Cup of Coffee: May 6, 2021

Good morning! And welcome to Free Thursday!

With that business out of the way, let’s get on with it. A lot happened yesterday!

And That Happened

Here are the scores, here are the highlights:

Orioles 6, Mariners 0: A no-hitter for John Means! Viva soft-tossing lefties! Viva guys who don’t wake up in the morning 110% sure they’re gonna win the day every day but who, actually, on occasion, doubt themselves and question their direction! Viva pitchers who go the distance and, in so doing, don’t allow any balls hit harder than a damn 96.5 m.p.h. pop fly that barely cleared the infield! One hundred and thirteen pitches. Twelve strikeouts. A wild pitch shy of a perfect game. Fantastic job, John Means.

Reds 1, White Sox 0: Where in the hell do we begin with this one? I guess we’ll begin with the basics: a rare 0-0 tie after nine innings in the bandbox that is Great American Ballpark, thanks to a strong outing by Dallas Keuchel. Then we’ll skip to the very end, when the Reds won it with a Jesse Winker walkoff single in the bottom of the tenth. That stuff is easy. Making it complicated was Tony La Russa, who was hired because he’s supposed to be some sort of genius but blew this game because he didn’t know one of the rules.

La Russa had double-switched closer Liam Hendriks into the game in the bottom of the ninth inning, taking the number five spot in the batting order, which had made the last out in the top of the ninth. When the top of the tenth began, La Russa sent Hendricks out to be the runner on second. Except . . . he didn’t have to, because per MLB rules if the spot that made the last out of the inning — the spot that normally supplies the automatic runner in extras — is occupied by a pitcher, the team has the option to use the player before THAT in the batting order as the runner. The idea, of course, is to keep pitchers from being base runners, where they could hurt themselves. So, per the rule, La Russa could’ve put Jose Abreu out on second, but didn’t.

Why? La Russa after the game:

He had to be hipped to the rule by a reporter who asked him about it.

Here, not only did La Russa risk injury to his team’s closer, but it impacted the inning, as, with Hendricks on third due to a fielder’s choice, La Russa had Leury García steal second. Normally the catcher might have to concede that steal, because he doesn’t want the runner on third to break for home, but in this case Reds catcher Tucker Barnhart didn't hesitate to throw to second, knowing that Hendricks was unlikely to run. Garcia was out at second. Oh, La Russa made another mistake too. The batter up during that steal attempt was the weak-hitting Billy Hamilton, once again allowed to hit for himself in a high-leverage situation. This is just the latest of many times La Russa has allowed that to happen this season, for reasons only he can explain yet rarely does in anything approaching a satisfactory manner.

The Hendricks-on-second thing was the crazy bit, though. How does La Russa not know that rule? Even if he doesn’t, how does no one else in the dugout, be it a coach or a player, not know it and not tell La Russa that? My suspicion, actually, is that many people in that dugout knew that, but no one felt comfortable countermanding a La Russa order. Partially because he’s supposedly a genius, but mostly because his whole deal for the past 40 years has been about being prickly if second-guessed.

Whatever the case, La Russa has messed up and messed up a lot so far on the young season and has done nothing to prove wrong those of us — and those in his own front office — who believed that his hiring was a terrible mistake.

Rockies 6, Giants 5: Logan Webb shut out the Rockies for the first three innings, but that fourth was a lulu. He struck out the first Rockie he faced but then the next five went single, single, walk, single, walk. That made it 2-2. Webb then struck a guy out and walked a run in before he was lifted. All three of the guys on the sacks at that time belonged to him and reliever Matt Wisler allowed two straight singled that allowed all three of ‘em to score. 6-2 Rockies, after which they held on. Worse than the loss for the Giants: Buster Posey left the game early with a tight hamstring. There will no doubt be updates later today.

Cardinals 4, Mets 1; Mets 7, Cardinals 2: Pauls Goldschmidt and DeJong homered to lead the Cards to victory in the first one to lead the Cards to victory and Tomás Nido and Jonathan Villar homered in the second one to lead the Mets to victory. Nido said this after the second game, which featured a lot of Mets backups playing:

That has some real “Roland Weary naming him and the two scouts during the Battle of the Bulge ‘The Three Musketeers’” energy. If he dies from gangrene, everyone else on the Mets should be on the lookout for Paul Lazzaro. Laser beam injuries hurt. Just sayin’.

