Republicans at a far greater rate. This includes the Giants’ odious owner Charles Johnson, who has fully-embraced and has generously funded some of the most extreme candidates out there, including conspiracy-believing and insurrection-instigating Congresswoman Lauren Boebert and Congressman Jim Jordan and Senator Tommy Tuberville, each of whom voted against certification of the Electoral College. None of this stops the Ricketts family from being, well, the Ricketts family either.

In suspending political donations MLB is just trying to head off criticism for some of its political donations before they catch hell for them. It’s not taking any kind of stand at all. It’s, as baseball folks say, just eyewash.

Blue Jays give Mark Shapiro a five-year extension

Blue Jays president and chief executive officer Mark Shapiro has agreed to a five-year extension, per an announcement from Rogers Communications:

I’ll grant that the Jays are trending in the right direction, but I have a distaste for Shapiro.

One of the first thing he did after taking over in Toronto was to run Alex Anthopoulos out of town by chastising him for spending money on the team. This is in keeping with what he did in Cleveland for years and years: going cheap on the roster and transforming a team that set records for sold out games into one of the worst draws in the league by sending off and foregoing even moderately expensive talent.

To be sure, in both of those jobs he was taking his cues from team ownership which desired to go cheaper, but Shapiro is better at carrying out such orders than a lot of team presidents. Indeed, he’s the quintessential 21st Century MLB executive as far as laundering the cheapness of rich owners into a superficially palatable set of talking points. A lot of people cite Billy Beane as the “win on the cheap” pioneer GM, but more of today’s executive class follows Shapiro’s lead in taking a “cheap on the cheap and, hey, if we win on accident, that’s fine” approach and packaging it as “sustainable competitiveness” or what have you.

I’m probably being unfair to some extent here. As I said, the Jays do have a lot of good young talent and they are heading for better things. But until Shapiro actually wins something or does something that excites fans who don’t get off on how many years of control the team has over a given player, he doesn’t really get the benefit of the doubt as far as I’m concerned.

Astros sign Pedro Báez

The Houston Astros have signed reliever Pedro Báez to a two-year contract. The deal, which is expected to guarantee him $12-14 million plus various escalators and a buyout, is pending a physical.

Báez had a down 2020, but over the past seven seasons he has posted a 3.03 ERA and 369/120 K/BB ratio over 356 innings for the Dodgers. At times he’s been shaky but he’s mostly been reliable. He probably seems more shaky than he really is, too, because he’s, frankly, one of the hardest players to watch in all of baseball. That’s because he’s one of the slowest-working pitchers in the history of the game. It’s just excruciating when he pitches. The game grinds to a halt.

Báez wasn’t on the Dodgers’ playoff roster in 2017, so Astros fans missed him then. They’re gonna have plenty of time to see him now. Like, all the time in the world.

Other Stuff

Trump Impeached again

Generally, if one is asked about the single worst thing that can happen at one’s job, one need not say “can you be more specific?” but now Donald Trump has to. The House of Representatives impeached President Trump for “inciting violence against the government of the United States.” It was the second time he has been impeached. Good going, my dude.

Unlike his first impeachment, which basically fell along party lines, a handful of Republicans joined Democrats to charge him with high crimes and misdemeanors. Ten, in fact: Liz Cheney of Wyoming, Jaime Herrera Beutler of Washington, John Katko of New York, Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, Fred Upton of Michigan, Dan Newhouse of Washington, Peter Meijer of Michigan, Anthony Gonzalez of Ohio, David Valadao of California, and Tom Rice of South Carolina.

If you told me two weeks ago that Trump would be impeached again I not only would’ve laughed at the possibility but I would’ve howled at the notion that ten Republicans would agree to go along with it. That speaks to the seriousness of what happened last Wednesday. That being said, the fact remains that, even after the insurrection he instigated, 140 Republicans still voted to overturn Trump’s clear election loss and 197 Republicans didn’t think what he did violated his oath of office.

As noted yesterday, Mitch McConnell will not bring the Senate back before January 19, which means that there won’t be a trial to remove Trump before he leaves due to Joe Biden’s inauguration. He can still be tried and potentially convicted, however, which would allow the Senate to bar him from ever holding public office again. I’d put low odds on that actually happening, but given how it may be in Republicans’ interest to neutralize Trump politically going forward, there’s at least some incentive for them to do it. We’ll see how that plays out in the coming days.

Either way: Trump was already, in my book and in the book of most people who don’t adhere to the cultish aspects of the Republican Party, the worst president in the history of the United States. Now there’s just as strong an argument for that on a quantitative basis as there was a qualitative one.

For his part, Trump released a video statement after the impeachment vote. It’s pretty un-Trump-like in that he’s not ranting and raving. He, obviously, still does not own up to the fact that he inspired a deadly march on the Capitol for the purpose of overturning the results of an election that he lost. He also engages in the “No True Scotsman” fallacy, by saying “no true supporter of mine could ever endorse political violence.” Well, Trump himself strongly encouraged political violence and the people who have committed all the political violence in this country of late have done so explicitly in support of him while literally waving his banner. You can’t talk your way out of that, Bunky.

Otherwise the video rates at only, I’d say, a 4.7 on the Trump Crazy scale. He seems scared, frankly. He’s probably worried he’s going to get prosecuted. Not that any of this matters. He’s done enough. Nothing says or does now can erase what he has already said and done.

Trump isn’t going to pay Giuliani’s legal fees

The Washington Post reports that President Trump has instructed his aides not to pay Rudy Giuliani’s legal fees. This is one of the few times I’ll ever find myself on Trump’s side. I’m only half joking here.

