Cup of Coffee: January 20, 2022

Good morning! And welcome to Free Thursday!

Today we have news of a top free agent’s demands, a labor negotiation update, some commentary about how the parties to those negotiations should not, contrary to a notable figure’s latest column, place “saving games at all costs” as their top priority, a sighting of an old prospect, me being grumpy as hell about minor league team naming conventions, and Greg Maddux apparently changing his story about why he didn’t sign with the Yankees back in 1992.

In Other Stuff there’s some good COVID news, some bad political news, a friend wrote about the fickle fame of Twitter which, in turn, caused me to write a lot about “WKRP in Cincinnati,” I talk about a great train robbery, and we learn about how to stay woke while playing chess.

The Daily Briefing

Carlos Correa is reportedly asking for $330-350 million

Yesterday we learned that Scott Boras has taken over the representation of free agent shortstop Carlos Correa. Then, later in the day, a reporter who has a long and rich history of reporting things that Scott Boras knows, Jon Heyman of MLB Network, reported that Correa's demand in contract negotiations prior to the lockout was $330-350 million. Heyman characterizes it as “the clear minimum ask.”

Corey Seager, it should be noted, recently got a $325 million deal from the Texas Rangers. Seager is a tad older than Correa. They have both been in the bigs for seven seasons but Correa has played in 116 more games than Seager and, while Seager’s offensive stats are a little shiner, Correa is the far superior defender, has outproduced Seager overall by just about any measure of overall value, and seems far more likely to stick at shortstop longer than Seager will as they each get older.

In light of that, $330-350 million is not an unreasonable ask.

MLBPA will soon respond to the Major League Baseball’s latest offer

Heyman was busy yesterday. After he dropped the Correa stuff he reported that the MLBPA is preparing a response to MLB's latest proposal and that it will be “delivered within days.” I suppose that’s not a super scoop because, obviously, the union was gonna respond to MLB’s offer, but there’s not much else to talk about now, so we may as well mention it.

You’ll recall from last week that the players had a sharply negative reaction to that last MLB proposal. That proposal reportedly continued to advocate for a change to arbitration which links it to statistical benchmarks, didn’t move at all on the topic of minimum salary, did not propose anything new — or anything good in the eyes of the players — on the competitive balance tax, did not respond to the players’ previous demand to reduce the six-year track to free agency, and attempted to tie postseason awards voting — stuff like the MVP and Cy Young Awards — to draft pick compensation to teams as a means of combatting service time manipulation. The owners also demanded a 14-team postseason which, as we’ve discussed, is probably the most valuable thing the players could give up, so you’d figure that they’d offer something valuable in return but nah.

The players have been pretty dang clear about what they want: compensation, which has become uncoupled from performance via MLB’s increased reliance on low-paid, pre-free agency players, to more closely track performance. They are asking for that in a few ways, including raising salaries for pre-arbitration players and making the track to free agency shorter. They also seem to be willing to agree to an expanded postseason, which is super valuable to the owners and the league. Major League Baseball, meanwhile, is quite keen on getting that expanded postseason but does not seem to have offered much of anything the players in return. That doesn’t seem like a particularly equitable way to approach things.

So now we’ll get something from the union. If that something continues to be met with little or no movement from Rob Manfred and his pals, I’m struggling to see how the ball gets moved forward in any real way and, in turn, I’m struggling to see how spring training starts on time. It takes two to tango, after all, and if only one side is willing to engage in the abrazo what’s the point of staying in the Confiteria Bailable?

“Not a single game should be lost”

Ken Rosenthal has a new column about the labor situation over at The Athletic that got a lot of notice yesterday. Mostly for this paragraph, I think, in which he seems to rip Rob Manfred and the owners pretty good:

And yeah, that’s a pretty good paragraph. One that’s hard not to read with a bit of extra glee knowing that this is the first time Rosenthal has written substantively about labor since he was let go from MLB Network because he pissed off Rob Manfred. Not gonna lie, happy to see that. That graf, however, is just one good one in an otherwise both-sidesy kind of presentation the likes of which we see a lot of whenever baseball labor stuff is in the news.