Anyway, the first game extended the Cardinals’ winning streak to six games the second one ended it at six games. One of the things about doubleheaders is that they don’t let you have any time to savor anything that happens in game 1. Of course, time is a relative concept and not everyone experiences it the same way. And if you think death is a terrible thing, then you have not understood a word I've said. 

Marlins 8, Diamondbacks 0: Five Miami pitchers combined for a five-hit shutout. Which, good for them, but a dominant bullpen game is, in my personal view, like a good dry hump. Interesting? Absolutely. Better than a ton of other things one could do? Absolutely. But c’mon, whadda we really doin’ here, folks? Adam Duvall homered and drove in four and Miguel Rojas was 2-for-3, drove in two, and scored three times. At least he’ll tell all his friends at school today that he scored. Boys always talk.

Atlanta 5, Washington 3: Marcell Ozuna hit a grand slam in the third and William Contreras went deep in the fourth. The Nats got two homers too — Yan Gomes and Trea Turner — but neither of those was a salami so pfft to them. The Nats walked Freddie Freeman to get to Ozuna just before that salami, but given how Ozuna had been going coming into that at bat, it was a perfectly reasonable move. Atlanta has hit three grand slams in the past four games.

Yankees 6, Astros 3: Giancarlo Stanton homered and knocked in four runs, Aaron Hicks hit a tie-breaking single in the eighth inning, and the Yankees won their fifth in a row. They have Gerrit Cole going today, too, so a sweep is definitely on their minds. That’d be way more satisfying to me if I was a Yankees fan than getting a chance to yell “Fuck Altuve!” down onto the field, but I suppose that one can enjoy both. Stanton, by the way, has 17 hits in his last six games, and has raised his batting average from .205 to .314 in that span.

Phillies 5, Brewers 4: Didi Gregorius hit a grand slam to help stake the Phillies to a 5-0 lead that became only 5-4 by the fifth. Could the Philly bullpen hold a one-run lead for multiple innings? It’s not something you’d bet the good china on, but here they did, with four relievers combining to put up four and a third innings of scoreless relief.

Tigers 6, Red Sox 5: Jeimer Candelario hit a tie-breaking three-run homer in the 10th inning and Detroit needed all three of those runs as the Sox rallied for two in their half, falling just short of a comeback. Michael Fulmer closed out the game and got the save. The day before he started for the Tigers, gave up four runs in only two-thirds of an inning and took the loss. He became the first pitcher in Tigers history to start one day and earn the save the next day. I would’ve guessed John Hiller had done that once, maybe back in the late 70s when Ralph Houk would fart around and start him sometimes, but nah.

Cubs 6, Dodgers 5: The Dodgers have done very little to dignify themselves over the past couple of weeks, but getting swept by the current iteration of the Chicago Cubs — two days in a row via walkoffs — is fairly notable as far as indignities go. This one was kinda exciting at least, with the teams trading runs in the tenth inning to keep the extra baseball going. In the eleventh Matt Beaty put L.A. up by one with a fielder’s choice but Matt Duffy singled in a run to tie it back up and then Anthony Rizzo hit a walkoff RBI single to end it. The Dodgers lost for the 13th time in 17 games since their 13-2 start. They at least get to go play the Angels next who, heading into today’s game, have lost four straight.

Rangers 3, Twins 1: Hyeon-Jong Yang made his first start — after a couple of relief appearances — in America and it wasn’t bad. He struck out seven of the first nine batters he faced and eight overall in three and a third, allowing one run on a Mitch Garver dinger. The bullpen pitched more innings, though, and they shut out the Twins for five and two-thirds. The Rangers scored their runs on a fielder’s choice, a wild pitch, and a sac fly. But hey, offense is hard to come by for everyone this year.

Cleveland 5, Royals 4: The Clevelands were down 4-3 heading into the eighth and got a José Ramírez homer there and a Josh Naylor homer in the ninth to come from behind. That helped them overcome a rocky-for-him Shane Bieber start in which he allowed four — three earned — in six innings and struck out fewer than ten batters for only the second time on the season. Cleveland has taken the first three in this four-game set and they have come from behind in all three of ‘em. Maybe trying to reassemble the old 2014-15 bullpen was a good idea for Kansas City, but I wouldn't ask too much of them, I’d venture. You can’t repeat the past, Old Sport.

