Cup of Coffee: June 9, 2022

Good morning! And welcome to Free Thursday!

Today we check in on the further adventures of Dane Dunning and Packy Naughton. I probably have more fun writing those than you do reading them but I kinda don’t care. Sometimes you just gotta do things for yourself.

Also: All-Star balloting has kicked off, Joe Maddon has sounded off, I spend a great deal of time talking about crime and our perceptions thereof, I implore Democrats to call Republicans’ bluff when it comes to blaming mass shootings on mental health, and we take a look at a college dorm where the dilly weed is not allowed.

[Editor: “Dilly weed?”]

I’d say “yeah, I said it,” but in this case someone else said it and I’m merely quoting. That good enough for ya?

[Editor: Look at you pretending to be a reporter. Maybe one day you’ll not screw up internal quotation format]

I don’t pay you to mock me.

[Editor: You don’t pay me at all].

Touché. Let’s get on with it.

And That Happened

Here are the scores. Here are the highlights:

Red Sox 1, Angels 0: Every Angels player walked up to a Nickelback song in this game. They did so because so because they hoped it might shake things up. It didn’t work, and the Angels have now lost 14 straight. They’ve been shut out in the last two of those and in three of the last six.

Culturally speaking we have moved past the thing in which we reflexively say “Nickelback sucks!” because we realized a few years ago that that sort of judgment is a personal one not a valid authoritative and overarching assessment of objective quality. The Angels, on the other hand, suck. That’s OK to say.

And say what you want about Nickelback, but at least they had some hits, which is more than you can say about this bunch.

Guardians 4, Rangers 0: Dane Dunning gave up four runs in the first three innings. After he left, no one scored.

In this it was not unlike when Dunning and his sometimes paramour Lee Francis allegedly — allegedly! — ran a brothel out of the Hacienda Arms Apartments on the Sunset Strip. Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, and Errol Flynn were said to be some of their biggest customers, though their specific clientele was never definitively identified. Either way, everything was jake as long as Sheriff Biscailuz and his men were paid to look the other way. The problems began in 1948 when Francis was arrested by a rookie deputy who didn’t know any better and the press got the story before Biscailuz was able to head off the heat. By the time it was all said and done and the details were splattered all over the pages of the L.A. Daily News half of the department had resigned, Francis was cooling off in Tehachapi, and Dunning — who Francis protected for reasons known only to her — was hard up for money once again. Work for The Dane was hard to come by after that but good times with working girls for the men of Hollywood was even harder to come by thanks to the business at the Hacienda Arms going belly-up.

Dunning leaves, no one scores. Same as it ever was.

Rays 11, Cardinals 3: Packy Naughton lost a lot of fights in his middleweight career, but there was only one in which it was speculated that he took a dive. That came against Lulu Perez at Madison Square Garden back in 1954. It was all very circumstantial, of course. Naughton was a 6-5 favorite in the days leading up to the fight. On the day of, however, some bookmakers saw a big swing that made Perez the favorite to the tune of 4-1. That caused a bunch of ‘em to take the fight off the boards because the action was too hot to handle. In the event, Perez floored Naugton three times in the second round, the third of which came on a wicked uppercut. Packy didn’t even look like he was trying to defend himself. After the fight Packy’s cornerman offered some rebop about how he had been suffering from an undiagnosed spleen condition, thus explaining his sluggishness against the younger Perez, but in a 1979 exposé in Sport Magazine it was revealed that he took $16,000 from a distant cousin of Joe Profaci to hit the canvass early. Naughton sued for libel but lost. It ain’t all that hard to figure.

As for this game, Naughton got the start and got knocked out in the second. As is the case with Dane Dunning, the more things change the more they stay the same, man.

Tigers 3, Pirates 1: Back when interleague play begin in the 1990s, Major League Baseball designated the Pirates and Tigers as each other’s “rivals.” It was one of a handful of super contrived rivalries that existed solely because rivalries were needed for scheduling purposes — there were designated “rivalry weekends” — but it never made any sense, of course. Before the advent of interleague play I don’t think these two teams ever faced one another, even in non-spring training exhibition play, since the 1909 World Series. They had to have someone though, and they were the last two teams in this vague vicinity of the country without dance partners. I wonder sometimes if anyone — even a single person — took the “rivalry” to heart. I wonder if someone bought some Pirates-Tigers rivalry t-shirt or came up with reasons to hate the other team as a means of fueling it. Has to be someone, right?