Rosenthal’s column begins with a single-sentence paragraph: “Not a single game should be lost.” The sentence it ends with, in case you are missing his point: “Not a single game should be lost.” And yeah, that’s a sentiment that a lot of fans would prefer. No one wants to miss out on any baseball games.

But it’s also the case that when you set “no games should be lost” as the ultimate good — when you say that disruption of the season is the ultimate bad — you are, by definition, no longer assessing the labor situation objectively or understanding what the parties to that negotiation are trying to accomplish. That’s because disruption, however much fans may not like it, may very well be the best way for one side to this negotiation to get what it wants. And it may very well be what leads to a far more tenable, mutually-beneficial labor situation going forward.

The default of “we can’t have any missed games” is usually a pro-owner position, actually. There’s a lot of talk about how we’ve had labor peace since 1995 but, tell me, has labor peace been anywhere near as good for the players as it has been for the owners? Indeed, I think a strong argument can be made that a fair amount of that labor peace was achieved by the players ceding ground in past negotiations that they should not have ceded. Maybe they would’ve achieved better results for themselves in the past couple of CBAs if they did not prioritize peace as much as Rosenthal and others would have them do? Maybe they would’ve gotten a better deal if they had held out harder for what they wanted?

That’s obviously an unanswerable hypothetical, but the fact is that owners make more money off the playing of baseball games than players do, and thus the prioritizing of the playing of games at all costs, by definition, is a pro-ownership position. The threat of a strike, in a strike situation, is the union’s ultimate weapon. Their weathering a lockout now and standing firm despite the owners’ action is the other side of that same coin. Saying that using that weapon is a thing that CANNOT HAPPEN and demanding that the thing that most benefits the owners — the show going on — is to demand that one side unilaterally disarm.

If you’re a just a fan it’s totally defensible to take the position that missed games is the worst thing imaginable. But if you’re doing what Rosenthal is doing here — breaking down each side’s strengths and weaknesses, armchair-quarterbacking their negotiation strategy, and trying to envision what a deal may look like — such a position is not really a serious one because it takes key variables off the table. And, more importantly, it misreads what the objectives of the parties to the negotiation actually are.

Neither side wants to have games canceled, but neither side can or should go into these talks with that as the highest goal, because to do so is to forget why they’re in these negotiations in the first place: to get the best deal. The route to that best deal may very well involve a lot more brinksmanship than Rosenthal seems prepared to allow.

The Nationals signed . . . Rusney Castillo?!

The Washington Nationals have signed Rusney Castillo to a minor league deal.

Old heads will remember Castillo as one of the biggest international free agent busts ever. He signed a seven-year, $72.5 million contract with the Red Sox out of Cuba back in 2014 and people figured he was a can’t-miss talent. Welp, he missed.

Despite what was purported to be five-tool skills, Castillo was given his first extended MLB experience in 2015 and it didn’t go all that well. Overall he hit .262/.301/.379 (82 OPS+) in 99 games. The Red Sox put Castillo on waivers in 2016 and, given his contract, there were obviously no takers. He ended up spending a LOT of time at Pawtucket. Where, actually, he was pretty dang good through 2019, but there was never any appetite on the part of the Sox brass to call him back up so he spent years a minor league depth making like ten million a year. After missing 2020 like every other minor leaguer due to the pandemic, he spent the 2021 season with the Rakuten Golden Eagles of Japan's Nippon Professional Baseball where he got on base at a decent clip but didn’t do much else.

Castillo is now 34. He will likely open the 2022 season at Triple-A Rochester as organizational outfield depth for the Nats. If he makes it up to the bigs it’ll be the first time he’s done that since 2016.

Introducing the Sugar Land Space Cowboys

A year after purchasing the once-independent Sugar Land Skeeters and making them their Triple-A affiliate, the Houston Astros are re-branding the team. They are now called the Sugar Land Space Cowboys.

