Cup of Coffee: January 21, 2021

Good morning! It’s a new morning! And it’s Free Thursday! If you like the taste, buy the meal:

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In baseball news today we have a couple of signings of note, but not much more. Guess all the front office people were watching the inauguration. We’ll talk about those, but obviously the story of yesterday was in Washington, not next to the hot stove.

Let’s get at ‘er.

The Daily Briefing

The Astros re-sign Michael Brantley

The Houston Astros have re-signed Michael Brantley to a two-year, $32 million contract. Which is the exact length and value of the contract he just finished up. Normally you don’t want your salary to be flat, but baseball is a business in which you usually make less when you’re 34-35 than you did when you’re 32-33, so this is pretty good for Brantley.

The deal came hours after reports on Wednesday morning which had Brantley agreeing to a three-year contract with the Blue Jays. Those were, to say the least, wrong. I’d be interested to know what happened there and just how close Brantley really was to signing with the Jays. I bet we hear eventually.

Regardless, Houston has Brantley back. And what they get back is one of the steadiest bats out there. Brantley posted OPS+s of 124, 126 and 126 while hitting .300 each of the last three seasons. Given the loss of George Springer to free agency, the Astros needed to keep Brantley in the fold. And that they did.

Twins sign J.A. Happ to a one-year deal

The Minnesota Twins signed J.A. Happ to a one-year, $8 million deal.

Happ, 38, posted a 3.47 ERA and a 42/15 K/BB ratio in 49.1 innings over nine starts with the Yankees in 2020. Indeed, he’s posted sub-4.00 ERAs five of the last six years. That’s not world-beating, but it’s solid. There are a lot of innings to eat in a 162-game season. Happ will eat them competently and, in all likelihood, at a slightly above-average rate.

The Royals sign Wade Davis

Seeing Trump go and a sane, non-malevolent person take office makes it feel like 2015 all over again. So too does seeing Wade Davis join the Kansas City Royals. Which he did yesterday, agreeing to a minor league contract with an invitation to spring training. If he makes the team he’ll make $1.25 million with a possibility of $925,000 in bonuses.

Davis was a two-time AL All-Star and down-ballot Cy Young Award vote-getter in Kansas City and then led the NL in saves while pitching for the Rockies in 2018, but he’s a very different pitcher these days. He posted a 9.77 ERA in 47 innings with the Rockies between 2019-2020. He’s 35 now, and obviously won’t be rocking his mid-teens numbers, but Royals fans will be happy to see a familiar face, I presume.

Jays to play in Florida if they can’t play in Toronto

Marc Topkin of the Tampa Bay Times reports that the Toronto Blue Jays are most likely to play their home games at their spring training facility in Dunedin, Florida at the beginning of the season if they aren’t cleared to play in Toronto.

The Jays, you’ll recall, played at their Triple-A stadium in Buffalo in 2020, but given that their Triple-A team is likely to have an actual season this year — and given how damn cold it can be in Buffalo early in the season — it makes more sense to play in Dunedin if COVID-related travel restrictions make it so that Canada and the Rogers Centre is not an option.

Fun fact: the power alleys in Rogers Centre are 375 feet. The left field power alley at the ballpark in Dunedin is bigger, at 380 feet, but the right field power alley is just 363. I guess left-handed batting Cavan Biggio and Rowdy Tellez will like it.

Other Stuff

All hail our boring new president

Joe Biden was sworn in just before noon yesterday and he immediately did exactly what we’ve been thirsting for as a nation: he was kinda boring. Competent, but boring. And I mean that in the best sense of the term. God, how badly do we need our president to simply be boring after the last four years? I think I speak for many of you when I say that I’d love to go a couple of days in a row not thinking about him at all. Not wondering what fresh hell he’s unleashing on the populace.