I should note that I’m writing this from the perspective of a person who just learned that Brentford and Fulham are rivals and who is trying to process it. Because even if it’s a legitimate, longstanding rivalry — I presume it is — to a newbie like me who doesn’t know anything, it feels fake in a weird way and I’m trying to decide how I’m going to pretend to hate Fulham next season when they face off against the Bees for the first time in Premier League play. Alas.

Oh, the game: Daz Cameron knocked in a couple and Alex Faedo and four Tigers relievers combined to allow one run on four hits and strike out 13 Pirates.

Royals 8, Blue Jays 4: The Royals knocked out Blue Jays starter Yusei Kikuchi before the end of the first inning, finished that frame up 3-0, blew that lead, but then rolled from there in a rare offensive outburst for these guys. The win, just the sixth in their last 21 games, was nice. Having the Angels around to take the heat off is nicer.

Mariners 6, Astros 3: Cal Raleigh and Ty France both homered as the M’s take two of three. It’s the first time they’ve won a series in Minute Maid Park in four years.

Marlins 2, Nationals 1: Sandy Alcantara continues his run of dominance, tossing nine shutout innings. He didn’t get the win or the shutout because his mates couldn’t score either, but a Willians Astudillo RBI single in the tenth tied things up at one and a Jesús Aguilar single that saw La Tortuga sprint home and roughly flop in for the walkoff run gave the Fish the game. I’m too lazy to go read why Don Mattingly did not have someone pinch run for Astudillo down at second when he represented the winning run. I can only assume that every other available Marlins player was maimed in an industrial accident between the ninth and tenth innings. Gonna just assume that they all, simultaneously, got their hands mangled in a hydrostroke gear-shaper.

Atlanta 13, Athletics 2: Atlanta rallied from an 0-2 deficit with 13 unanswered runs to give them their seventh straight win. The A’s, meanwhile, have lost eight straight and 11 of 13. Like the Royals, they’re super happy the Angels exist.

Twins 8, Yankees 1: The hero journey of Nestor Cortes was always gonna have to go though the “tests and adventures” stage, as all hero’s journeys do. In his case, rather than getting caught by some goblins in the Misty Mountains or getting knocked unconscious by Tusken Raiders it was just a matter of gettin’ beat up by the Twins on a night when he didn’t have his best stuff. There’s still time for him to cross the threshold, though.

Dodgers 4, White Sox 1: Tony Gonsolin is now 7-0 after tossing three-hit ball over six innings and dropping his ERA to 1.58. Will Smith and Cody Bellinger homered for the Dodgers.

Phillies 10, Brewers 0: Aaron Nola pitched eight shutout innings, Bryson Stott went 4-for-4 with a home run and double, Bryce Harper, Rhys Hoskins and Odúbel Herrera also homered, and Kyle Schwarber added four hits, two of them doubles. Six straight wins for the Phillies.

Diamondbacks 7, Reds 0: Snakes starter Merrill Kelly allowed just one hit over six shutout innings while Christian Walker hit a two-run homer and Josh Rojas and Jordan Luplow added solo shots.

Padres 13, Mets 2: Jake Cronenworth homered, doubled, singled and had five RBI, Jurickson Profar drove in three runs and scored three, and Manny Machado had two RBI doubles. The Padres take their second in a row against the best team in the NL and win the series.

Giants 2, Rockies 1: Charlie Blackmon booted a Luis González single to right that allowed the Manfred Man to score the winning run as San Francisco walks it off in ten. Mike Yastrzemski had three hits and Thairo Estrada added an RBI single for the Giants.

