Cup of Coffee: May 20, 2021

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Can’t have too much of a good thing! Although, maybe there can be too many no-hitters? We’ve certainly had a hell of a lot of those lately. Let’s start talking about that . . . right now.

And That Happened

Here are the scores. Here are the highlights

Yankees 2, Rangers 0: There is a segment in “Twilight Zone: The Movie” where a woman encounters a young boy who, via special powers, makes it so that every show on TV is always a cartoon, everyone in his family caters to his every whim, every meal is a birthday dinner, and every plate at that meal is full of ice cream, candy apples, potato chips, and hamburgers topped with peanut butter. Basically, the kind of thing you could imagine a young boy conjuring up if he had the power to conjure up anything he wanted. The kicker: his family, such as it was, was basically trapped in a prison of this every day celebration and the boy himself, having gotten everything he thought he wanted, was woefully unhappy.

I’m not saying we’re quite there with no-hitters yet, but it is getting a little ridiculous now. It’s a little less eventful-feeling. Reaching for the superlatives and the historical comps is an exercise that is becoming a bit more rote.

Which is not to say that Corey Kluber, who tossed the season’s sixth official no-hitter — seventh if you count Madison Bumgarner’s seven-inning job — is not worthy of our praise. One hundred and one pitches, nine strikeouts, and a walk with zero hits allowed is something he and Yankees fans will remember forever. But we literally did this yesterday. And five (or six) other times already in a season that is less than two months old. The record for no hitters in a season is seven set in 1990, 1991 and 2012. Unless something changes, that’s gonna be broken by Sunday.

It could be worse, of course. There’s also a segment in “Twilight Zone: The Movie” in which three of the actors were killed by an out-of-control helicopter during filming and actually died in real life. There was also a bumper in which we in the audience had to endure Dan Aykroyd. Too much of a good thing is way better than that.

White Sox 2, Twins 1: Lucas Giolito allowed only one run on two hits while striking out 11 over eight innings. Adam Eaton and Leury García each knocked in a run. Nelson Cruz homered for the Twins. In addition to the victory, no White Sox player attempted to frag Tony La Russa like he was Braxton Bragg or something, so that was an added victory.

Padres 3, Rockies 0: Given all the high-profile injuries lately, I’m guess Padres fans cringed when they saw this, from Fernando Tatís Jr., in his first game back after missing eight games after testing positive for COVID:

But then, because Tatís was OK, and because he homered and went 4-for-4, I’m sure they enjoyed it. They also enjoyed Jake Cronenworth hitting an inside-the-park home run and Joe Musgrove striking out 11 in seven innings. They have certainly enjoyed the fact that the Padres have won six straight and nine of ten. Here’s that inside-the-parker from Cronenworth for which, really, Rockies right fielder Charlie Blackmon should be given an assist:

Giants 4, Reds 0: Kevin Gausman gave up only one hit over six strong innings and Buster Posey drove in three via a double in the ninth for a little late breathing room. Between Gausman’s outing here, Logan Webb’s gem on Monday and Anthony DeSclafani’s strong outing on Tuesday, the Giants are just spoiled rotten with good pitching of late. Two of which came from guys, in Gausman and DeScalafani, who were freely available to anyone as late as November and December last offseason.

Marlins 3, Phillies 1: Trevor Rogers keeps his strong season going, picking up his sixth win and lowering his ERA to 1.74 after pitching one-run ball into the eighth. Brian Anderson homered — on his birthday no less — and Adam Duvall and Jazz Chisholm Jr. each drove in a run. Philly has lost three of four.

Rays 9, Orioles 7: Baltimore built up a 5-0 lead after two innings, but then things got interesting. Randy Arozarena hit two home runs, drove in four, and stole a would-be homer off the bat of Pat Valaika with a sweet catch at the wall. Mike Brosseau also homered, and Ji-Man Choi singled in a run in the eighth to break a 6-6 tie and help the Rays to their sixth straight win.

Atlanta 5, Mets 4: Atlanta blew an early two-run lead, tied it back up in the eighth, and then Ronald Acuña Jr. won with a walkoff homer in the bottom of the ninth. Better it end that way than via a sustained rally, because if the latter occurred the club would be encouraging fans to do the Tomahawk Chop. Which, as I discuss down in the Daily Briefing, Atlanta (a) still does; and (b) is worse than it was before given that they acknowledged that it was racially insensitive during the 2019 NLDS.

Red Sox 7, Blue Jays 3: The Sox enjoyed a five-run first inning thanks to homers from Alex Verdugo and J.D. Martinez and got two others later from Kiké Hernández, and Christian Vázquez. That was plenty of cushion for Garrett Richards, who tossed two-run ball into the seventh.