Rudy’s legal work was total dog shit. He did zero to help his client legally speaking and made him look worse P.R.-wise in the process. Yes, Trump is an impossible client, but Trump could’ve just ranted on Twitter for two months and would’ve gotten farther than he did with Rudy’s help, and I suspect Rudy knew that before he got going. I think Rudy was blowing smoke up Trump’s butt in an effort to churn some hours and make some dough before it all came crashing down. Trump is probably realizing that now. I wouldn’t want to pay for that either.

Beyond that, Trump is notorious for not paying his bills and for turning on his friends and allies on a dime, often for no reason at all. In light of that, if Rudy didn’t get a retainer and if he didn’t stop work the moment it ran out and if he didn’t refuse to resume work until it was replenished, he was asking to get stiffed, frankly, so no sympathy here.

Trump has about 5,000 lawsuits waiting for him come next Wednesday afternoon, but I’d actually defend him in a fees suit brought by Rudy. At least if I got a retainer first.

Civil War Vibes

On Tuesday the military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff sent a message to American armed forces reminding them to defend the Constitution and reminding them that Biden would soon be their Commander-In-Chief. It’s absolutely extraordinary, given the officially apolitical nature of the United States military, that such a message had to be sent, but given the events of the past week or so I get it.

Meanwhile, the army is bivouacking in the seat of power of the legislative branch due to threats of aggression from forces aligned with the chief executive:

All we’re missing right now is Trump showing up in a general’s uniform.

“I’m not a terrorist,” says man who explicitly stated that he wanted to instill terror

A retired U.S. Navy SEAL from Ohio named Adam Newbold took part in the insurrection last week. In a Facebook video he filmed in the aftermath of the attack he said that he hoped his and his fellow seditionists’ actions would ignite a “positive revolution.”

ABC news reached out to Newbold, who now says that it all went “too far” and that he’s cooperating with the FBI. He also tells ABC News that "I am not a terrorist.” Of course, in his video he said he wanted “to make lawmakers think twice about what they're doing" and for them to be left “shaking in their shoes.”

Someone ought to provide a dictionary to this Newbold, fella, because last I checked, the literal goal of terrorism is to inspire terror, just like he said was his aim. Of course, for vast swaths of this country, the word “terrorist” is a racial/ethnic/religious designation referring to brown people, not an actual rational descriptor, so it makes sense that he might be confused on the point.

Password stress

A man named Stefan Thomas has two guesses left to remember a password to his IronKey hard drive that gives him access to a digital wallet. If he can’t, he’s lost $220 million in Bitcoin:

As someone who gets the shakes when he can’t remember the login for HBOMax when he wants to watch another episode of “Doom Patrol,” this article gives me massive levels of anxiety.

Don’t cry too much for Stefan Thomas, though. Once you get to the end of the very interesting article about the very weird world of cryptocurrency, it’s revealed that the dude is already super wealthy even without the locked-up $220 million: “Mr. Thomas said he also managed to hold on to enough Bitcoin — and remember the passwords — to give him more riches than he knows what to do with.”

In contrast, if I can’t see “Doom Patrol,” well, I just can’t see it.

A New Federal Arts Project

The pandemic has absolutely killed the arts in this country, with artists, musicians, actors, dancers, artists, and all of the people who work behind the scenes and adjacent to the world of the arts taking it on the chin in far, far greater proportion to basically every other sector of the economy.

The arts, however, are not merely a sector of the economy. They are an essential part of the country’s — and the world’s — cultural existence. The losses in the arts world are losses for us all. If society is to recover from everything that ails it, it needs a vibrant culture to help it do so.

To that end, New York Times’ critic Jason Farago wrote out a roadmap for Joe Biden to follow to help the arts rebound. It’s, essentially, a reboot of the Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project of the 1930s. Back on December 23 I wrote about the similar Federal Writers Project, and how such a thing could be useful now as well.

Farago notes that the key to the Federal Arts Project — and to what he is proposing now — is that it was not some merit-based scheme aimed at deciding what was and what was not worthy and that there was no requirement that any given artist justify his or her work to some board or commission. Rather, it was a work program in the literal sense of the term. It was aimed at putting artists to work and paying them for it. Some of what was developed was great. Some of it was crap. But what specifically came out of it was less important than what it did for the arts economy, without which there’d be no art community.

The point is to understand and appreciate that artists, performers, and those who work with them are true workers who are valuable to both the culture and the economy and to help them remain a part of the culture and the economy rather than abandon it due to the pandemic. You’ll be utterly shocked to hear that I’m all for it.

Wanna own an axe murderer’s house?

Nah, not my great-great grandmother’s. They sold that in 1911 after she went to the insane asylum. Detroit being Detroit, it looks like this now:

Pity.

No, I’m talking about Lizzie Borden’s old house. In 1892 Borden, you likely know, almost certainly took an axe and gave her father — and stepmother — 40 whacks in Fall River, Massachusetts. She was acquitted, however, and moved to a nearby house and lived there for the last 30+ years of her life. That second house — not the murder house — us up for sale now if you want it. It’s been a bed and breakfast for a long time. It’ll only set you back $892,000.

I’m guessing you could get the lot for the old Kniffen place a lot cheaper.

Know what else is cheap? A subscription to this newsletter!

Hey, give it a whirl! What’s the worst thing that could happen? If you hate it, just pull a Trump and stop paying me. It’s easy!

Have a great day, everyone.