Cubs vs. Orioles — POSTPONED:

🎶Tell me what you're thinking babyYour heart's beating faster than mineAnd I know something's going on in your lifeYour life (your life)

You were the girl I wanted to cry withYou were the girl I wanted to die with

And you were the boy who turned into the manBroke my heart and let go of my hand

Our bed is emptyThe fire is outAnd all the love we've got to giveHas all spurted outThere's no more bloodAnd no more painIn our kingdom of rain🎶

The Daily Briefing

All-Star balloting is up and running

Fan balloting for the All-Star Game began yesterday.

The important thing to remember in all of this is that the point of balloting is not to pick the top players in each league for the Midsummer Classic. That’s a side effect. The real purpose is to direct as much internet traffic as possible to the Chevrolet-sponsored All-Star ballot.

In order to pump up those web impressions for the league’s sponsors, fans can submit up to five votes per 24 hours during the first phase of voting, which ends on on June 30. Which means that if you don’t submit 110 ballots during that time we’re gonna start to question your commitment to Chevrolet, MLB, and Sparkle Motion.

After the first round the leading vote-getter in each league will get a starting position in the game and will bypass the second round. In the second phase of voting the top two finalists at each position — top six for outfielders — face off in balloting that runs from July 5 through July 8. Any players not in the top-2/6 after that round will be killed.

*holds hand to earpiece*

I’m sorry, I misunderstood. Players who do not make the team in the final round will not be killed. They will get a nice four-day vacation with their loved ones and don’t run the risk of having to pretend to look happy if they win the All-Star MVP Award and are given a car that they probably would never choose for themselves regardless of who was paying for it. That has to be stressful. “Oh, a Camaro! Wow!” exclaims the man who has two Bentleys and a Lambo in his garage at home.

The All-Star Game will be at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles on July 19. I will be on an airplane en route to London as the game is being played. Enjoy yourselves, everyone. Let me know how the awarding of the Camaro goes.

Joe Maddon was for analytics before he was against them

I missed this yesterday, but not long after the Angels fired Joe Maddon, he spoke to Ken Rosenthal of The Athletic and called out Angels general manager Perry Minasian to some degree while looking askance at analytics:

A lot of people criticized Maddon for this yesterday — and maybe he’s worthy of some criticism here — but I wonder if, however inartfully he’s putting this, he doesn’t have something of a legit beef. Not with analytics as such. The whole “there’s too much analytics these days” stuff is basically parody at this point. But perhaps he has a point in terms of how analytical information is communicated within the Angels organization.

Let’s remember, after all, that when Maddon managed the Rays he was considered the perfect analytics-based manager in a lot of ways. He had all of the old school baseball bonafides suggested by his lengthy resume but also, he seemed anyway, to work very well with the Rays’ extremely analytics-heavy front office. There wasn’t much beefing about it I recall anyway. The same thing happened in Chicago where Theo Epstein’s front office and Maddon’s dugout never seemed to come into any sort of conflict. Did Maddon suddenly get old and crotchety once he made it back to Anaheim to the point where he’s now lashing out at analytics, or was it a matter of the way in which analytical concepts are communicated to the field staff there being way more messed up than it was in his previous managerial stops?

Yeah, Maddon mentions “the industry” and paints with a broad brush when it comes to all of this, so maybe he has become old and crotchety, but I can’t help but wonder if he’s really reacting to the specific case of the Los Angeles Angels and, out of frustration and “I don’t give a crap anymore” venting, he’s lazily applying it to the industry as a whole.

Talking about Rethinking Fandom with the Bay Area and Sacramento SABR chapters

On Tuesday night I joined the Dusty Baker-Sacramento and Lefty O’Doul-Bay Area SABR chapters for a discussion of my book, Rethinking Fandom. It was 10pm my time which is horrifyingly late for me, but adrenaline and a periodically visible glass of Evan Williams got me through it. Check it out here.

Other Stuff

When it comes to crime, feelings rule

There’s a strong narrative out there which has been building for some time — but which seems poised to truly take over the next several months of political discourse — in which the biggest problem in America is crime. The notion that it’s out of control, that it’s taking over our cities and that addressing it should stand head and shoulders above every other priority out there.

The most important part of this narrative, politically speaking, is the notion that it’s a Democratic problem. That liberals and progressives have caused this alleged crime epidemic and that only repudiation of their agenda and their candidates will solve it.

