Cup of Coffee: October 13, 2022

A goose egg in Atlanta, an actual goose in L.A., a dead bird on The Big Unit's website, pigeons in the Cincinnati sportsbook, vultures surround Alex Jones, and non-bird words about Egypt and CDs

October 13, 2022

Good morning! And welcome to Free Thursday!

No one’s goose got cooked in NLDS action last night as each series is now even. In off-the-field news an Atlanta reliever went under the knife, the New York media New York media-d, the Reds get a sportsbook, and if you don’t win any money there you can at least try to win $1,000 just by watching baseball movies.

In Other Stuff it was a bad day for Alex Jones but that means it’s a good day for everyone else, Gannett continues to kill local news, there was an interesting crime in Atlanta, Egypt wants its stuff back, and we commemorate the anniversary of the compact disk.

And That Happened

Here are the scores. Here are the highlights:

Atlanta 3, Phillies 0: Kyle Wright pitched six scoreless innings A.J. Minter, Raisel Iglesias and Kenley Jansen closed out the three-hitter with one shutout inning a piece, and Atlanta got three RBI singles in the sixth. This series is now tied, so we’ll get Friday and Saturday games in Philly.

Padres 5, Dodgers 3: Manny Machado homered, doubled and drove in two and Jake Cronenworth homered as well. During the eighth inning a greater white-fronted goose decided to land on the field. Dodgers second baseman Gavin Lux hit a single while the goose was there but then, during a pitching change, the grounds crew removed it after which Josh Hader walked Trayce Thompson and induced a flyout from Austin Barnes en route to a four-out save. So, sorry, no Rally Goose. The Padres even things up and turn this series into a best-of-three.

The Daily Briefing

Tyler Matzek to undergo Tommy John surgery

Reliever Tyler Matzek was a postseason hero for the 2021 Atlanta Baseball Club, but his 2022 was something of a comedown due to a loss of both velocity and effectiveness and he was left off the NLDS roster. Now he’ll have no 2023 season at all as the team announced that Matzek had Tommy John surgery yesterday.

Matzek, who turns 32 next week, was a first round pick of the Rockies back in 2009 but never fulfilled the promise Colorado thought he had back then. After years in the minors and a stint in independent ball, however, he has posted a 2.92 ERA with 156 strikeouts in 135.2 innings since joining Atlanta in 2020. Here’s hoping he has one more comeback left in him.

New York media is gonna New York media

The Yankees won Game 1 of the ALDS. Aaron Judge went 0-for-3 but drew a walk and scored a run. So, a pretty good day all around that I’m pretty sure Judge will take 10 out of 10 times even if he didn’t get a hit.

The headline of Ian O’Connor of the New York Post’s column: “Aaron Judge has more than earned benefit of doubt after rough Game 1.” And it’s not just a weirdly uncharitable headline. In the column O’Connor lauds Judge’s 2022 season and says, “[h]e’s earned some room to breathe and some space to work. If this slow Division Series start happens to extend through Game 2, hey, he’s sure earned the benefit of the doubt.”

I once shared a press box with Ian O’Connor so I know he’s actually seen a baseball game before and knows that sometimes even the greatest players have 0-fers and it’s not a notable thing, but you sure as well wouldn’t know it by a column like this.

Reds get on-site gambling

The Cincinnati Reds have announced a multi-year partnership with BetMGM that includes the latter putting a sportsbook in Great American Ballpark. If they haven’t already shoved a bunch of cameras in Pete Rose’s face in response to this they soon will.

All I wanna know is how BetMGM expects to make money on this thing when no one goes to Reds games anymore.

Wanna get $1,000 for watching ten baseball movies?

The jewelry company Shane Co. is offering $1,000 to “the biggest baseball fan in the world,” in exchange watching what it has decided are “the 10 greatest baseball movies of all time.”

I’ll grant that the list has a few that I’d place in the conversation for the best, but it specifically excludes a movie that many people claim to be the best while containing the two worst baseball movies of all time:

  • “42”

  • “A League of Their Own”

  • “Bull Durham”

  • “Field of Dreams”

  • “Moneyball”

  • “The Bad News Bears”

  • “The Natural”

  • “The Rookie”

  • “The Sandlot”

  • “Trouble with the Curve”

That’s right, no “Major League.” Yet it includes “Trouble with the Curve” which is, bar none, the worst baseball movie I’ve ever seen. Like, I’d watch “Field of Dreams” ten times before watching “Trouble with the Curve” again.