Every middle aged (and older) ballwriter worth their salt has already made the requisite Steve Miller Band joke here, so I’ll pass on that. Rather, I will take the opportunity to, once again, say how tired I am with cutesy minor league branding efforts which have run rampant for the past decade or so.

It’s a bunch of corporate-driven false whimsy, aimed at embodying a humble, quirky, hit-bull-win-steak sort of minor league baseball culture that has long since ceased to exist and, really, was never as prevalent as folks who are invested in it would have you believe it was. The Skeeters name itself was part of that trend so naming that club the Space Cowboys isn’t really changing anything, but it’s all the same sort of jazz. Eventually we’ll run out of strange animals and retro pop culture ephemera after which to name clubs who, despite being located in affluent suburbs, want to evoke feelings of some sort of pastoral, Big Rock Candy Mountain paradise, but I suppose if we’re now mining 1970s classic rock radio for monikers, the trend could conceivably go on for ever.

Oh well. Can’t wait for the Space Cowboys’ so-lame-they’re-cool promotions, the antics of their calculatedly over-the-top mascot, and their alternate jersey theme nights, all of which will try to evoke the spirit of some sort of old weird America carnival in an effort to make you forget that Major League Baseball, its billion dollar baseball teams, and now a multi-billion dollar sports conglomerate have basically taken over minor league baseball.

Now get off my lawn.

Greg Maddux has a new explanation for why he didn’t sign with the Yankees in 1992

Hall of Famer Greg Maddux famously signed with Atlanta when he reached free agency for the first time following the 1992 season. He was the reigning Cy Young Award winner that year so there were certainly other suitors. The most notable suitor was the New York Yankees who, while still smarting from a few of their worst seasons in franchise history, were a team on the rise. A young Bernie Williams was poised to become a team centerpiece in 1993. The Bombers had likewise acquired Paul O’Neill from the Cincinnati Reds. Before the 1993 season began they’d also sign Jimmy Key and Wade Boggs. Within a couple of years the 1990s Yankees dynasty would truly begin to come together.

They certainly would’ve come together faster if they had landed Maddux, but he took what was widely reported to be a lesser offer from Atlanta. At the time, and many times since then, Maddux has said that he just did a gut-check and decided that (a) he thought that Atlanta, a two-time defending NL Pennant winner, had a better chance to win than the Yankees; and (b) he just wanted to stay in the National League because knew the hitters better and it was a better environment for pitchers. He forwent a bit of dough to do it, he has long said, but ultimately he went where he felt more comfortable.

In a recent appearance on David Cone’s podcast, however, he said that, actually, the Yankees never offered him a contract at all:

Maddux went on to say that he heard through the grapevine that one of the higher-ups on the Yankees, whose identity he can’t remember — but it was not GM Gene Michael — had a heart attack, things got confused, and that’s why he wasn’t made an offer. When he got home from his trip to New York Atlanta, the team he had wanted to join in the first place but which he didn’t think was going to make him an offer either, ponied up, he accepted the offer, and the rest was history.

That’s a little confusing, but I suppose memories get fuzzy over 30 years. It’s possible that there was an “offer” from the Yankees but not an official and final offer, thus making both versions of this true in a sense. It’s also possible that no offer came, Maddux signed with Atlanta, and then the Yankees, Maddux’s agent Scott Boras, and Maddux had after-the-fact conversations in which it was determined that, yeah, the Yankees actually would’ve paid him more. These talks aren’t always linear as it is and back in late 1992, before everyone had a cell phone, it was probably a bit more messy.

Gotta say, though, Atlanta fans have gotten a lot of mileage over the years off the idea that Maddux said no to the Yankees bigger bucks offer and decided instead to take his talents to Atlanta because doing so just felt better. Some of them of a certain age may feel a bit deflated if they can’t keep telling it that way. For my part I don’t think that has ever really mattered much and it’s pretty irrelevant now, but people like their narratives, and as a fan, I suppose it’s a pretty good one.

