Cup of Coffee: October 17, 2024

Good morning! And welcome to Free Thursday!

And away we go.

And That Happened 

Here are the scores. Here are the highlights:

Dodgers 8, Mets 0: The Dodgers got a couple of nickel-and-dime runs in the second but Kiké Hernández smacked a two-run homer in the sixth and Shohei Ohtani hit a big three-run dinger in the eighth to make this one into a blowout. Max Muncy’s ninth inning solo shot was the cherry on top. Walker Buehler had great stuff four four innings and the margin of victory made it possible for Dave Roberts to Keep Daniel Hudson and Evan Phillips on their keisters, so they’ll be fresh for Games 4 and 5. The Mets got a couple of sparkly defensive plays out of Tyrone Taylor and Francisco Lindor but that was basically it for the highlights.

In other news, on Monday I wrote about how MLB ratings are up. Yesterday we had a good reminder that that stuff is relative and that for as much as it pains us, baseball just isn’t a big thing in American culture these days:

Two biggest markets in American sports, too. But that’s just the way it is, man.

The Daily Briefing

Jerry Reinsdorf is in discussions to sell the White Sox

Brittany Ghiroli of The Athletic reports that White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf is open to selling the team and that he is “in active discussions with a group led by former big leaguer Dave Stewart.”

Reinsdorf is 88 and he has owned the White Sox for 43 years. He has never shown any indication that he was interested in selling the team and, as recently as this past summer, was openly lobbying Illinois public officials for a new publicly-financed stadium for the Sox in the South Loop. Those efforts have proven fruitless, however, and the White Sox’ historically bad 2024 campaign has largely, and I believe accurately, been attributed to Reinsdorf’s failures as an owner. Perhaps he realized he is not going to live long enough to oversee another winning White Sox team? Perhaps he’s just sick if it all?

Stewart’s most prominent post-playing job was as the GM for the Arizona Diamondbacks and he did not perform at all well in that role. Since then he has headed-up a group of investors under his “Smoke34” banner. The group previously tried to purchase Oakland’s stake in the Oakland Coliseum for development. He has likewise been actively involved in trying to get an expansion baseball team to Nashville and to get an NWSL team in Nashville as well. Which makes one wonder if Stewart has ideas of moving the White Sox there. Given what just happened in Oakland I’d hope that he, of all people, appreciates how unpopular a move that would be, but who knows?

I’ll say this much, though: a guy who messed up a team’s baseball operations for a couple of years and whose future plans seem murky is actually an improvement for a team that has had a guy messing things up for 40 years and whose future plans seem murky. If you’re a White Sox fan you’ll probably take that leap, right?

The White Sox have a couple of managerial candidates

Last night MLB Trade Rumors alerted us to a report that Tigers bench coach George Lombard and Padres special assistant A.J. Ellis are two of the candidates being considered for the White Sox manager job. I have two thoughts about this.

The first thought: despite the fact that he is nearly my own age, George Lombard is and always will be a prospect in his early 20s who is on the verge of turning the corner and becoming an important part of the Atlanta outfield. This was true in 1997, 2007, 2017 and today. Sorry, that dynamic just applies to some players and in my mind George Lombard is one of those players.

The second thought: If the White Sox go with Ellis there will be no one more happy for him than baseball writers who covered the Dodgers circa 2013-16. I say that because he was always those guys’ best source for clubhouse dirt. That was particularly the case with Yasiel Puig who, despite TOTALLY deserving most of the criticism he got, was still unfairly dragged by “sources with the team” which were almost certainly Ellis.

One of the best examples of this came when Puig was sent down the minors in 2016 and Ken Rosenthal wrote a report about Puig freaking out and “storming off” from Dodger Stadium and generally creating a scene when told the news. Except that never happened and Rosenthal took the extraordinary step of apologizing for spreading misinformation. I used to know some people back in those days and a couple of them said that it was Ellis who told Rosenthal that story, as he despised Puig. Which is insane given that Puig did so much actual stuff to aggravate his teammates so why bother to make up dirt? Oh, and Ellis was traded away by the Dodgers later that month, either because of that business or because Andrew Friedman was firing a shot over the bow of Clayton Kershaw, who insisted that his good buddy Ellis be his personal catcher when the team wanted Yasmani Grandal to catch more. Or both. Yeah, it was probably both. You can’t let your backup catcher dictate clubhouse dynamics. He ain’t worth it.

Anyway, it should be fun if either of these two are chosen to help rearrange the deck chairs on the S.S. White Sox. Lombard because it’ll be weird to see a 22 year-old manager. Ellis because, if the Sox have to suck, the least they can do is be messy bitches about it. At least that’d be entertaining.

