Cup of Coffee: November 14, 2024

Good morning! And welcome to Free Thursday!

And away we go.

The Daily Briefing

Hey, you get to pay for another subscription to watch baseball!

Diamond Sports Group announced yesterday that it has entered into an agreement with Amazon Prime Video via which its 16 regional FanDuel Sports Network channels — which used to be Bally’s Sports Network — will be available on the streamer and will allow fans to stream their team’s games locally. The kicker: it will not be included in your existing Amazon Prime package. It will cost extra as an add-on subscription.

The agreement is not exclusive, meaning that Diamond Sports Group can still do streaming rights deals with other partners, the way it recently did with the Cardinals and the Angels, separate and apart from Amazon. All teams broadcast by Diamond without such streaming agreements will be a part of the Amazon Prime thing.

The upshot: if your team is a Diamond Sports team in 2025, if you only had cable to watch your local team’s games before, and if you want to cut the cord, you’ll have to pay the $15/month for Prime, plus whatever the add-on subscription up-charge for your local team will be (TBD). If you want to watch other games you’ll still have to pay for an MLB dot TV subscription which is another $150 a year. And if you want to watch the postseason on ESPN, TBS, and Fox, you’ll still need cable anyway.

In other news, watching baseball never becomes cheaper and never becomes easier. It only becomes more complicated, fragmented, and expensive, and honestly I do not know how people who aren’t super plugged in to this stuff ever find their teams’ games to watch in the first place.

Rangers sign reliever Luis Curvelo

The Texas Rangers have signed righty reliever Luis Curvelo to a one-year major league contract.

Curvelo, 24, was an international signee of the Mariners several years ago, but has never pitched above Double-A. He was pretty great at Double-A Arkansas in 2024, however, posting a 2.57 ERA and a 78/18 K/BB ratio over 66.2 innings of work. Based on a pretty low BABIP it seems that he was hit lucky last year so don’t expect such dominance to continue, but he’s said to have great stuff and strikes out a hell of a lot of guys.

The stuff is not so great apparently, that the Mariners felt it worth adding Curvelo to their 40-man roster, which they would’ve had to do to keep him, but good enough to where the Rangers feel he’s worth a major league deal. Given how bad the Rangers’ bullpen was last year, it makes sense for them to take a flier like this.

Rich Hill would like to keep pitching

Rich Hill is currently pitching for the U.S. in the Premier12 tournament, and Bob Nightengale caught up with him. Hill told him he still wants to pitch in the bigs:

Hill, who will turn 45 during spring training, was effective into his 40s but has not really had a good go of it the past couple of years. He posted an ERA+ of 82 in 32 games — 27 starts — while splitting time between the Pirates and Padres in 2023. Last year he didn’t sign until August, latching on with Boston, but they cut him loose after only four relief appearances.

Hill’s “we’ll know in a month or so” thing suggests that his agents are looking for a spring training invite, but eventually even the guys who aged like fine wine like Hill did for so long come to the end of the road.

Wander Franco assigned court supervision on gun charges

As mentioned earlier this week, Wander Franco was arrested on Sunday after getting into an altercation in which he pulled a gun on someone down in the Dominican Republic. Yesterday he was assigned monthly court-mandated check-ins while he awaits a court date on charges of illegal use and possession of a firearm. He could face three to five years if convicted on those charges.

In the meantime, he goes to trial next month on charges of sexual abuse, sexual exploitation against a minor and human trafficking that could result in a sentence of up to 20 years.

Someone asked me the other day whether Franco could play in the U.S. again and/or whether the Rays have to pay him if he is acquitted on the sexual abuse charges. My answer was that even if he walks he’ll still probably get a lengthy MLB suspension during which he would not be paid. Afterward, one presumes, the Rays will release him — and no one else would be likely to sign him — though the Rays will be on the hook for any money left on the 11-year, $182 million deal he signed before the 2022 season.

The gun charges, however, could cost him even that because they could very well cause him to be barred from entering the United States. If a player cannot clear immigration he’s on the restricted list and cannot be paid. Not that that’s anything approaching the most important thing here.

Fernando Valenzuela’s cause of death revealed 

The Los Angeles County Medical Examiner has determined that Dodgers legend Fernando Valenzuela died of of septic shock. Underlying/contributory causes include (a) decompensated alcoholic cirrhosis of the liver and and nonalcoholic steatohepatitis cirrhosis. Also listed as a significant condition contributing was “probable” Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, which is a rare, rapidly progressive brain disorder. TMZ first obtained the death certificate and reported its contents if you’re interested in that kind of thing.

Sixty-three is too young. RIP Fernando.

Other Stuff

An update on the platform migration

Yesterday I got confirmation that, barring anything unexpected, the newsletter will be transitioning to the Ghost platform beginning on Monday November 25. It should be fully migrated as of November 29. So, basically, the newsletter will go dark the week of Thanksgiving.

The reason this will take a few days is because, unlike the move off of Substack back in January, I am not doing it myself. I am using Ghost’s “concierge” migration service and that process is a bit more deliberate than that of other platforms. Which is good, because back in January there were a decent number of subscription accounts that got missed somehow, which caused me to spend a couple of weeks scrambling to fix things. There are no guarantees in life so I can’t promise that everything will go perfectly this time, but it’s way more likely to go smoothly with the experts handling it.

I’ll be sure to remind you all of this once again some time next week, but know that this battle station should be fully armed and operational, over at Ghost, by the end of the month.

Happy Screaming Partially Muscled Skeleton Day!

Gotta love November 14:

With news like “Trump nominates Matt Gaetz to be his attorney general” rolling in on the regular — followed by all of the chaos that came after it later in the day — that screaming skeleton will be us for the next four years. One hopes that, by the end of it we, like Dr. Jon Osterman, will have figured out how to reassemble ourselves after having our intrinsic fields zapped to oblivion. And that we won’t be uncaring jerks like he was at the end of that process.

Pass the popcorn

We’re barely a week past the election and it appears that some fissures are forming in the Donald Trump-Elon Musk bromance:

The most consistent thing about Donald Trump, throughout his public life, is that loyalty only goes one way. If you associate yourself with him you will, sooner or later, be chewed up and spit out. That has happened to virtually everyone who has ever helped him. Trump has never held the bag and never will and he’s the exact opposite of a Lannister in that he never pays his debts. Well, he does to Vladimir Putin — you can tell that based on who he nominated to lead national intelligence — but he doesn’t pay debts to anyone who does not possess a nuclear arsenal.

And that’s just as a matter of disposition. Like, he’ll do that to people about whom he feels neutral. If, however, he never much cared for you in the first place but associated with you out of necessity, you’re gonna get shut out and/or screwed over even more quickly once you’re no longer needed. That’s because Trump does not like to be reminded that he needed someone and brought them into his circle in a moment of weakness, like he did with Musk when his campaign needed funding. And no, Trump did not care for or respect Musk in the first place. Not even a little bit:

Speaking 100% dispassionately, Trump does very much owe Musk given that Musk (a) spent over a hundred million dollars underwriting the campaign; and (b) turned Twitter into a right wing megaphone that has greatly benefitted the Trump movement. So, on a purely objective level, it would not be right for Trump to wraith Musk like he’s wraithed everyone else in his orbit.

Speaking 100% honestly, however, I would love nothing more than to see Trump tell Musk to take a long walk off a short pier and freeze him out in the most embarrassing fashion possible. I mean, Trump sucks, but at least we elected him and no matter what else happens we’re stuck with him for the time being. I expect him to do great damage to the country and immiserate millions, but if he occasionally humiliates and casts out jackasses like Musk it might help make things more bearable, at least momentarily.

People are abandoning Twitter

Last week I decided that I was done with Twitter. I still have my account and I still post links to the newsletter there because I have a business to run, but I am done posting anything else there, done interacting with people there, and done using it as my means of reading news or anything else.

I didn’t abandon Twitter because any particular person or account did it before me. I made the decision in a single moment of “I just can’t” the day after the election. So too did a hell of a lot of other people:

This past weekend seemed to be a huge tipping point, as I’ve seen my follower count over there nearly triple since Friday. That was boosted by a lot of people creating what they call “starter packs” of accounts to follow. Stuff like “baseball people” or “news people” or “movie/pop culture accounts” or what have you that helps you find people to follow. The big issue when BlueSky first formed — no one knew how to find interesting follows or like-minded fellow users — has basically been solved. I’ll add that another common early BlueSky issue — people who adopted the platform early pretending that they’re God’s Special Children and trying to impose a bunch of unwritten rules on people — has all but melted away. Now there are only two real demands people tend to have of users: (a) do not engage or try to argue with whatever bad faith jerks you encounter, simply block them and move on; and (b) use alt-text to describe posted images. And since both of those are good advice that make the experience better, they’re welcome unwritten rules.

As for the benefits: no bot accounts, few if any right wing trolls. And, in the event anyone you don’t want to hear from does appear, BlueSky’s block and mute functions have actual teeth that basically just cause these people to disappear from your feed and your mentions. The best part, though, is that because BlueSky does not use some algorithm to serve you stuff it thinks you may want — or that it demands that you see — your feed is exactly what you want it to be and no one’s replies leapfrog to the top in way that kills conversation and engagement.

Obviously not everyone needs or wants a social media platform like that. But if you are someone who used to like using Twitter before it went to hell, I strongly recommend giving BlueSky a shot.

“A Militant Atheist’s Christmas Playlist”

Journalist Bill Shea has created what he calls “A Militant Atheist’s Christmas Playlist.” While it’s still just mid-November, here’s why he’s OK with getting into this stuff now:

This is the same reason why Allison and I have started the annual viewing of Hallmark/Lifetime Christmas movies already. Yes, we know they’re mostly terrible, but when everything is fully terrible there are way worse things to have on in the background when you’re farting around and trying to avoid the direness of existence. Plus, it makes me feel smart to watch them because they telegraph the plot resolution within in the first ten minutes. Yeah, I’m lookin’ at you, “Santa Tell Me.” I saw how that was gonna end the moment the premise was established.

Anyway, Bills playlist has a lot of the usual bangers, a lot of the usual cringers, and provides a good excuse to escape into Holiday Season nonsense a bit early, because God knows we need it.

Have a great day everyone.