Padres 4, Pirates 2: Yu Darvish allowed two while pitching into the sixth and Jake Cronenworth hit a go-ahead, two-run single in the sixth to give the Padres the win in the three-game set. Victor Caratini, Darvish's personal catcher, homered in the third. I’d like to have a personal something, but I really have no idea what it’d be.

Rays 3, Angels 1: Shohei Ohtani allowed one hit in five shutout innings, and he did this:

Still, it takes more than one man to win a game, and the Angles, on most nights, only have one mad putting up anything decent, be it him or Trout. Their only offense was a bases-loaded walk and the Rays’ only offense was a three-run homer from Brandon Lowe in the seventh, and three-run homers are better than bases-loaded walks. Tampa Bay has won four straight and goes for the series sweep today.

Blue Jays 9, Athletics 4: Teoscar Hernández hit a tiebreaking RBI single during Toronto's five-run eighth inning. Earlier in the game he hit another run-scoring single. Or do we call the one in the eighth “another” RBI due to when they occurred in time? Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe one day we’ll all meet strange creatures that are two feet high, and green, and shaped like plumber's friends with suction cups with hand-topped shafts that are extremely flexible, usually pointed to the sky, with eyeballs on the hands. And maybe these strange creatures will have many wonderful things to teach Earthlings, especially about time. 

I dunno. All I know is that Ramón Laureano and Matt Chapman homered and Sean Murphy had two hits and two RBI for Oakland, yet they still lost. So it goes.

The Daily Briefing

Joe Votto fractured his right thumb

Reds first baseman Joey Votto was batting in the bottom of the fourth inning against the White Sox yesterday when he was hit by a pitch from White Sox starter Dallas Keuchel. He shook his hand in pain as he jogged to first base, stayed in the game for the fifth, but was replaced in the field for the top of the sixth inning.

Then the bad news came: after the game it was reported that he has a fractured thumb. A specific timeline of how long he will be out will likely come later, but manager David Bell said after the game that, “it’s going to be weeks for sure.”

Votto has struggled in the early going, but losing a hitter of his caliber is a big, big blow for the Reds.

Angel Hernandez admits that he “basically guessed” on a call

On Tuesday night, during the Cleveland-Kansas City game, Royals catcher Salvador Pérez came up to the plate in the third inning with runners on second and third and hit a fly ball to deep right. The ball went between center fielder Harold Ramírez and Right Fielder Josh Naylor. Ramírez went to catch the ball but it bounced off the tip of his glove and landed on the warning track.

Whit Merrifield was on third base and scored. Andrew Benintendi, however, was on second base and ended up getting caught in between second and third because Angel Hernandez, who was umping at first, signaled that the batter was out, apparently believing the ball was caught even though it wasn’t. His signal, in fact, is what caused Benintendi to stop, thinking he needed to retreat to the base, rather than advance. After Hernandez's blown call and Benintendi getting tagged out, the umpiring crew got together and awarded Benintendi third base.

Here was Hernandez’s explanation:

Viva replay, I guess. And kudos for getting the call right eventually. But as Cleveland manager Terry Francona said after the game . . .

Hernandez gets off easy, I suppose, given that all the attention given to people who fucked up moved on to La Russa yesterday afternoon.

The Astros reportedly complained to MLB about fans taunting them

Yesterday morning Stephanie Apstein wrote a story for Sports Illustrated covering the Astros’ Tuesday night game against the Yankees in New York. It focused on the fan taunting and jeers which, obviously, was the big off-the-field story of the game. In it she talked to a fan who was not allowed to bring in a big Oscar the Grouch/trashcan costume into the ballpark:

I’m guessing this will be pushed back on today by MLB or the Astros or someone and couched in terms of “player safety” or the potentially distracting nature of costumes or props or something. And, obviously, if fans are doing things that might put players at risk that’s a problem. But nothing I’ve seen suggests any fan taunting of the Astros has risen to that level and, for now, I am mostly trying to get my head around the Astros complaining about this.

