Cup of Coffee: November 7, 2024

Good morning. Welcome to Free Thursday:

The exclamation point at the end of my usual good morning greeting will eventually return, but I’m not feeling it at the moment and probably won’t feel it for a while. I hope you understand.

I’m going to do my best to stumble through today. Some of the news discussed below was really Tuesday’s or yesterday’s news but it felt stupid to post about Shohei Ohtani’s shoulder or Skip Schumaker or whatever the hell yesterday so I axed it. I’m back to it today, more or less. Today’s Other Stuff is not going to be like the usual thing, but it’ll morph back to normal in a day or two as well.

Over the near-to-mid term I’ll probably be writing way less granularly about politics than I usually do. Doom-posting five days a week is not good for my mental health and I suspect it’s not good for yours either. I’m not going to ignore what’s going on in the world — however disillusioned I am at the moment, I care too much for that — but we (meaning: I) have to accept that no amount of breathless editorializing will stop what’s about to happen. Thousands of words a day on that kind of stuff from people like me won’t change a thing and I’m not going to be in the business of using my obsessions or my rhetoric to exhaust you, to make you anxious, or to get anyone’s hopes up in the face of what’s to come. My hope is that when I do touch on political things it will be done in a manner which contextualizes what’s going on or which serves as a vehicle for this community to understand it better and cope with it all rather than serve to rile everyone up or to make things feel hopeless.

In 51 years of life I never failed to find my voice and I don’t expect to fail to do so now. But the world just changed in a pretty shocking and substantial way and like everyone else I’m going to be feeling around for it for a little while. We’ll get through it together, though. Our small communities are all we have left anymore and this one is vitally important to me. I owe it to that community to try to do the best I can.

On with the show.

The Daily Briefing

Kyle Hendricks signs with the Angels

Free agent pitcher Kyle Hendricks and the Angels have agreed to a one-year $2.5 million deal with incentives.

Hendricks, who will turn 35 next month, did not make Pouliot’s top-111 free agents list, as he is coming off of the worst season of his career. He went 4-12 with a 5.92 ERA (67 ERA+) as his strikeout rate declined for the third straight year and he walked more batters per nine innings and gave up more hits per nine innings than he ever has. It’s hard to see how he’s not cooked, frankly, but it’s not like the Angels will pay him much money to find out for themselves.

But man, ain’t this the most Angels signing ever?

Padres, Mike Shildt agree to a two-year extension 

This was telegraphed a couple of weeks ago but yesterday it became official: The San Diego Padres and manager Mike Shildt have finalized a two-year extension which will keep Shildt at the helm through 2027.

Shildt led the Padres to 93 wins in 2024, including a 43-19 stretch near the end of the season during which they were baseball’s hottest team. They lost the NLDS to the Dodgers but, to their credit, they played Los Angeles tougher than either the Mets or Yankees did in subsequent rounds.

There’s a lot of talent on the Padres. Shildt should enjoy a lot of winning over the next three years.

Willson Contreras is moving to first base

Cardinals president of baseball operations John Mozeliak said yesterday that Willson Contreras will be moved, permanently, to first base in 2025.

Contreras has caught 774 games and played 52 games elsewhere with just 11 at first base. I’m sure it’ll go great, though.

Contreras has never been a great defensive catcher and, at least in 2023, Cardinals pitchers more or less rebelled, saying they didn’t like the way he called games and otherwise played the position. The fact that that became a public controversy is on the club and the players who didn’t keep it all in-house, but the fact that there was beef about it to begin with spoke to everyone’s lack of comfort with him back there. This past season it was less of an issue because he missed half of it with a broken arm sustained on a backswing so, well, maybe it’s better for him to move to first.

Contreras has three seasons left on his contract and he has a no-trade clause. His bat is still strong — he hit .262/.380/.468 (136 OPS+) in 2024 — so the Cardinals will obviously give him all the chances they can to make this work. Meanwhile, Ivan Herrera and Pedro Pages will likely split time behind the plate.

Mookie Betts is moving to the infield permanently 

In similar news yesterday Dodgers general manager Brandon Gomes said that Mookie Betts will move back to the infield in 2025, though it’s not yet clear if it’ll be at second base or shortstop.

Betts came up as a second baseman in Boston but was moved to the outfield because of the presence of Dustin Pedroia. The Dodgers put him back at second for 70 games and at shortstop for 16 games in 2023. Last season they planned on Betts being the everyday second baseman before Gavin Lux got the yips, so they flip-flopped them. He returned to right field after returning from a broken wrist during the season.

The Dodgers moving Betts to the infield is not really about where he’d best fit, of course, because he’s a superior defensive right fielder, OK at second, and a bit subpar at short. It’s really about the fact that there are far more free agent options who are outfielders this winter than infielders, and they’d probably like a slot for one of them. For Juan Soto if they’re dreaming big but possibly for bringing back Teoscar Hernández or signing someone like Anthony Santander or Jurickson Profar.

Guardians re-sign Austin Hedges

The Cleveland Guardians announced yesterday that they have re-signed catcher Austin Hedges to a one-year deal. He’ll make $4 million, same as last year.