It’s no surprise that Republicans are pushing that because Republicans blame every bad thing that happens on Democrats. What is every bit as predictable, however, but what is still so disappointing, is that a great many Democratic candidates have accepted this frame and have chosen to campaign with tough-on-crime messages in order to try to outrun it. It is not the first time and will not be the last time that Democrats fight battles on Republicans’ terms. Maybe one day it will actually work, but I kinda doubt it. Democrats absolutely never learn when it comes to this kind of stuff.

Maybe I’d feel differently about this if this was a problem born of Democratic policies and missteps, but there’s no evidence for that. Not that you’d know it by reading almost any newspaper.

Yes, the violent crime rate — particularly the murder rate — has spiked in the past couple of years, but this is not some problem unique to cities and states which are ruled by Democrats. Indeed, the increase in crime has happened basically everywhere. Eight out of the 10 states with the highest murder rates voted for Donald Trump in 2020. The murder rate in the 25 states that went for Trump is, on average, 40% higher than that of states that voted for Joe Biden. When you boil it down to cities, sure, you’ll see a lot of Democratic-led places with increased violent crime rates, but there’s nothing specific about Democratic policies — as opposed to the realities of urban existence — that causes that to be the case.

As Paul Waldman of the Washington Post noted the other day, there were 131 murders in Jacksonville, Florida in 2019, with that figure rising to 144 in 2020, after which it fell to 109 in 2021. In Fort Worth, Texas there were 71 murders in 2019, 115 in 2020, and 118 in 2021. These were historic highs. Those cities have roughly the same population as San Francisco but San Francisco had 41 murders in 2019, 48 in 2020 and 56 in 2021. Jacksonville and Fort Worth both have Republican mayors and Republican chief prosecutors and they have received zero national attention and Republicans there have not been called out as failed leaders with failed policies which have led to crime spikes. San Francisco has, however. That city is dominated by Democrats, however, and its newly-ousted prosecutor, Chesa Boudin — more on him in the next item — has become a national news figure whose criminal justice reform agenda has been cast as proof that liberal policies are disastrous failures. It doesn’t take a genius to grok that the reason for that is Republican-driven cultural warfare that has been lapped up by a press corps that Republicans always seem able to lead wherever they want it to go.

Not to say that violent crime is not, in fact, a problem. Of course it is. I’d argue, however, that it is not a problem primarily — or even secondarily or tertiarily — born of city-level criminal justice policies or initiatives. Rather, I’d argue that it’s a function of a larger societal breakdown spurred on by national and state tax cuts, program cuts, and austerity measures all of which were exacerbated, at warp speed, by the pandemic. People are desperate. Stress is at an all-time high. Resources available to help the desperate are harder to find than they ever have been. Oh, and the nation has been utterly flooded with guns and the removal of restrictions on their ownership and use. You don’t need to be a genius to do that math.

It’s not just the violent crime rate that is fueling this growing political narrative, of course. Property crimes have not spiked anywhere near the way murder rates have but they have gotten outsized media coverage in the past year or two. Homelessness, which is not a crime — at least not yet — is often spoken of hand-in-hand with actual crime in this political narrative. As is the case with violent crime rates, I think there is a much stronger case to be made that those things are the products of our nation’s profound housing crisis and our Gilded Age-levels of income inequality than they are Democrats’ policies and rhetoric when it comes to arresting, prosecuting, and sentencing people. To the extent both of those things have become problems it’s because of conservative policies and conservatives’ refusal to acknowledge them in a genuine, as opposed to an opportunistic way, let alone effectively address them. Yet again: it’s Democrats who are called to answer for all of this.

The thing is, I don’t know that the facts matter anymore, at least not as far as this year’s elections go. The right-wing framework in which all crime is the fault of the left — even where the left has no sway, and even if crime is not as bad in places controlled by the left — has firmly taken hold. The media has almost uniformly eaten it up and, increasingly, it has become conventional wisdom. Here I’m not talking about just conventional media wisdom or what talking heads or Fox news addicts say. I mean in the minds of normal, everyday, non-cable-news-poisoned folks.