Other Stuff

Some good COVID news

I tend to bring the gloom fairly often and, when I don’t, I don’t bring sunshine as much as I bring weirdness or randomness. But sometimes I need to go against type and bring that sunshine. From the New York Times:

Hospitalizations are still high, but hospitalizations (a) likewise drag the infection stats (duh) so it’s expected there will be good news there too; and (b) they’re already starting to fall in the first places Omicron hit. South Africa, the UK and places where the variant hit first saw a pattern in which there was a huge surge for about a month, followed by a rapid decline. it looks like it’s happening here too.

Things still suck for now, but once we get into February, things should begin to look a lot brighter. The brightest it can conceivably look: COVID becoming endemic, meaning that it continues to exist, but at lower levels with far milder symptoms and effects, and thus becomes something that is managed — and is manageable — like common diseases such as flus and colds and things. As Dr. Anthony Fauci put it the other day:

It still sucks now, it will still suck to some degree in the future — and it didn’t have to suck as nearly as bad as it has, except for the fact that our leadership and large swaths of humanity have repeatedly failed to do the right thing over the past two years, sometimes maliciously, sometimes simply negligently — but there is light at the end of the tunnel.

The quiet part out loud

The move to amend the filibuster rules and allow a vote on the voting rights bill failed in the Senate last night, with all 50 Republicans and two Democrats, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, opposing it. As such, the effort to pass voting rights legislation is officially dead.

This is, of course, depressing for a number of reasons. Mostly because it means that the GOP’s full-on assault against democracy will continue and, sooner rather than later, we will almost certainly have an election in which the winner is simply deemed the loser and the loser deemed the winner by fiat and, short of that, elections in which Republicans win solely by virtue of their robust, unchecked, and now uncheckable voter suppression efforts.

Two other reasons it’s depressing:

• It will now be cast by the media as “Joe Biden’s failure” or “Democrats’ failure” with Republicans who, as a matter of party policy and with perfect party discipline, made it their mission to oppose democracy and to allow for the evisceration of democratic norms, receiving no scrutiny for their radical and abhorrent stance. It’s always this way, by the way. The toxicity of the Republican platform and their obstructionist efforts to protect it are just taken as a baseline for which they need not be expected to answer. It’s their side, you see, and one side is as good as the other! All we should care about who got their football over the goal line. That’s wherein all political virtue lies!; and

• Despite this outcome — and despite Manchin and Sinema’s bullshit words about Senate traditions and the need to protect the country from hasty shifts in policy — the filibuster will, eventually, be ended by a pretty quick and simple vote. Indeed, when that time comes it’ll only take like seven minutes. The ones lifting it will be Republicans the next time they hold the Senate and the presidency and it will be lifted in order to pass, say, a national abortion ban or the addition of five 39 year-old Federalist Society-groomed Supreme Court justices or something. Say what you want about Republicans, but they’re nothing if not laser-focused on doing the stuff they wanna do.

What’s done is done. And now that it’s done, those who seek to end democracy as we know it aren’t being quite as careful about their words when asked about it:

Hey Mitch, you said the quiet part out loud. Although I don’t suppose doing that matters much anymore.

The Fickle Fame of Twitter

I can’t remember when I first followed Michele Catalano on Twitter. It wasn’t that long ago. Maybe three years ago? Not sure.

I also can’t remember why I followed her. I think I saw someone retweet something she said about the Yankees that I thought was funny, made a mental note to follow her, forgot, and then later saw something else she tweeted about the Yankees and said “oh, I suppose I should follow her.” It also helped that she wakes up early like I do and, sometimes, at like 5AM, there ain’t no one else around. Either way, I used to follow everyone, then I cut waaaaaay back during a brief “I need to simplify my life” phase circa 2015. I’ll follow new people now and again now, but these days it takes a lot for me to follow someone new because I feel like I’m out of bandwidth. When I followed Michele I had something approaching a rational process at least, I dunno.