Hedges is easily the worst major league hitter of any significant tenure in living memory, posting a career line of .186/.243/.315 (53 OPS+) in ten seasons. But the guy can catch and frame better than anyone and that’s what brings home the bacon for a backup catcher.

Shohei Ohtani has shoulder surgery

Shohei Ohtani underwent shoulder surgery Tuesday to repair a torn labrum in his left shoulder. The Dodgers initially described the injury as a subluxation (i.e. slight dislocation) which he sustained on an attempted steal of second base in Game 2 of the World Series. Turns out it was more than that. Which tracks given how much obvious pain Ohtani was in and how ineffective he was at the plate for the final three games of the Series.

All that being said, the Dodgers said Ohtani will be ready for spring training and, given that it’s his non-throwing shoulder, it should not affect his ramp-up schedule as he resumes pitching in 2025 either. He might be a bit delayed to start the season at most.

Rangers hire Skip Schumaker for front office role

The Texas Rangers have hired former Miami Marlins manager Skip Schumaker as a senior advisor to president of baseball operations Chris Young. Luis Urueta, who was Schumaker's bench coach with the Marlins, has also been hired as the Rangers’ bench coach. There was a space for that as Will Venable, who previously filled that role albeit with a different title, was hired to manage the White Sox.

Schumaker was assumed to be a hot managerial candidate this offseason but there ended up being fewer openings than expected and those there were — in Cincinnati and Chicago — were filled quickly, so he was left without a home.

His landing in Texas is fairly intriguing in that the current manager, Bruce Bochy, is 69 years old and is entering year three of a three-year contract. Given his accomplishments — the Rangers won the dang World Series last year and has four rings in all — he could obviously stay for several more years if he wanted to, but it’s possible that he and the Rangers have already discussed how long he actually plans on holding the job. If there is some agreement to that end it would put Schumaker in the position to take over at some point down the road.

Not that that’s necessarily what’s happening. It could just be a place for Schumaker to cool his heels until new managerial positions open up within the next year. A lot of managers and executives find little sinecures like that when they’re between things.

Clayton Kershaw opts out but still expects to pitch for the Dodgers

Clayton Kershaw had a player option with the Dodgers for 2025 and given that his health issues over the past couple of years mean that his market is not exactly hot, it was widely expected that he’d exercise the option and come back in an effort to end his career on the field instead of on the sidelines. He declined that option on Monday night, however, and is now a free agent. Not that that was the biggest example of something widely expected not coming to fruition this week.

[Editor: Easy, Craig]

I know, I know.

Unlike the past couple of years when Kershaw was reported to be flirting with his hometown Texas Rangers, he is still expected to re-sign with the Dodgers this winter. It’s being reported that the opt-out was more a matter of renegotiating the terms with the club. Which didn’t exactly work for Gerrit Cole this past weekend, but the dollars for Kershaw are much lower so I presume that the club will, in fact, sign the future Hall of Famer.

Joe Jiménez could miss all of 2025

The Atlanta Baseball Club announced on Monday night that setup man Joe Jiménez had surgery to repair damaged cartilage in his left knee at the end of October. The surgery is expected to sideline him 8-12 months, so he'll likely miss the entire 2025 season. Best case scenario he shows up in the waning days of the season. That must have been some severely damaged cartilage.

Jiménez, 29, posted a 2.62 ERA (159 ERA+) with a strong strikeout numbers in 68.2 innings across 69 appearances in 2024. Given that he handles lefties and righties pretty much the same, he’s been a key late-inning guy for Atlanta, so his loss will definitely be felt.

Injuries killed Atlanta in 2024. They’re getting a head start on a repeat in 2025.

OK, Buster

Andrew Baggarly is at the General Manager meetings and reports thusly on the Giants new head of baseball operations Buster Posey:

My guess is that the actual role of analysts will not change all that much with the Giants. But I’m also gonna guess that the atmosphere and dynamic of the Giants front office under Farhan Zaidi must’ve been insanely toxic for Posey to feel the need to do something performative like that. It’s the president of baseball operations equivalent of Norman Dale measuring the rim height in “Hoosiers” or something.

Other Stuff

What doesn’t work

In the intro today I talked about how I’m going to need to feel my way forward for a bit. And I will. In the day or so since this all hit, however, all I can think of is just how empty and pointless all of the things I and many others have said and done since this nightmare began in 2016 truly were and how I don’t want to get involved in that sort of thing again.

To that end, yesterday I read a pretty useful piece by Daniel Hunter which sets forth several potential ways to deal with Trump’s victory. There’s a lot of good advice in there and it’s definitely worth a read. The thing that jumped out at me the most, though, was something he said not to do, at least in a vacuum:

Anyone who was on social media a lot during Trump’s first term remembers just how frantic and ultimately stupid all of the doom-posting was. The understandable mood of panic led to the emergence of a hell of resistance grifters who did nothing but post engagement bait — a huge amount of which was fanfic at best but which was often misinformation — which ultimately did nothing but make people more anxious than they already were. I have definitely found myself in little fugues of posting or writing DO YOU BELIEVE WHAT IS HAPPENING OH MY GOD stuff, but it was pointless then and it seems even more pointless now. No one can be in crisis mode every moment of every day and anyone who is doing that either has no real life or has an ulterior motive. Best not to get involved with that this time around.