Anyway, if you want a chance for the $1,000, you’ll need to fill out a form that asks you to explain why you should be chosen. The form also asks: “If you could be a part of one team from any baseball movie, which would it be and why?”(the answer, now and always, is Chico’s Bail Bonds; they had fun out there). If you’re selected, you’ll need to write up reviews for each of the ten movies by December 5 to get the $1,000 prize. Deadline for entry is November 7.

Will I enter myself? Hmm . . . maybe. But if I do, I’m not actually gonna watch “Trouble with the Curve.” Rather, I’ll watch “Unforgiven” again and then, in my review, ask why so the old Atlanta scout felt it necessary to murder so many people. This scene was particularly affecting:

Johnny : [after passing on drafting Bo Gentry]  It don't seem real... how he ain't gonna never hit the curveball again ... how he's sitting dead red. All on account of pulling the string.

Gus : It's a hell of a thing, not drafting a man. Take away all he's got and all he's ever gonna have.

Johnny : Yeah, well, I guess he had it coming.

Gus : We all got it coming, kid. Now I’m off to scout more players despite the fact I still can’t see anything, which is sort of a plot point they let drop in a rush to give this movie an unearned happy ending.

The best sports-adjacent logo going

Several years ago I remember reading about how Hall of Fame pitcher Randy Johnson was hired to photograph a Rush tour via his friendship with bassist/singer Geddy Lee. When that happened there were various articles written about Johnson’s photography study and training when he was at USC in the 80s and how he was seriously attempting to turn photography into his second career. I thought that was pretty neat.

We were reminded of all of that when this photo, showing The Big Unit as a credentialed NFL photographer, went viral yesterday:

That’s also pretty neat, but nowhere near as neat as the logo for Johnson’s photography business:

Which, of course, references Johnson’s famous asploding of a bird during a 2001 spring training game. Which, if I remember correctly, Johnson doesn’t like to talk too much about in interviews and things because the experience upset him. But hey, we suffer for our art. And for the promotion of our art.

Other Stuff

Alex Jones gets bodied by a Connecticut jury

Alex Jones and Infowars’ parent company, Free Speech Systems, must pay close to $1 billion to the family members of eight victims of the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary and an F.B.I. agent who responded to the scene of the 2012 massacre, which killed 20 first graders and six educators.

Mr. Jones had been found liable for defamation after he spent years falsely describing the shooting as a hoax and accusing the victims’ families of being actors complicit in the plot. As a result, the families were threatened in person and online. He used his Infowars platform to spread these lies.

Wait, I’m sorry. I meant to say that that was rom the You Love To See It Department.

Best part: because judgments arising from intentional torts and/or punitive damages awards are not dischargeable in bankruptcy, Jones cannot simply declare bankruptcy, retire to a Florida house with a homestead exemption, and just ignore this for the rest of his days. Rather, he will be hounded from now until the end of time for payment. If he attempts to hide income or assets he’ll be dragged back into court for contempt, which could subject him to further sanctions up to and including imprisonment.

And all of that’s still too good for him.

No news is bad news

Yesterday the newspaper company Gannett announced mandatory employee furloughs for the holidays, employee buyouts, a freeze on 401(k) matching and a hiring freeze. This is two months after Gannett laid off hundreds of workers across its newspaper empire.

Gannett is the largest owner of local newspapers in the country but it’s less a newspaper company than it is the pretext for a publicly-traded stock and the enrichment of some investors and a thin layer of highly-paid executives. The company’s growth is based on debt-heavy acquisitions which enrich those investors and executives but which hamstring the operations of news gathering and publication because, hey, that stock price isn’t gonna keep itself up and that debt isn’t going to service itself.

Everywhere Gannett operates it embarks on a slash-and-burn campaign that eviscerates once proud newspapers and turns entire communities into information deserts. As Diana Moskovitz wrote for Defector in August:

Gannett isn’t a company. It’s an angel of death. All it does is buy local newspapers, then slowly smother them out of existence . . .The copy desk gets outsourced to a “regional hub.” . . . Then comes the hiring freeze. Then comes the skyrocketing price for an obit and a print ad. Then comes the shrinking print news hole. They phase out the staff photographers. Then comes the elimination of your reporting or editing position because they don’t need it, what with such a small news hole, even though your community and your news is not shrinking. Advertising, sales, marketing—that all goes to the regional hub, too. Whoever is left behind is stuck with an impossible task, doing far too much for too little pay, and it all concludes with them getting yelled at online about typos.