One thing I noticed after I followed her, that I had not noticed when I decided to follow her, was that she had over 600,000 followers. Which was kind of weird, as she did not have a verified account and thus was pretty unlikely to be a famous or notable person of some kind. I don’t need the people I follow to be famous or notable, mind you — I probably follow fewer famous and verified people than most folks — but I did think it was unusual. After she followed me back I had a notion to ask her about why she had 600,000 followers, but never bothered to. By then I had figured out that she was just a normal person, not in media or any other high-profile industry and not the subject of weird viral fame and I chalked it all up to some random quirk of the Internet, being an early Twitter adopter, and probably an experiment in bots-gone-wrong.

Yesterday (and many years earlier, though I never saw it) Michele explained why she has so many followers (it was over a million at one point). The answer is kinda what I figured: randomly appearing on a “who to follow” list in Twitter’s very early days and then Oprah doing a segment about Twitter that caused a lot of people to see that list. Bing-bang-boom, a million followers for a middle aged civil servant, mother, and sports and music fan from Long Island.

What I didn’t think about before reading that, however, is what suddenly getting a million followers can do to a person. How it might wig you out a bit. It put me in mind of that “WKRP” episode where Dr. Johnny Fever told his listeners to throw their garbage on the steps of city hall and, when he realized people actually listened to him, it caused him to get some pretty major stage fright. Michele does a great job of telling that story. I’m sorry she had to deal with that and I’d hate to have gone through that unexpectedly myself, but I’m glad she talked about it. Bonus: there’s some good advice in there about how to curate your online experience so you can avoid all the bullshit that one encounters on social media.

Whether she had 600,000 followers or 600, I think Michele is a good follow. We’ve never met, but in the past couple of years I’ve gotten to know her the way in which you know people you know only through the Internet. She’s talked about her ups and her downs. How good, and sometimes bad, it can be to follow a team like the New York Islanders. What really terrible food choices a person can make while high. How shitty getting a divorce is. All of these are exactly the sorts of things people got onto social media in the first place for, by the way. Random interactions with random people that can enrich your life a little bit. To know that there are other people out there feeling or thinking the same stupid crap you are.

You should go read her thing about getting a million Twitter followers. And all of the other stuff she’s written at her Substack about life and crap over the past year or two. It’s like a throwback Internet experience. You know, from back before everyone’s brains got poisoned.

Speaking of “WKRP”

When it occurred to me to reference the “WKRP in Cincinnati” episode in which Johnny got stage fright — it was entitled “Mike Fright,” BTW — I Googled it really quickly to make sure I remembered it correctly. When I did I found an A.V. Club article from ten years ago which talked about that episode specifically and “WKRP” in general. It’s a fantastic article that anyone who is even remotely familiar with the show should read.

I’ve talked about “Night Court” a lot here. And “Columbo” of course. But there is not a show that was more important to me or which I loved more growing up than “WKRP in Cincinnati.” I caught it as a very, very little kid when it was first on, as my mom would watch “M*A*S*H” and the other super popular CBS shows and, at various times, “WKRP” was sandwiched in between those shows. I watched it in earnest, however, once it hit syndication. It was on a lot in the mid-1980s and I never missed it. I’m sure I saw every episode a dozen times in those days which, importantly, still included the original music. I’ve since gotten various bastardized DVD or VHS versions of it which didn’t have the music due to the expensive clearance rights, but as that AV Club article makes clear, it’s not the same. At the same time, it’s relative obscurity now has elevated it to some degree and has kept my memories of it from being sullied by finding out that this or that joke no longer holds up.

The A.V. Club article goes a long way towards explaining what was so good about “WKRP.” I suspect, though, that it’s one of those “you had to be there” shows. But I was there when it was on. And, in the late 80s, I went to work for a small radio station that had a great many similarities to WKRP.