The Astros made their bed here. No matter what Astros fans want to say about selective enforcement and no matter how one might parse statistics to show that, actually, the sign-stealing didn’t help all that much, it’s absurd to think that opposing fans are not gonna be hostile about this. Especially given that none of the players were punished for it. A fun fact also worth noting: if you get arrested for stealing something, things like “a lot of other people were stealing things too!” and “actually, the person I stole from was still very rich after I stole their stuff and my life wasn’t benefitted all that much” do not constitute valid defenses, so miss me with those stale-ass excuses, Astros fans.

To be fair, later in the article some Yankees fan behavior is described that is, to say the least, over-the-top. There was some mean and nasty stuff said, players who were not part of the sign-stealing like Zack Greinke were taunted over it and, of course, some Yankees fans had no problem cheering on an abusive piece or crap like Domingo Germán before and during the game. It’s a bad look and anyone who goes after people’s families or otherwise loses perspective about such things need to take a look in the mirror and ask themselves what they’re doing with their lives.

But of course that sort of irrationality is the very nature of fandom. Expecting it not to manifest itself like this in the wake of one of the biggest scandals in the history of professional sports is patently unreasonable and comes off as whiny as hell. The Astros are not victims by any stretch of the imagination, no matter how much they and their fans want to make themselves into ones.

Blue Jays to once again shuffle off to Buffalo

It was announced yesterday that the Toronto Blue Jays will return to Buffalo for a on June 1. 

The Blue Jays have been playing at their spring training facility in Dunedin, Florida, but it’s gonna get unbearably hot and rainy there soon — they’ve already had rain postponements this season — so if they can’t go back home to Ontario, they at least want to get as close as they can.

With the Jays playing in Lehmen Stadium, their Triple-A club which normally plays its home games in Buffalo will play in Trenton, New Jersey. The team that played in Trenton — the Thunder — were deaffiliated in the minor league contraction and became members of the MLB Draft League, whose season is supposed to start on May 24. I asked out loud on Twitter where they will play and got this response:

And, per the DoogieStardust mentioned in the above tweet, when playing in Trenton the Buffalo team will play as the “Trenton Thunder” but on the road they remain the Buffalo Bisons. So that’s not at all confusing.

Drew Robinson makes the Giants’ Triple-A roster

On April 16, 2020, former Rangers, Cardinals, and Giants utilityman Drew Robinson attempted suicide by shooting himself in the head. The gun fired, went through one eye, through his sinus cavity, and just past his other eye. For the next 17 hours he remained in his apartment, slipping in and out of consciousness — and at times showering, sleeping, and even brushing his teeth — with a bullet hole in his head, debating whether or not to try to shoot himself again or to call 9-1-1. He called 9-1-1 and he survived.

Last Winter Jeff Passan of ESPN published the story of how Robinson arrived at the fateful moment and how he has worked to recover since. Part of that recovery involved taking BP and working out with the hopes of playing baseball again, despite the fact that he lost an eye in the suicide attempt.

Yesterday it was announced that Robinson made the Opening Day roster for the Sacramento River Cats, the Giants’ Triple-A team. They open their season tonight in Las Vegas, Robinson’s hometown, and the place where his life nearly ended.

Damn.

You can get a free ticket for Yankees or Mets game if you get a vaccination

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced yesterday that, starting May 19, the Yankees and the Mets will give away a free ticket to anyone who gets the Johnson and Johnson vaccine at the ballpark. Vaccinated people can also sit without social distancing in certain sections.

I am all for the “give people stuff to entice them to get vaccinations” thing. We shouldn’t have to do that, but given that we’ve demonstrated that we’re a country in which a frightening amount of people act only out of convenience and self-interest, it’s probably the best chance we have to up the vaccination numbers.

Where is the lie?

President Biden, circumventing Congress’ war-declaring powers and unilaterally dropping truth bombs:

Other Stuff

Brave Litle Belgium

A farmer in Belgium has single-handedly redrawn the border with France. He did so by moving stones marking the boundary between the two countries had moved seven and a half feet inside the French border because he was pissed that it got in the way of his tractor’s path.

After he did this, the United Kingdom declared war on the farmer per an 80 year-old treaty and, eventually, 20 million people died in a grotesquely mechanized dance of death, with very little being accomplished apart from planting the seeds of an even more destructive conflict 20 years later.

It all seemed to make logical sense at the time, though.

Brood X

Reading up on the 17-year cicadas which are about to emerge:

Sounds like my first marriage.