Tropicana Field will not be ready for the 2025 season

Marc Topkin of the Tampa Bay Times reported on Tuesday evening that while the damage to Tropicana Field when Hurricane Milton blew through is still being assessed, it’s now understood by everyone involved that the Rays won't be able to play in the stadium when the 2025 season begins in late March.

Topkin says it's not yet been decided where the team will play at the start of next year, nor how long they'll be out of their home ballpark, but he says the club and MLB officials have a long list of possibilities they’re working through. Nearby minor league parks like the Disney facility where Atlanta used to hold spring training or the the Blue Jays’ facility in Dunedin, Florida have been mentioned, but due to the heat and rain outdoor baseball in Florida gets pretty tough once you get into May.

One assumes that nothing is off the table at the moment, as the clock is ticking and the 2025 schedule — kicking off with a six-game Rays homestand! — is set in stone.

Other Stuff

I’m being attacked

This comment from yesterday has triggered me:

To be clear: I am not triggered by insult or anger or anything. I am triggered by the inherent reality of the notion that, if we want the rewards of being loved, we have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known, and man, ThisIsRuss quite obviously knows me.

An ode to aimless wandering

Subscriber Seán Ó Máille shot me a link to something Simon Armitage, the UK’s poet laureate, wrote about walking in The New Statesman yesterday.

In the piece Armitage talks about how he walked the Pennine Way, a long and challenging trail that intersects with the Coast to Coast in the North of England, back in 2010. He didn’t care for the walk all that much and the book he subsequently wrote about it was noted by critics for being decidedly dour and complainy. Three years later he walked the South West Coast Path — one I wouldn’t mind trying some day — and felt much the same way about it. He likes the walking but he also found it frustrating. More notably, to this day, Armitage continues to have a less-than-great impression of the sea, the shoreline of which the South West Coast Path follows, and which he grew sick of on his walk. And I don’t mean just the part of the sea along the path. He hates oceans in general. Which is not exactly the sort of thing you’d expect a poet to say, but I don’t know poetry all that well, so who knows?

But despite Armitage finding all manner of walks so many people love to be somewhat miserable, he has arrived at a truth about them which has made them worthwhile for him:

I don’t think I’d want to walk with Armitage because it’s never a good idea for me to be around people who are crankier than I am, but he’s definitely hit on a Great Truth here.

A lot of people have asked me in the past year if I was upset about not finishing the Coast to Coast. I’ll admit that, at the time I injured my leg and had to cut my walk short, I was greatly disappointed and that that disappointment lasted for a few weeks afterward. But around the time my leg healed that disappointment had all but completely disappeared. It did so because the enjoyment of the portion of the walk I completed stuck with me — and still sticks with me — far more strongly than any disappointment over not getting to the end did. The point of the walk, even if I wasn’t 100% clear on it at the time, was just to . . . walk. To see beautiful things and to get outside of my head for a while and I did a hell of a lot of that. More of it than I ever had in one go. A year out from it and it stands as one of the best things I’ve ever experienced in my life and I am certain it will always rank near the top.

I tend to be very left-brained about things and even though I have a huge amount of freedom due to my weird job and the fact that my kids are grown, I still live a very structured existence and I adhere pretty hard to routines and schedules. It’s just how I’m wired and how I’ve always been wired. The times in which I’ve been relatively untethered are few and, in the past at least, have sort of unsettled me. But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve gotten far more comfortable with wandering, both literally and figuratively. Those days, weekends, or even weeks in which I’m sort of meandering or doing things that I wouldn’t normally be doing don’t carry with them anxiety like they once did nor do they require Tangible Results, such as a completed task or a trophy or whatever, to make them seem worthwhile to me like they once did.

People often daydream about their ideal existence. Lottery fantasies, or whatever. At this point in my life I’m pretty sure mine would have me in a home base that isn’t very far from a lot of paths on which to wander, without a schedule or even a goal. If I managed that I’d be one up on Armitage because unlike him I actually like the ocean.

Facial recognition at Kroger

Over the summer some stories came out about how grocery stores are moving to electronic price labels on shelves, replacing the little stickers or paper signs under items. While there are a number of things this innovation could enable — including the ability to deliver better product information to customers and to make inventory processes more efficient — it’s patently obvious that it is mostly a way to give grocery stores the ability to implement Uber-style surge pricing which, when applied to groceries, is better characterized as price-gouging. Not that this was really a secret, as one “grocery industry analyst” quoted in the story said, “If it’s hot outside, we can raise the price of water and ice cream. If there's something that’s close to the expiration date, we can lower the price — that’s the good news.”

Last Friday Michigan Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib did what a lot of Members of Congress do when stuff like this comes up: she sent a letter to Kroger Chairman and CEO Rodney McMullen voicing her concerns about the digital tag/dynamic pricing plan and asked him several pointed questions about the company’s intentions. Most of it was the usual constituent advocacy/pressure politics one sees in letters like these. There was one part of the letter that stuck out to me, however. After talking about the digital price tags, Tlaib wrote:

Congresswoman Tlaib is absolutely right about that, of course, and cites sources for her assertion about how facial recognition technology is likely to lead to racial discrimination, including this Scientific American article from May of 2023.