WCIR in Beckley, West Virginia launched in the early 70s as a Christian radio station (the “CIR” stood for “Christ in Radio”) but in the mid-1970s the younger son of the station’s older owners convinced his dad to change the format to rock and roll, just like Andy Travis got The Big Guy to change WKRP’s format from easy listening to rock. In my station’s case that young son, Shane Southern, was the morning drive DJ from then into the 1980s. By the time he hired 16 year-old me to do weekend overnights he was the general manager, but he still had that morning drive DJ sensibility. He was basically Andy Travis if, somehow, Andy had taken over Arthur Carlson’s job.

The station also had a bullpen of offices for the sales and news people and a healthy divide between the suits and the dungarees. Some of the DJs were burnouts, others were players. Weird crap seemed to happen all the time. Like, the National Park service once came to the station and told us they had gotten reports of a bear in the area and asked if they could put a humane bear trap in the parking lot. Which they did, and which caught the bear, which surprised the living hell out of morning guy when he pulled into work at 5:30 AM one day. Going to work at WCIR after watching WKRP for so many years was like reading all the Harry Potter novels and then going away to college and finding out that, actually, Hogwarts existed. I wrote all about that job 12 or 13 years ago and, while the bit at the end about it being the best job I’ll ever have is no longer true — this is — I still remember those radio days fondly.

There’s no point to any of this. I’m just drifting along in the feels. God I’ve had a great life and have gotten to do so many fun things. I’m happy I had a reason to think about “WKRP” today.

The Great Train Robbery

Within the past week or so you almost certainly saw the video from a Los Angeles area train yard showing thousands upon thousands of looted, broken-open and discarded packages alongside busted-open freight cars. The video has gone viral in part because (a) it’s a hell of a damn sight; and (b) because it provides a handy visual for those who are invested in arguing that criminals are running amok and no one and nothing is safe.

A week later and the images from that video have made their way into all sorts of “this is Biden’s America” and “this is the future Democrats want” memes. They have also provided fodder for local news outlets all over the country who have made it their mission to stoke fears of an unprecedented crimewave. Which, even in Los Angeles, is simply not true, but forget it, they’re rolling.

In Los Angeles a lot of the commentary around it has been driven by Union Pacific railroad officials who have made a big public show of saying that the responsibility for the thefts lie with elected Democratic officials. Specifically, the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office which has recently moved to a no cash bail policy for misdemeanors and other non-violent crimes. The argument from the railroad executives is that it’s the city and the county’s fault that thieves are robbing trains and, dammit, they had better get tougher about things.

Union Pacific officials and those nodding along with them on that score have left something out of that, however. From L.A. Taco:

I, personally, would think that a company laying off 80% of its security force is at least partially responsible when a thing that its security force literally exists to prevent happens, but I don’t suppose that fits in very well with the “Joe Biden and the Democrats have ruined America” memes. And mentioning it sure as hell won’t accomplish what I presume to be a goal of executives like those who run the railroad: outsourcing necessary functions of their business to the public.

You all probably know where I stand when it comes to the exercise of maximal police and prosecutorial power, but I’ll be honest and say that I do not know for sure how going easier or harder on minor crimes relates to the overall crime rate. There are a lot of studies which show that being uber-tough on small offenses and locking everyone up for almost everything actually has net negative consequences overall, but I’m prepared to be enlightened by alternative theories on the matter. Crime rates went WAY down from the mid-to-late 90s-on and they continue to be significantly lower now than they were back in the day. A lot of that has been demographically-driven and subject to other odd circumstances — Boomers aged out of their crime-doing years; lead paint went away, etc. — but it’s also the case that police and prosecutorial tactics changed over that time as well. So, despite my strong suspicions on the subject, I will allow for the possibility that more heavy-handed policing has something to do with it all.

Still: the narratives spinning out of this train story smell like bullshit to me. I strongly suspect that those train thefts have a hell of a lot more to do with corporate budget cuts than they do with anything else.

CheckComrade

This is the kind of thing that, if I had heard it when I was in college, I’d say “oh wow, man . . .” and think was really deep:

Now I simply know it to be true and don’t pay it much mind, really.

Stay vigilant, my comrade chess players. And as always, have a great day.