Great Moments in Capitalism

A restaurant in Columbus is closing its doors because, even though it weathered the pandemic, it cannot attract enough workers to keep the place operating. The owner is blaming unemployment benefits:

Gee, you ever think about, you know, paying people more? Because that’s working for some people. Especially given that we’re still in a pandemic, there are still a ton of people not getting vaccinated and not wearing masks, and restaurant work is still pretty risky as far as that sort of thing goes.

It’s also worth noting that, overall, wages have gone up in the retail and distribution sector of late due to a heating-up economy and fear of unionization drives leading to wage bumps. Maybe those aren’t the greatest jobs on the planet, but working in a restaurant is hard, often thankless work, so paying low wages is a great way to repel potential applicants.

There have been a ton of articles like these, but rarely do they mention what sort of wages the complaining restauranteur is offering. Rarely are there quotes from former employees explaining why they are not willing to come back. Rarely do they do anything approaching a thorough job of describing the very real risks inherent in restaurant work these days (here’s a great one that does touch on those things). I’m guessing the vast majority of those decisions are based on alternative available employment and the fact that workers can make more money elsewhere combined with a wariness to go work in a hot and crowded kitchen, elbow-to-elbow with coworkers, or working for tips in an environment where houses will still be less-crowded than they were before for some time. I’m guessing very few restaurant workers are saying “Pfft, this unemployment check rocks! Screw you, bossman!”

But no matter what is causing all of this, I am most struck by the expectation so many of the people quoted in these articles seem to have that they should be able to run their restaurants as if nothing whatsoever has changed.

Sorry, dudes: there is no God-given right for one to operate a business. If things are such to where you cannot afford to operate it given the prevailing market conditions you do not, by definition, have a viable business. Maybe that sucks, but that's how things are.

Why the Liz Cheney thing matters

I mentioned yesterday that House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has gone after the third-ranking House GOP member, Liz Cheney, because she does not believe the absolutely unhinged propositions that (a) the 2020 election was stolen; and (b) the January 6 insurrection was a trivial matter. These are things, however, that most Republicans in Congress believe right now. Or at least have to say they believe lest they fall out of favor with the part that has decided that its only purpose is to glorify Donald Trump.

Yesterday Representative Steve Scalise, the number two House Republican, joined in the campaign against Cheney, publicly endorsing Representative Elise Stefanik of New York to replace her in the party’s leadership. As far as experience and seniority go Stefanik lacks qualifications for the job, but she does possess blind devotion to Donald Trump, and that — along with a passion for misinformation campaigns — seems to be the Republican party’s guiding orthodoxy.

Which, even if you are not a Republican, is a very, very bad thing. And not just because Republicans may very well regain power in two or four years and we don’t want unhinged and hateful conspiracy-mongers running the government again. It’s bad because, as Charlie Pierce wrote the other day, “we allow ourselves only two political parties and, if one of them is permanently delusional, the whole system goes out of balance.”

It goes out of balance because insanity in one of the two parties forces the whole system in the direction of that insanity. The actions of one party get normalized as merely one of two standard modes, with a midpoint artificially placed in between them. That which is radical -- and everything the GOP has done for over a decade is truly radical, especially their abject denial of basic democratic norms and of basic reality this past election cycle -- is glossed over as just one legitimate position in a polity in which we have, for whatever reason, only made way for two positions at any one time. One of the parties is for a list of straight-forward governmental policies, the other declares that only those who believe that 2 +2 = 5 have any right to govern, and the media and the public at large give us those choices and those choices only, with an implicit imprimatur of approval. And that’s in addition to the very real, present dangers, such as lawmakers in several states justifying new laws that make voting more difficult based on the idea that 2 + 2 = 5 is true.

In such a system, it is extraordinarily dangerous to have people like those currently in control of the Republican party anywhere near power. Once they knock Liz Cheney and any others who refuse to believe 2 +2 =5 out of power, the entire country will move closer to a reality in which that equation is the only one considered to be correct.

“We’re in the bottom of the sixth!”

In light of the number of confirmed new COVID cases in the U.S. falling 35 percent in the past three weeks, Dr. Anthony Fauci was on CNN yesterday and told Wolf Blitzer that the United States was, “in the bottom of the 6th inning” in the fight against covid.

Here’s hoping we’re not about to call in Buck Farmer or Randy Dobnak!

Have a great day, everyone.