With local newspapers turned into a shell of their former selves the public knows less and less about what is going on in their own community. That ignorance, in and of itself, is a bad thing, but it causes something worse: it causes people to default to national news outlets for basically everything. When all that people see are talking heads shouting about the sorts of ratings-grabbing culture war arglebargle found on the cable networks they then project that noise into the vacuum Gannett has left on the local scene. This is one of the big reasons your local school board election has turned into shouting about Critical Race Theory, toxic, anti-Trans policies, and book-banning and the only thing you ever hear about in your city are crime stories.

Companies like Gannett like to blame the Internet for killing the newspaper business. At some point they should own up to the fact that their own corporate greed is doing far more damage than Craigslist and some blogs ever did.

Catch me if you — oh, wait

Per the AJC: a man doing a 14-year sentence inside a Georgia super-max prison allegedly stole $11 million from a billionaire fashion and movie mogul using burner phones, bought a crap-ton of gold coins with it, arranged for a private plane to transport the gold to Atlanta, where it was used to buy a $4.4 million house.

Again: the guy accused of doing this never left his prison cell. I’d say this could be a sequel to “Catch me if you Can” but . . . they had already caught him, so I guess everyone’s out of ideas.

Egypt wants the Rosetta Stone back

Back in July, when I was in London, I wrote about my trip to the British Museum. In relevant part:

It’s impossible for an even moderately-enlightened person to talk or even think about the British Museum these days without acknowledging that it is now, more than anything, a monument to an empire’s plundering of the planet. With very few exceptions everything in there is or should be the property of people and countries which are decidedly not English or England and would be still if not for the fact that the English and England had all the guns and money and stuff. They are, to be sure, fantastic antiquities which I and millions of people would not, practically speaking, be able to see if they were not gathered here — and the museum has, in recent years, at least begun to grapple, albeit modestly, with the legacy of looting and plunder that has made its existence possible — but that’s sorta not the important thing I don’t think.

The most famous attraction in the British Museum is the Rosetta Stone. Speaking of which:

Thousands of Egyptians are demanding the repatriation of the Rosetta Stone from the British Museum back to its home country . . . The latest campaign to reclaim the antiquities has gathered more than 2,500 signatures in an online petition launched by a group of prominent archeologists. Together, these archeologists urge Egyptian Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly to "work through diplomatic and legal means" to retrieve the antiquities.

Honestly, they should just give it back. Mostly because, yeah, it’s imperial plunder and 21st century folk should be doing whatever we can to at least to begin to atone for imperial plunder. But also because, honestly, the Rosetta Stone is not super impressive as far as exhibits go. Yeah, it’s important, but as a physical exhibition it just sort of sits there, not even in a place of particular focus or aesthetic pleasantness of any kind. “Oh, that’s it” I said as I walked up to it. Then I walked on and looked at far cooler stuff.

And yeah, the far cooler stuff was itself the product of imperial plunder, but Egypt asked first so they should get their thing back and we’ll work on the rest of the stuff next.

Happy birthday compact discs

Yesterday was the 40th anniversary of the commercial release of the compact disc. I’ve found a few different answers to the question of “what was the first CD sold” but most sources I could track down say it was Billy Joel's “52nd Street,” released in Japan. Some say that it was sold on October 1, not October 11. I’m gonna say “I don’t give a crap, it’s just Billy Joel” and just assume it was the 11th. Go ahead with your own life, leave me alone.

If you are of the proper age to have witnessed the ascension of CDs over vinyl and cassettes, you probably remember the first CD you purchased and/or owned. I honestly can’t remember the first CD I bought, but it was probably in the fall of 1989 when I got my first job. I was still buying cassettes for a couple of years after that as my car had a cassette player — hell, I didn’t even own a car with a CD player until 1998 — but I did have a boombox with a CD player in it so I bought both. If I had to guess I’d say that it was some classic rock greatest hits package or something, but I really can’t recall.

The first one I owned was Beastie Boys “Paul’s Boutique,” which my brother bought when it came out in the summer of 1989 and which he left at home when he went away to Navy bootcamp that November. I claimed it under the “possession is 9/10 of the law” theory and for whatever reason Curt never asked for it back. I still own it, in fact. Well, kinda. A couple of years back Anna and Carlo found all my old CDs in the box I store them in in the garage and took what they considered to be the coolest ones to their rooms. No, they don’t own CD players. Anna taped up like two dozen of them, including “Paul’s Boutique,” on her walls and door as decorations. Carlo has the ones he considers cool in a stack on his desk. I am not sure what he does with them. Neither of them took any of my Dylan or Neil Young CDs. Shocker.

Anyway, I sometimes think that I’ll get myself a CD player again, just to have one, but I doubt I’ll actually drag the old CDs down — or take them off Anna’s bedroom walls — to listen to them.

Have a great day everyone.

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