Nationals 4, Cubs 3: Juan Soto hit a monster blast off the right field scoreboard:

Thing went 421 feet according to whatever it is that measures such things, but he should be awarded 50 extra feet for the pretty to-the-knee swing. He also had a single. Max Scherzer labored to some degree but he has given up just four runs over his last four starts and the Nats got strong relief from Kyle Finnegan, Daniel Hudson and Brad Hand. “Strong relief” and “Washington Nationals” hasn’t gone together too much in the past few years, but it still can happen.

Cardinals 8, Pirates 5: Jack Flaherty allowed two runs on four hits while striking out seven in six innings and working around four walks to pick up his MLB-leading eighth win on the season. The Cards scored five runs in the second inning to give him breathing room. Paul Goldschmidt had three hits and drove in two. The Cardinals are 5-0 against Pittsburgh this season. 

Cleveland 3, Angels 2: Aaron Civale pitched seven strong innings, allowing only two runs, Jake Bauers homered in the fifth to tie things up at two, and Josh Naylor drove in the tie-breaking run on an infield single in the sixth. Shohei Ohtani labored with somewhat reduced velocity and that had everyone following along online sorta freaking out as the game was happening, but after it was over — he moved to right field so he could get more at-bats in the game — he said he was just feeling a bit sluggish and didn’t have any health problems. So, whew. He as 1-for-3 at the plate and gave up two runs in four and two-thirds while striking out five while on the mound.

Royals 6, Brewers 4: Milwaukee took a 3-2 lead after six, but the Royals struck for two in the seventh and two in the eighth to sweep the two-game series. Jorge Soler hit a homer to tie the game. Nicky Lopez bunted home the go-ahead run. If the right one don’t get ya than the left one will.

Astros 8, Athletics 1: Zack Greinke allowed one run on four hits and didn’t walk a batter over eight strong innings to pick up his fourth win on the year. He had the lead before even throwing a pitch thanks to José Altuve’s leadoff homer. Yuli Gurriel drove in four runs via a pair of two-run doubles and had four hits on the night.

Dodgers 4, Diamondbacks 2: The Dodgers rallied late, scoring not just one but two runs on Will Smith's pinch-hit sacrifice fly in the seventh, thanks to Josh Rojas dropping the ball in right field. Those two were the tying and go-ahead runs. Mookie Betts followed with a ground-rule double. L.A. has not been dominant of late, but they have won seven of eight. Helps when the other team hands you one like this.

Tigers 6, Mariners 2: Tarik Skubal struck out nine in five innings and Harold Castro went 3-for-5 and drove in three to give the Tigers their third straight win. They’ve won three of four, in fact. Wait, make that seven of nine. Actually, it’s eight of ten too, but let’s just leave it at seven of nine, OK?

The Daily Briefing

La Russa really needs to stop talking

Here’s Tony La Russa before yesterday’s game, after being asked about whether his comments on Tuesday evening critical of Yermín Mercedes might not have been well-taken by his players:

I guess La Russa doesn’t have Instagram. Or Twitter, where Lucas Giolito was quoted yesterday saying “we all support Yermín. We all love home runs here. That’s it. We’re going to move on.” La Russa also added the following:

I’m not sure what the definition of “enough runs to win” in baseball is, but I watched a Mariners game when they came back from ten down just a few years ago. In 2009 there were two teams that came back and won games they were trailing by ten. I’m not saying it’s common. I’m not saying the Twins poised a risk of coming back from the 11-run deficit they faced when Mercedes hit that homer, but there’s no clock and no mercy rule in baseball. And that’s before you talk about what so many of us have said since La Russa started yapping about this on Tuesday: that once the other team decides to make a joke of the proceedings by bringing in a meatball-throwing backup catcher to pitch, all bets are off.

That’s what White Sox pitcher Lance Lynn said on Tuesday. Specifically, he said “there are no rules” when a position player comes into the game. Asked about that after he claimed that there was no one in his clubhouse contradicting him, La Russa said “Lance has a locker. I have an office. I don’t agree.”

It’s La Russa’s team. He can do what he wants. But he couldn’t do more to humiliate and alienate his own players if he tried.

Atlanta is still doing the Tomahawk Chop

Flashback to October 2019, just before Game 5 of the NLCS. That’s when Cardinals reliever Ryan Helsley, a member of the Cherokee Nation, was asked by a reporter how he felt to pitch in Atlanta when the sound system blared drumbeats and 40,000 fans waved foam tomahawks and did a “war chant” like some racist caricature of Native Americans in a 75 year-old movie. You know, the infamous Tomahawk Chop Atlanta fans have done at the encouragement of the team for around 30 years now.