As for the symbolic actions, a march or a demonstration with a specific purpose or focused on a specific issue is fine. Indeed, it’s the essence of protest. But boy howdy were there a lot of them between 2016 and 2020 which amounted to little more than virtue signaling and venting. And yeah, I went to number of ‘em. I won’t be doing that again. Especially if the alpha and omega of it is an hour or two of chanting followed by a brunch which reminds everyone that, really, nothing is going to change and no one doing the marching is really all that affected.

Again, I’m not sure what the way forward is. But it can’t look like what went down eight years ago what has carried over since. We’re past that. We’re long past that.

My Tuesday

On Tuesday I left the house to go vote at around a quarter to ten. I can walk to my polling place and it was a beautiful day so I sort of meandered. As I made my way there I passed a house with the most curious assemblage of voting signs I had seen all fall:

West, who has spent the past couple of years torching his legacy, was originally a Green Party guy who last I checked was running as an independent. Stein, a certified kook and pretty obvious Russian puppet, was the actual Green Party candidate. Oliver is a Libertarian and Libertarians tend to have the temperament of 14 year old boys who have read exactly one book, so yeah, that was quite the grouping. The fact that one house had all three of their signs made it pretty clear that the owner’s support of any of them was far weaker than his disdain for the two-party system, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to hang around and wait for him to come outside to talk to him about it. I imagine that’d be the most exhausting conversation of my life.

There was a decent but manageable line outside of my polling place when I got there. It’s a church, and given how much one of the political parties has coopted and weaponized Christianity I’ve never really liked the fact that Ohio allows churches to be polling places, but at least this church is a pretty liberal one which caters to a congregation with a substantial gay contingent. To an atheist like me the overall vibe of the place is far more community center than place of worship, but I don’t suppose I’m the best judge of such things. Regardless, it didn’t weird me out the way polling places in my two previous neighborhoods — one of which was a Catholic Church and the other a more mainline Protestant kind of place — often did.

The Catholic Church was where I voted when I lived in a decidedly liberal city neighborhood from 1999 through 2004. I hated voting there, but not just because it was a church. Ohio makes no attempt to hide its efforts to suppress the vote in largely Democratic areas and that place used to only have two voting machines for a pretty damn dense precinct. In 2004 I waited there for an hour and a half to cast my ballot, mostly in the rain, with my ten month old daughter in a stroller in front of me. Anna was not at all happy that afternoon. Given how that election went I was not happy that evening either, but that’s obviously been the norm for me on election day more often than it hasn’t, so I’m pretty used to it by now.

Voting was much easier up in New Albany between 2005 and 2023. It’s easy to understand why if you know how Ohio rolls. Rich people live up there. Mostly white people live up there. Until 2020, when New Albany went blue in the presidential race, mostly Republicans lived up there. So of course there were typically a dozen voting machines in that Protestant church. I voted in four presidential elections at that place and I never waited in line for more than five minutes, even if I went before or after work.

Now that I live in a liberal, urban area again I expected to have to wait forever to vote on Tuesday but I didn’t. It wasn’t New Albany-fast as there were only eight machines as opposed to twelve, but from the time I got in line until the time I walked out it was 29 minutes. I’m sure it took longer earlier in the morning and in the evening, but all things considered it was OK. As the numbers came in Tuesday night it became apparent to me that a big part of that was because a hell of a lot of people stayed home who shouldn’t have. As I sit here right now I wish had to wait an hour and a half this time around.

I told myself I wouldn’t doomscroll all Tuesday afternoon but I pretty much doomscrolled all afternoon. At around six Allison suggested that we should unplug and go out to dinner someplace where there were no TVs on. That was a wise idea. We walked to dinner and ate outside for what will probably the last night of the year. Rain came yesterday. The cold will be here soon.

I was happy during dinner and happy on our walk back. My plan was to do some writing and check in with election returns online every hour or two while staying off social media because that’s never a good place to be on election night. Regardless, I fully expected Harris to win. I imagined North Carolina and maybe Georgia going her way early and the pressure being off. I figured Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin would soon follow and that it’d be over by midnight. So much for figuring. As the night went on my anxiety rose. Thanks to some moderately deep dives into various granular trends I knew the game was lost well before anyone called the states which sealed it.

I’ve cut way back on my drinking in the past few months — no big reason; just my changing, middle aged metabolism making the juice way less worth the squeeze than it used to be — and I’m pretty proud of myself for not reaching for a bottle when things began going sideways. Instead I just decided to write the little bit I wrote yesterday and do my best to get to sleep. Not that sleep came all that easily. I tossed and turned and had a pretty on-the-nose dystopian nightmare. Unlike most nightmares, however, there was no relief to be found from waking up.

Have a great day everyone.