Biden’s speech was full of broad appeals to America and unity and eminently ignorable stuff like that. And thank God for that. Talk — at least if it isn’t the presidential equivalent of yelling “fire” in a crowded movie house, which characterized the Trump years — is cheap. And often empty. Even the good-sounding talk. Indeed, I no more want my president to dazzle me with inspirational sounding bullshit than I want him to instill anxiety in my on a daily basis. When it comes to presidential speeches, I ask for one simple thing: don’t make me worry that there’s an insane person with the nuclear codes. By dialing up Standard Attempted Inspirational Speech #125 from the pre-Trump Presidential Speech Database, Biden did that.

None of this is to say that I don’t care about what the president does. To the contrary, that’s all that matters. We should pay precise attention to actions and orders and laws and policies and stuff and we should do everything we can to pressure the president into doing things that help Americans and which make America a better place.

In the meantime, I’m happy for some mildly boring rhetoric in a speech I could safely ignore if the phone rang, without worrying that the president just, I dunno, declared war on Narnia.

I can’t imagine a better thing to have right now, really.

And yeah, he did stuff

It’s easier to be cool with the somewhat boring rhetoric when you know it’s backed up with action. And Biden leapt into action yesterday, signing 17 executive orders and memorandums. Orders that, all of his talk in speeches about unity notwithstanding, were clearly, and admirably, aimed at specifically repudiating Trump’s toxic legacy. Or at least beginning to.

You can read the details of these orders here, but the short version:

• He appointed an official Covid-19 response coordinator that answers to him, not ten levels of action-deadening bureaucracy;

• He rejoined the World Health Organization;

• He ended Trump’s odious travel ban on predominantly Muslim countries;

• He halted construction of the border wall;

• He rejoined the Paris climate accord;

• He revoked the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline;

• He reversed Trump’s efforts to shrink some national parks and open them up to commercial development and exploitation;

• He reversed rollbacks to vehicle emissions standards;

• He issued a moratorium on oil and natural gas leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge;

• He extend a federal moratorium on evictions, and a moratorium on foreclosures on federally guaranteed mortgages;

• He pressed pause on federal student loan interest and principal payments through the end of September;

• He made multiple orders rolling back Trump’s hateful and, in some cases, illegal anti-LGBTQ+ initiatives; and

• He established ethics rules for those who serve in his administration that aim “to restore and maintain trust in the government.” 

More please, Mr. President. Govern like you have a mandate to undo what Trump did and to take us forward as a nation. Because you do. Beyond that, go big. Go bold. Help people quickly and significantly without complicated technocratic hoops, nods to conservative concern trolling over the debt and deficit. Make it impossible for anyone to say, two or four years from now, that government was not up to the task of helping fix what is broken with America or that Republicans and Democrats are, really, no different. Because that kind of stuff will empower populists and demagogues, just as it did in 2016.

I don’t know if Biden and his people are up to it, but until we see that, I’m happy enough to note that he installed a big portrait of FDR in the oval office. Maybe that’s a sign of what’s to come.

“The Hill We Climb”

A the inauguration yesterday, the poet Amanda Gorman, at the age of 22, put better words to our current condition, the challenges we face, and the strength we have to face them — even if we have momentarily forgotten the strength we have — than anyone possibly could have. She spoke of the power of unity, the power of healing, the power of grief and the power of hope and how our seemingly lost American ideals will, with time and with work, redeem us.

If you missed this yesterday, take some time with it today, either in text or here, as she delivered it:

Gorman asked “where can we find light in this never-ending shade?” and answered that by speaking of an inevitable dawn. It’s a dawn I want to believe in, even if I have come to doubt that I’ll see it in my lifetime.

Hi, A-Rod

He’s everywhere. He had an excuse yesterday, as he escorted J-Lo who was there to sing “This Land is Your Land.” Sadly she didn’t include the explicitly socialist verses, but I suppose that wouldn’t have worn particularly well on someone who’s worth like a billion dollars.

Good riddance to Trump

I’ll admit, I have some amount of curiosity — sick curiosity — about what, exactly, Donald Trump did with his day yesterday after landing in Florida. I kinda want to know what he was doing as the inauguration was happening and I kinda want to know even more what he was doing during the telecast of the national celebration of him leaving power last night. And make no mistake, that’s what it was. If this were a normal transition between presidents we would not have seen A-list celebrities and all the rest of that stuff last night. What we got was amped up by a factor of ten because of the glee that Trump was gone.