Helsley, not surprisingly, said he didn’t care for it and found it disrespectful. And then something unexpected happened: the Atlanta club acknowledged Helsley’s feelings on the matter and made the decision not to distribute the foam tomahawks for that game. The move was rather shocking, coming as it did after years and years of the team and its fans insisting that the chop wasn’t racist but, rather, was merely benign fan exuberance. But, hey, it’s better to do the right thing late than never at all.

I and many others suspected that, since the team had acknowledged that the chop was offensive and insensitive to Native Americans, that they’d stop encouraging fans to do it on a permanent basis. I mean, once you’ve acknowledged that, you cannot go right back to doing it, can you?

Apparently you can:

From what I understand they still aren’t handing out the foam tomahawks, but they’re clearly playing the drum music, flashing encouragement on the scoreboards and, if you look closely when it pans over, they’re showing the image of a giant tomahawk on the big JumboTron. It’s quite clear that the team is encouraging the crowd to whoop it up.

If it had chosen to, the team could’ve stuck with that whole disingenuous “it's just fan spirit” stuff forever, and no one would’ve done much more than continue to roll their eyes. But the moment the team acknowledged that it was racially insensitive to encourage fans to do the chop when Ryan Helsley was facing them, it could not go back to doing it anymore and hope to retain even a shred of plausible deniability. Yet here they are, in 2021, still doing it. I guess it’s because Ryan Helsley wasn’t there during this game. I guess they’re operating with the same logic and moral compass as someone who makes a point not to tell racist jokes in front of a Black coworker but thinks it’s still totally cool to tell them to their white buddies.

As I have written in the past, there is no way for the Atlanta baseball club to prohibit fans from performing the gesture and raising the cheer which the club encouraged for 30 years. Fans will, no doubt, continue to do it for years. I have long suspected, however, that if the club stopped with the drums, and the scoreboard prompts eventually it’d die down and become far less prominent a part of the ballpark culture in Atlanta. It’d recede into the same level of an occasional “Let’s go [team]” chant, occasionally initiated but never dominating the proceedings.

But nope, the team wants to see this continue. Even after it acknowledged, two years ago, that it’s disrespectful to do so. Which makes it even worse.

An additional note on the Spencer Turnbull no-hitter

Yesterday, in talking about Spencer Turnbull’s no-hitter, and earlier today in the Yankees recap, I talked about how, even if we should celebrate them, we have to acknowledge that the rash of no-hitters have a lot to do with baseball being broken these days, what with pitching greatly outclassing hitting for a number of reasons.

I still believe that’s a factor, but one of you mentioned this to me yesterday, and it’s a much better point:

True: four of five of the no-nos have come against Cleveland and the Mariners, and both of those teams have gone cheap, for purely financial reasons, with the problem being particularly notable on offense.

Just another way baseball is broken.

Other Stuff

J.D. Vance makes another right wing social media play

J.D. Vance, who has spent a few years trying to portray himself as an aw-shucks, sensible, friendly conservative who is palatable to the left and the right, is making a huge investment via his venture capital firm into Rumble, a right-wing video platform that is making a play to become the leader among alternative social-media channels which appeal to those with views so extreme they’ve been banned from Twitter and Facebook. This is not new for Vance given that, as I have mentioned in the past, he is a close adviser to Rebekah Mercer and her company Parler, which has been the right-wing extremist’s social media platform of choice to date.

No one ever seems to ask him about these things, though.

Sorry, crypto-dudes

Seems that the crypto market crashed a day after I turned my daughter’s viral map into an NFT. Sorry, everyone. On the bright side, if you want to buy my daughter’s map, crypto-bros, it’s way cheaper now than it used to be. Buy on the dip, as the kids say!

Suspects oppose investigation

In what can only be called a shocking turn of events, the very same people who have been implicated in planning and supporting the January 6th insurrection are opposed to a fact finding investigation into the January 6th insurrection. Who could’ve ever guessed that would happen?

Oh well, I supposed that spared us the absurdity of all of the Republicans dressing up in hot dog suits.

You get what you pay for

A couple of weeks ago I went on a rant about how businesses which can’t hire enough workers to fill out their staffs while claiming “no one wants to work” actually just need to pay people more. As part of that rant I linked a story about an ice cream parlor in Pittsburgh that simply raised all wages to $15 an hour.

So, how’s it going? (note: it’s a video)

Funny how that works.