By way of example, neither my dad nor my brother are crazy people. Neither of them are as plugged into politics as I am, but both of them are pretty open-minded dudes who tend to think fairly progressively about most issues, as a matter of disposition, when they put thought to them. Neither of them watch Fox News, listen to political talk radio, or otherwise subject themselves to right wing propaganda. Both of them, however, have completely eaten up the idea that crime is out of control.

In the past few weeks I’ve heard both of them voice sentiments about this or that city being “a war zone” or this or that city “falling apart.” Both of them have taken some isolated incident they’ve read about on social media or saw on the local news and have cast it as part of an epidemic. A shooting that took place near my brother’s urban San Diego home has caused him to say things like “you can’t walk outside without hearing gunshots.” A carjacking on a street five miles from my dad’s house has morphed into the entire northeast quadrant of Columbus being taken over by roving gangs of car thieves which make the area so unsafe you shouldn’t even drive there. Both of these assertions are patently ridiculous, but they genuinely believe them.

As I said before, in this my dad and brother are not consciously lapping up right wing talking points. Indeed, neither of them tend to expose themselves to right wing talkers because they tend to dislike and distrust them. But the right wing has laundered those talking points through a compliant and/or suckered media and people who have heard and have believed those talking points have shared them widely on Facebook or NextDoor or what have you. By the time your friends and neighbors are echoing this stuff it has gained a certain credibility, even if that echoing is rooted in baselessness. The cake is baked, I suspect, when it comes to the 2022 election being about electing Republicans to be the white knights who will banish evil from our dangerous and godless cities. I suspect that narrative carries the day and carries the GOP to pretty convincing victories basically everywhere.

In the end, though, I don’t think, that the right wing propaganda and an addlebrained media deserves all the blame here. Sure, the evening news, tabloids, and social media platforms blow up isolated crimes in cities of millions in such a way as to portray them as something more than isolated crimes, but people were saying things “the city has gone to hell/you can’t even walk outside” sentiments long before the Republican party’s modern media apparatus was erected and long before NextDoor existed. People said it in the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s too. The media and politicians are adept at pushing buttons which cause that kind of panic, but there is something in Americans' DNA, I think, that make us pretty damn susceptible to it. That causes us to set aside facts and reason and to react with fear and distrust.

I’m not smart enough to explain what, exactly, it is about us that makes us react like that — racism and cultural bullshit about simple country folk being virtuous while cities are dens of iniquity have a lot to do with it — but I think that almost any non-crime story could emerge and that politicians could say or do almost anything and, despite that, nothing will shake the “we must elect strongmen who will empower cops to crush criminals” narrative. That’s proven to be a winning message almost any time and any place it is given voice in this country and it will be again this fall as well.

What the D.A. recall in San Francisco does and does not mean

As for the specific case of the San Francisco District Attorney I mentioned above. . .

Elections were held in California on Tuesday. One of the most-watched races — though one which affects far fewer people than most races which get national press — was the recall of San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin. That recall was successful. Boudin will be out of office shortly.

There has been a lot of ink spilled over what the recall of Boudin represents but, as is so often the case with local races, the nuances get lost or, sometimes, the point gets totally missed by national reporters who parachute in without understanding the dynamics of a given city, county, or state. God knows I’ve seen that here in Ohio. From what I can tell, that applied with the Boudin recall too.

The broad strokes, as reported by national reporters and commentators, is that Boudin’s recall was a wholesale rejection of progressive criminal justice policies and a warning shot over the bow of any politician who dares speak of liberalization when it comes to that stuff. “If even commie San Francisco says no to you, you’re too extreme for ANYONE,” the thinking goes.

If you read outlets which are better-informed about the locality in question, however, you tend to find that such pronouncements are overly-simplistic. Such as this piece from Joe Eskenazi of San Francisco’s Mission Local.