I’m sure there are reports out there of what Trump actually did, but despite my curiosity about it, I don’t think I’ll seek them out. Rather, I’ll read this story in the Washington Post instead, entitled “The last day of Donald.” It’s not a tick-tock of the 45th president’s doings, it’s a snapshot of what America was like on the day he left the public stage. It’s supremely well-written, moving, and in many places sad:

And:

There is so much more work to do to undo what he has done.

In the meantime, this thread, in which people share their favorite memories of the stupid and embarrassing (to him) things he did or which happened to him while in office, is all rather fun now. Things like the wife of the Japanese Prime minister pretending not to speak English during a state dinner so she did not have to talk to him. Which really happened.

The QAnon people are temporarily cracking

There were several reports yesterday that a bunch of QAnon conspiracy theorists were taking to internet forums and chat rooms in sad desperation, seeing as though their prophecy of an Inauguration Day coup that would keep Donald Trump in power — with the help of JFK Jr. and all manner of other nonsense — was phony and that Biden was sworn in rather than lined up against a wall in front of a firing squad:

It’s always good when people who believe crazy things stop believing in crazy things, especially when those crazy things essentially have hijacked many people’s lives in destructive ways and have sent them on a course of hate. But I am skeptical that whatever is happening on conspiracy theory message boards is actually evidence that anyone is ceasing to believe in these crazy things. At least more than temporarily.

Conspiracy theories, by definition, resist falsification. They are, if anything, reinforced by attempts at falsification thanks to circular reasoning in which evidence against the theory is twisted into evidence of its truth. Soon we will see the temporarily disillusioned QAnon people believe that, actually, Trump and his righteous sword are lulling their enemies into a false sense of security and will be back with even greater than imagined vengeance later. Or they’ll simply take yesterday’s inauguration as evidence that the struggle is more dire than even they themselves believed and that efforts must redoubled in order to help Trump defeat his foes. If anything, this could make these people more dangerous, not less. Instead of waiting for something, they’ll try to spur it into action.

Which is to say that we are not done with the insanity that Trump enabled and encouraged. It may never go away, actually.

Proud Boy leader arrested

A man named Joseph Randall Biggs was arrested in Florida yesterday for his part in the goddamn insurrection. He was charged with obstruction of a proceeding, entering restricted grounds, and disorderly conduct. Biggs is a leader and organizer of the Proud Boys.

During my interactions with the Proud Boys last year, I was struck by just how often they stress, while marching, rallying, whatever, that they’re non-violent and that they don’t break the law. They yell it constantly, claiming they’re better than lefty groups, Black Lives Matter, or whoever they’re casting as their enemies because, unlike those people, they’re orderly and peaceful.

That was always bullshit, of course. The Proud Boys appeared alongside other hate groups at extremist gatherings like the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville and their basic message — white, western men are superior to all others — is itself an implicit invitation to violence against all people who are not white, western men.

Still, it’s nice to see this piece of garbage popped for doing exactly that which he and his ilk claimed they did not do. It’s also hilarious to see them now turning on Trump because they perceive him as “weak.”

Dignity

Last night my podcast partner Mike Ferrin asked Steve Goldman and I which song Bob Dylan would do if he had been part of the inauguration. My gut reaction was that because Dylan is nothing if not weird he’d do something long and random like “Highlands” or else perform a stark and turgid version of one of ballads about death and mortality. It’s not that Bob can’t read the room. It’s just that he’s not particularly interested in doing so.

Steve’s answer was the best one, though. “Dignity.” As I said above, what happens matters, not how it happens. Acts, not words. Results, not style. Still, there is something very nice about, once again, being able to say that I have some hope. Thees is something nice about there being someone in charge who, however flawed he may be, seems to mean well and will at least endeavor to make things better. There is something nice about the prospect of dignity being restored to America.

Have a great day, everyone.