I don’t know if Kroger will, ultimately roll out a facial recognition program like the one the Congresswoman describes, but I do have some recent experience with Kroger which suggests that they’re totally fine with playing fast and loose with the old eyeball test in ways that almost certainly lead to racial discrimination.

The closest Kroger to my house is just south of Downtown Columbus. A few months ago it and a few other Kroger stores in the city, all in what one might describe as “urban” locations if one wished to use euphemisms, began posting private security guards — armed and decked out in the most comically over-the-top tactical gear — at the exists. Each shopper that leaves the store is expected to show these militarized rent-a-cops their receipts and let them look in shopping bags if they ask. I haven’t really dug too deeply into Kroger’s thinking on this but it’s no doubt a function of the shoplifting hysteria which has embedded itself in so many retailers’ minds.

I found the move to be insanely hostile. I was already going to that Kroger less and less because Kroger’s produce sucks and that store is often a mess, most likely because Kroger won’t hire enough people to properly staff it, but the army LARPers posted at the doors was the final straw. For the past several months I’ve done almost all of our shopping at different stores which don’t presume their clientele to be criminals.

About a month ago, I needed one thing I had forgotten for a recipe I was making. It was a critical thing for which I had no substitute so I figured, screw it, I’ll run into the Kroger since it’s so close and get that one thing. So I went there, got the thing, checked out, and walked toward the Cost-Cutter version of Master Chief guarding the door. I had absently dropped my receipt in my bag before remembering I was expected to show it, so as I began walking toward him I was sort of fumbling the bag and was also dealing with my travel mug of coffee because I’m an addict. It wasn’t an insurmountable problem, but for a second there, right when the guard looked up at me, I’m sure I looked like a bit of a mess.

Then this happened:

Except that guard had never seen me before in his life. I had been in the store exactly one time since the guard policy began and it was a different person at the door on that occasion. I had not been in the store at all for a good three or four months when we had this interaction.

What was quite obviously happening is that the armed guard Kroger placed at its exit looked at the bald middle aged white guy with glasses, dad jeans and normcore shoes, and decided that there is no way he was stealing anything. At the same time, I’d bet my life that there are Black, Latino, or other people who do not look like me who shop at that store two or three times a week who never get waved through like I did. Kroger may not have intended their little private militia to be profiling its customers and treating them in discriminatory ways, but that’s what they’ve accomplished at the store in my neighborhood.

So, no, I don’t have much confidence in Kroger profiling anyone in any way, even if they’re employing whiz-bang technology to do so.

“Slow Horses” is renewed 

I cannot adequately describe how much I love the Apple TV+ show “Slow Horses.” It’s simultaneously intense, with high stakes — like, main characters die and stuff — while also being something of a hang show, featuring characters you’d be just as happy to watch chatting in the office as you are watching them chase after bad guys while trying not to get killed. Like, I’m pretty sure that Gary Oldman’s character, Jackson Lamb, would be just as entertaining to watch in a show where he’s the manager of a furniture store as he is as a master spy who people underestimate simply because he’s a greasy, slovenly, disheveled alcoholic with no use for basic manners. The show just works, man.

I’ll also admit that part of my love for the show is that unlike most prestige TV of the past decade or so, they crank out new episodes on a regular basis. Sure, each season only has six of them, but they come out on the regular. Season one debuted in April 2022, Season two came out in December 2022, Season three came out in November 2023, and Season four, which just concluded last week, was released last month. They film them more or less back-to-back as well, so the second the last episode ends in a season they already have a teaser trailer for the new season. That happened at the end of Season four, so presumably we’ll have a fifth season at some point in mid-to-late 2025. I’d guess September again but who knows.

And then we learned earlier this week that “Slow Horses” has been renewed for a sixth season, sow we’ll likely get that in 2026. Yay!

I spend a lot of time in this space talking about all of the things wrong with the world, but dammit, there are some good things too, like a spy show I like showing up on the regular. That’s not much, I realize, but given the state of human existence these days, the bar for actual joy is pretty damn low.

Also: I love the theme song, performed by Mick Jagger, of all people, who you’d never expect to lower himself to such a gig. He did it, however, because he’s a big fan of the book series on which the show is based. It’s an almost hilariously over-the-top performance by Jagger but I absolutely love it and never skip it when watching the show. The guy has been a rock god for over 60 years. He has absolutely nothing to prove to anyone. Yet here he is, going harder on the theme song for a streaming spy show than on almost anything he’s done since the “Undercover” album. What a goddamn legend.

Have a great day everyone.