Eskenazi notes that what people from afar might be saying here — “even far-left San Francisco has rejected far-left criminal justice policies” — misses the fact that Boudin never really had the support of a majority of San Franciscans in the first place, so there was nothing they ever accepted that they are now rejecting. Indeed, he argues, San Francisco’s lefty bonafides are not what most people think they are, at least when it comes to policing and criminal justice policies. Yes, it’s a very liberal city when it comes to a great many things. But most of those relate to things which do not affect the lives of the very white, very wealthy people who make up a very big part of the most expensive city in the country:

Eskenazi goes on to note that the lack of a substantial Black population in the city — “in San Francisco the last Black neighborhood is the county jail,” he says — means that the people most negatively impacted by traditional, tough-on-crime criminal justice policies and most in favor of criminal justice reform are not a substantial part of the electorate. In neighboring Alameda and Contra Costa counties, however, where Black people do constitute a significant part of the electorate and where violent crime has actually spiked, more traditional police-backed, law-and-order D.A. candidates have gotten their clocks cleaned by progressives who believe in most of the things Boudin believes in. No national reporters seem to think it notable when that happens. No one talks about how voters “have rejected tough-on-crime policing” or what have you, for many of the reasons I mentioned in the previous item above.

None of which is to say that Boudin was a popular figure. Indeed, there is no evidence he ever was. It’s simply to note that using an absurdly wealthy city like San Francisco as a barometer for what is a bridge too far is not necessarily a good idea. Because there’s a really good case to be made that San Francisco’s wealth and racial demographics trump the city’s baseline liberalism when it comes to stuff like criminal justice policies (see also housing policy). And that’s before you even get to that business I mentioned in the last section about how we all seem to want to be fearful and pessimistic about these things.

Call the bluff

An article at the always excellent Texas Monthly notes just how hard it is for Republican politicians to coherently address mass violence when the things in which they passionately believe strongly encourage those who are prone to resort to mass violence:

It’s a tough circle to square, that’s for damn sure, so Republicans generally don’t even attempt to square it. As my friend and sometimes podcast mate Lincoln Mitchell wrote for NBC the other day, however, maybe someone should force them to. Or, at the very least, should attempt to get something from Republicans that, at least per their rhetoric, they claim to want:

Lincoln is no naive soul, of course, so he knows that (a) mental illness is not really the reason for our epidemic of gun violence; and (b) he is fully cognizant that Republicans will simply pretend they haven’t been blaming mental illness for all of this and ignore calls for funding to address it. After all, Lincoln notes, cutting mental health funding has been one of Republicans’ favorite pastimes for the past several decades.

But it’d be smart politics to take Republicans at their word and propose massive increases to mental health programs.

The Dilly Weed

As most of you know, my daughter Anna will be going to the University of Vermont this fall. Like a lot of colleges, Vermont has different dorm-based “communities” based on kids’ interests or lifestyles. When it came time to pick a community, Anna chose the “Wellness Community,” which is about healthy lifestyles and, according to its website, “fitness, nutrition, and mindfulness.” Those are admirable things, obviously, but Anna’s primary reason for choosing the Wellness Community is that it is housed in the campus’ nicest, newest, and most centrally-located dorm building. Which, hey, fair.

In addition to fitness, nutrition and mindfulness, the Wellness community is also about abstaining from drugs and alcohol, at least in the dorm building. Like, no one is taking a pledge to not have a beer out someplace — and because it’s Vermont it’s probably impossible to avoid at least a contact high while walking down the damn sidewalk — but the premises are supposed to be clear of it, even if students are 21 or over. Given the state of the law that should actually be the policy everywhere, but those of us who went away to college know how it really works. The idea with the Wellness community is that students actually commit to keeping the place drug and alcohol free and don’t do what we all did and smuggle in 12 packs of Natty Light in our JanSports.

UVM’s Wellness community has existed for about a decade. Back in 2018 CBS News did a feature on it, the upshot of which is “how can a party school like Vermont pull this off?” It’s a fine feature as far as such things go, but I about lost it when I got to the 3:20 mark. That’s when the founder of the Wellness community, a UVM psychiatry professor, referred to marijuana as “the dilly weed.”

As of today I don’t think I’m ever going to not call pot “the dilly weed” again. Even if it makes me sound like a narc.

Have a great day, everyone.