There’s a push on in Republican-controlled states to slash jobless benefits, with the rationale being that people would rather draw unemployment than work and that making unemployment harder would fix that. That’s pretty ridiculous given that even the enhanced federal unemployment checks don’t represent a long term livable wage and given that, at most times in recent history, our employment rates have been really, really high.

People want to work. They just don’t want to get locked into low-paying jobs with crap benefits if, indeed, there are any benefits at all. And that’s especially true now when child care and schools are still on a pandemic footing in many respects, making it even harder to justify low-paying work. Having even a little short-term latitude to hold out for something better is a good thing. The private sector being incentivized to entice workers with higher pay, rather than force them to sign on out of desperation, is also a good thing. I mean, until Reagan came along we all generally agreed that it was better for everyone if workers could afford to, you know, live above subsistence level.

The idea that workers making a decent wage is death for business is pure propaganda. Like, literal propaganda, floated by places like the U.S. and state and local chambers of commerce, whose mission is to help deliver maximal profits to businesses and casting workers as the enemy.

Places like that ice cream shop are proof of it.

Bye-Bye Darwin’s Arch

Here’s one to get your over-size brain around:

The top of the rock formation known as Darwin's Arch, in the Galápagos Islands, collapsed on Monday. Natural erosion was cited as the cause.

There are all these people bragging about how they’re survivors, as though that’s something very special. But the only kind of person who can’t say that is a corpse.

Carson/Letterman/Leno/etc.

Yesterday I shared that great clip of Charles Grodin on the Johnny Carson show. That led to a discussion in the comments about Carson’s undeniable talent and that of his successors Jay Leno (direct) and David Letterman (spiritual and probably preferred).

Obviously this topic is decades old now, and the current era in which talk shows are primarily designed to create viral video content as opposed to standing as actual, cohesive shows, makes the merits of the hosts far less important than it used to be, but it’s one that still interests me. Not so much for re-litigating the battle for the “Tonight Show” throne in the early 90s, but for what it says about how TV production — and normal workplace dynamics — works in general.

A thing I don’t think most people realize is that the decisions networks make when it comes to on-air talent -- and I've seen this first hand in sports TV, but it applies across the board -- are based first and foremost on who will cause the network and the producers the least amount of hassle. There is an obvious baseline of competence required, but in the end they prefer those who will be boringly competent and predictable in a way that will not disrupt production, cause memos to be sent, cause extra meetings to be required, and lead to unwelcome press inquires. They want the matter of talent "sorted" and for the other parts of production -- ad rates, scheduling, technical stuff, production staffing -- to be as predictable as possible as well. In the end, TV production is more like manufacturing than show business, and the reliability of inputs is paramount.

There are limits to this of course -- if someone is so bad that it causes the audience to disappear, that's a problem -- but they'll take bland and average over interesting and brilliant, because you can plan ahead with bland and average better than you can with interesting and brilliant. It also helps if your bland and average host or talking head knows which camera to look into without being told and can tease tomorrow’s show in a way that makes people want to watch it. There are countless other things like that which, while fairly irrelevant for the viewers, are important to the network.

While almost everyone on the planet would agree David Letterman was more talented than Leno, there were always gonna be way more meetings about Letterman. There was always a question about whether he would upset some suit way up the corporate ladder. There were always going to be questions as to whether his ironic detachment was going to distract from his promo of tomorrow evening’s episode of “Quantum Leap” or offend some southern affiliate owner at a cocktail party. NBC knew that Leno was not as funny or culturally relevant, but they also knew that they didn’t need Letterman’s level of funny or cultural relevance as long as he handled that stuff smoothly and a long as they had a great prime time lineup leading in most evenings. And yes, I think that would’ve been the case even if Leno had stayed behind Letterman in the ratings, at least as long as the gap wasn’t too big. In the event, of course, Leno’s ratings eventually and consistently exceeded Letterman’s, which says something else about the relative importance of brilliance and critical assessment as opposed to bland predictability.

Most people don’t work in TV, of course, but these sorts of considerations apply to more of your workplaces than you may think.

I worked with some brilliant lawyers who made clients nervous sometimes, and their shelf life was not as long as the steadier, less-brilliant, but still-reliable lawyers in the firm. All of you have some experience with workplaces where super talented people didn’t make it as far as you figured they should’ve because the metrics applied to advancement were very different than you imagined them to be. Personally, I’ve been on both sides of that dynamic at various jobs at times, and I always did better in the eyes of my bosses when I was doing worse work, qualitatively speaking. Probably explains why life has funneled me into a place where I only work for myself.

Anyway, just a thing I think about a lot.

Have a great day, everyone: