Cup of Coffee: November 2, 2023

Good morning! And welcome to Free Thursday:

And of course, congratulations to the Texas Rangers, your 2023 World Series champions!

We’ll talk about that below. And about TV ratings, the Padres taking a loan, practical jokes which don’t make much sense, and the end of standardized coaching contracts.

In Other Stuff the Washington Post drops the ball, a lot of Boomer rock stars are jackasses, Marvel has no idea what to do, and we Party at Dow Zero.

And That Happened

Rangers 5, Diamondbacks 0: It was tight until it wasn’t. Zac Gallen no-hit Texas for six innings. Nate Eovaldi worked out of trouble. Yeah, the Rangers had a two-game lead to the stakes weren’t nearly as high for them, but it was some nail-biting stuff all the same. The three hits Texas strung together in the seventh plated what we now know to have been the winning run but we didn’t know it then and it remained 1-0 into the ninth.

It’s for the best that that one run was enough because if it hadn’t been my heart would’ve broken for Alek Thomas, who Buckner’d that Jonah Heim single and allowed two runs to score. When Marcus Semien hit that two-run homer to make it 5-0 we all knew that was erased at least. The rout was on and we needed to only get through the final half inning in which the Snakes slithered away quietly.

Corey Seager — who went 6-for-23, walked three times, hit three homers, a double, and drove in six won the Series MVP award. It was his second win, having taken home the trophy with the Dodgers in 2020. He joins Sandy Koufax, Bob Gibson and Reggie Jackson as the only two-time World Series MVPs and Jackson as the only one to do it with two clubs.

And now the Rangers join the club of World Series champions. A club that had eluded the franchise since it began play as the Washington Senators v.2.0 back in 1961 and since it moved to Texas in 1972. It was a club that began building a few years ago and built decently enough but which was more than put over the top by some big free agent spending and the masterstroke hiring of Bruce Bochy out of retirement.

People will now start to write narratives about What the Rangers Winning the World Series Means, but I think it’s enough to say that you should collect as many good players as you can, get some adults to run everything, hope for the best, and if you manage to go 11-0 on the road in the postseason, yeah, that’s gonna help too.

Maybe those aren’t deep takeaways but who cares? All we know, all we can ever really know, is what happened. And that it was pretty fun to watch.

Pitchers and catchers report in 103 days.

The Daily Briefing

Ratings

Yesterday the news came out that Games 2 and 3 were the least-watched World Series games in history. I’m guessing 4 and 5 were not much better in that regard.

As I’ve said, I don’t care all that much about that kind of thing but then I saw a media person not affiliated with Fox or MLB lament this fact online, chalk it up to the Rangers and Diamondbacks being boring, non-marquee teams, and THEN say that, even worse for Fox and MLB, the Rangers could end the Series in Game 5, making it a short Series as well.

I’ve never seen the “this restaurant is terrible . . . and such small portions!” joke appear so plainly in in real life, but there it was.

The Padres took a $50 million loan to cover expenses

Evan Drellich of The Athletic reported yesterday that the San Diego Padres took out a loan for about $50 million in September “to address short-term cash flow issues and meet their obligations, including player payroll.”

I’m sure a lot of people are gonna use this fact to make some pretty broad claims about the Padres payroll specifically and player payroll in general, but I do not think anything intelligent can be said about it given what is currently known. A lot of teams draw on lines of credit for short term cashflow. When they do that it could mean something. But it could simply mean that ownership doesn’t want to put its own money to cover common, expected, or otherwise unremarkable short term expenses and would prefer to take a loan which, even with today’s interest rates for common consumers, are likely on pretty damn favorable terms. Drellich’s story is pretty clear about all of that, how it all works, and the broad conclusion I’m taking from the story is that this is not really that big a deal.

As Drellich also notes, however, payroll — particularly the Padres’ payroll — has “become politicized” in the sport so people are gonna draw conclusions which adhere to their priors, particularly if their priors are “baseball teams should not spend a lot of money on players.” I have my priors too, of course — spending money on players rocks — but given that, with the exception of Atlanta, team finances exist in a complete black box, no one other than Padres ownership can say what the real story is here and, with a few anonymous quotes in the story notwithstanding, they obviously have no interest in doing so.

If I wanted to go all conspiracy theorist with this — and I know a lot of you sickos like it when I do — I’d note that, at present, the Padres are presumed to be selling off players this winter in an effort to get payroll down to $200 million or so. The idea of dealig Juan Soto has been talked about a lot. They’re also losing some big names to free agency which they may not wish to replace with comparable talent. If any or all of that happens, fans won’t be super pleased. If I were a team owner who wanted to slash payroll and not catch hell for it, it’d be pretty useful for me to have a story out there that would cause people to assume I’m in financial distress.

Back in reality, though, I can’t really figure this as anything weird or telling. The Padres are a business and businesses often draw on credit lines. To the extent people draw big conclusions from this, they’re doing it, necessarily, without knowing everything. Myself included. Thus is the nature of Major League Baseball finances.

What was the joke, exactly?

Fox Sports ran a story yesterday about how, even though he wasn’t pitching, Jacob deGrom helped the Rangers in their quest to win the World Series. How he was still there and how he was still being inspiring and helpful as both a resource and as a morale booster and everything. Which, fine. You’ve read that story many times before and, as far as such stories go it’s fine.

I’m sort of struggling with the anecdote which opened the story, though. It was about how, on a team flight, Max Scherzer and his teammates were playing cards. Scherzer was sick with a stomach bug at the time. So . . .

So the joke is on Scherzer because he was sick, someone in close quarters with him asked him to wear a mask because of it, and he did so? That’s the “gotcha” here? That Scherzer is a considerate guy who heeded someone’s request that he do some minor thing to keep his teammates from getting sick too? “Haha, what a fool,” only truly weird damn people would say.

The second part of the “prank” featured deGrom telling Bochy about it and convincing him to go up to Scherzer and pretend to be an anti-mask freak who was angry at Scherzer for wearing as mask on the flight. At least that part — putting someone in an awkward situation — is the usual stuff of pranks, but it’s still geared toward Scherzer being the butt of a joke for being a decent and considerate person. It’s like an “I Think You Should Leave” sketch or something.

Ballplayers, man. They’re so cool to watch play. But I really don’t wanna think too hard about what most of them are actually like.

MLB gets rid of standardized contracts for coaches, managers, and scouts

Evan Drellich reported early yesterday that Major League Baseball and its clubs will no longer use uniform employee contracts for managers, coaches, trainers and salaried scouts. Until now the contract terms applicable to a coach or a scout from one team was the same as those on another team due to standardized paperwork. Going forward clubs will draft contracts for their own employees.

Drellich says that the reason for the change is to insulate the league from liability. If, for example, a coach on one team filed a contract lawsuit, they could automatically include the league as a defendant given that the league drafted the contract terms. Alternatively, MLB has been subject to an increasing number of antirust lawsuits and class actions and removing uniformity could help insulate the league from such suits.

This could make things better or worse for team employees, really. On the one hand, a club could seek to strong-arm certain employees into worse deals they might’ve had under the uniform contracts if they feel they have the leverage to do so. On the other hand, it’s also possible that clubs could use their new power to draft contracts to retain or attract employees. Of course given how much baseball owners actually hate the free market, they’ll still probably try to cut down on the latter even if they’re good with the former.

One other possibility that Drellich does not raise is the possibility for humor. I mean, it’s pretty safe to say that not all clubs will pay for or follow good legal advice when they begin freelancing on contract language. At some point one of them is gonna overplay their hand in a shortsighted effort to save a buck or control employee movement and they’re gonna draft terms that will lead to some fun, weird employment lawsuits in a few years. Can’t wait for that.

Bobby Knight: 1940-2023

They say that if you can’t say anything nice about someone to not say anything at all.

Other Stuff

BlueSky Codes

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The Washington Post drops the ball on Mike Johnson

For some time now people who think intelligently about the media and politics have been imploring the major publications to focus on the substance of politics and policy — the stakes involved — and not to simply report on the horse race aspects of it all. To note that the current state of American politics is not a competition between two political parties each of which want the same thing (impliedly a better world for all) but which simply disagree on the means of achieving them. To eschew the notion that the stakes of the current political moment are significant enough that casting political actors and parties as dueling spin campaigns which simply seek to win the next news cycle with no greater implication to it is journalistic malpractice.

Occasionally that message gets through and, as such we’ve started to see some better reporting because of it. Sadly, however, we still see far more of the lazy and naive horse race auto-piloting which helped get us where we are now.

A classic of the genre appeared in the Washington Post yesterday, headlined “Democrats quickly seek to make Speaker Johnson a boogeyman: The party has begun painting House Republicans’ new leader as ‘MAGA Mike’ but may face a challenge given his low profile and quiet tone.”

The entire article is about whether or not Democrats can, via messaging and fundraising and stuff, turn Johnson into Nancy Pelosi-like lightning rod. Maybe yes, maybe no, the paper concludes, after devoting the entire article to an analysis of election cycles, media buys, and Johnson’s image, appearance, age, and the sense Americans have about him personally given the fact that he’s a newcomer to the national stage. In this it’s an article which concerns itself solely with making readers feel savvy/cynical about how political messaging works and cares not a single lick, beyond what it might mean for vulnerable Republican Congressmen, about the implications of the most powerful legislator in the world being an anti-democratic white nationalist anti-science climate denier who wants to criminalize homosexuality.

Responsible journalism would acknowledge that since only a few thousand people around Shreveport, Louisiana actually vote for Mike Johnson, his national image, persona and his popularity are mostly immaterial. Responsible journalism would use his elevation to speaker as a means of explaining how, while Republicans prefer people to assume that Johnson’s extremist views are rare outliers, they represent the official position of the GOP in every way that matters. I mean he is, by definition, the leader of the party in Congress so there is no way that extremism is not emblematic of the party as a whole, thereby giving it maximal salience in the national political conversation. Yet we get stuff like “Johnson, for all his hard-line positions, is a newcomer with an affable personality.” Yes, that is a line that actually appears in the piece.

The New York Times actually gave us something like that yesterday, though it had to come from a guest essayist rather than their political reporters or in-house editorial/op-ed folks. From the Post, in contrast, we get celebrity journalism-style “who IS Mike Johnson” stuff and an examination into the work of image-making rather than matters of important public policy. It’s an abdication of actual journalism. The Washington Post ought to be ashamed.

Some Boomer rock stars have become reactionaries and the Los Angeles Times is ON IT

The Los Angeles Times has a story about how Boomer era rock and roll titans such as Eric Clapton, Van Morrison, Roger Waters, and Rolling Stone’s Jann Wenner have all staked out public positions of late which are not exactly in keeping with the popular conception of the 1960s rock and roll ethos:

As a flip response I’d ask where the L.A. Times has been on this as the figures they mention and several others have spent years aging into retrograde and reactionary dinosaurs. I mean, Clapton outed himself as a flat-out racist d-bag when he was just 30 years old. But it’s actually deeper than that.

The rock gods of the 1960s and 1970s did a pretty great job of talking the talk of progress, equality, and open-mindedness but far, far fewer of them walked the walk and among those who did even fewer still do today. Some of them simply aged out of those values and, like a lot people our parents’ age, became increasingly cranky, selfish and/or conservative as they grew older. A great many of them, however, were never all that enlightened in the first place. I mean, you could fill a truck with rock and roll biographies and memoirs in which artists who spent their days recording songs about peace, love, and equality spent their nights being jackass misogynists who only cared about when the next check would arrive.

This is not some singular shot at the Classic Rock folks, of course. Almost all pop subcultures become strongly associated with a certain set of values to which only a few committed core members of the culture genuinely subscribe while everyone else goes along with it all for various reasons before they ultimately abandon it. Flower power and the counterculture became a brand pretty damn quickly after it reached critical cultural mass, but so too did punk rock, heavy metal, and grunge and a hell of a lot of people only superficially adhered to the prevailing ethos for commercial reasons. Not every edgy band in 1978 was full of anarchists. Not every 1980s guitarist with big hair spent his nights downing Jack Daniels in strip clubs with only hedonism on his mind. Not every flannel-clad rocker was a disaffected and sensitive soul who cared only about his artistic integrity. It’d be just as odd if the Los Angeles Times wrote an article asking why representatives of those genres no longer held up the stereotype as it is for it to ask why someone who, in the 1960s, “made striking changes socially and morally and artistically” — to use Jann Wenner’s term — is no longer doing so today. It’s such a silly inquiry in my mind.

When guys like Eric Clapton, Van Morrison, or Roger Waters start acting like giant flaming jackasses, my first thought is “huh, those guys must be giant flaming jackasses.” Not “oh noes, what hath become of our precious culture?!” They were likely giant flaming jackasses when they recorded “Fresh Cream,” “Moondance,” and “Dark Side of the Moon” too. There are a lot of giant flaming jackasses in the world. Some of them even have a lot of talent. It happens. As always, we are what we do.

Marvel has no idea what to do

I recently talked about the issues Marvel is having with its TV series. And yeah, those issues are serious. I gave up for good on “Loki” in the middle of the most recent episode because I realized that if the people making it have no idea where the story is going and why, why should I spend my time trying to figure it out? It’s just terrible. Which is nuts for a mark like me to say. I cannot imagine what more casual MCU fans must think.

The movies are a mess too, of course. As I wrote a couple of weeks ago most of the post- “Endgame” movies have been forgettable at best, muddled and downright bad at worst. The new Captain Marvel movie comes out in a week or so and, given how disjointed the trailers look and how there is almost zero buzz about it, it’s hard to even care.

Against that backdrop, Variety published a story yesterday in which, in addition to chronicling the issues with the Marvel product in the past couple of years, it cites sources who say there have been talks at Disney about bringing back the original Avengers for another movie. Meaning that they’d revive Robert Downey Jr.’s Iron Man and Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow among other things in order to make it work. Maybe that’d lead to a good flick. After all, one thing that has become very clear since “Endgame” is just how much the likable star power of Downey, Johansson, Chris Evans and the other original heroes carried the day back then. But it’s also the case that getting the band back together rarely works out too well in movie franchises. Or with bands for that matter.

I suppose I’ll wait and see, but I’m getting pretty close to assuming a world view in which the MCU ended with “Endgame” and everything else has been some sort of fever dream. Which, now that I think about it, is probably how the committee writing a new OG Avengers movies would begin things.

Party at Dow zero

A few years ago I made a playlist called “Special Bulletin” which features songs that arose out of the early-to-mid-1980s nuclear paranoia which itself arose out of the end of Détente and the increased saber-rattling and outright brinksmanship of the Reagan Era. Most of those songs dealt with the existential angst all of that created, either directly, through dark gallows humor, or through sheer, helpless nihilism.

As far as I can remember, no songs on that playlist were about what World War III would mean for money managers or how our index funds might be imperiled if Ronnie didn’t talk to Russia, but that was all like 40 years ago and times were much simpler then. There is a lot more investor money floating around these days, however, and The Economist would like us all to know that, in addition to Earth’s rivers running red with the blood of millions, World War III would have a material negative impact on the markets:

My friends: I would like to tell you that this article does not contain the sentence, “. . . even if investors expect a major war, there is little they can do to reliably profit from it.” I’d like to tell you that. But sadly I cannot. Because it does.

Now I’m mentally flashing forward to next fall when Biden runs an updated version of the LBJ “Daisy” ad except, instead of a little girl, the countdown starts off and the camera zooms into the eyes of an innocent hedge fund manager, cut down in the prime of his arbitraging by those who do not appreciate the tragedy of investors being unable to reliably profit from armageddon.

Have a great day — and a great offseason — everyone.