Cup of Coffee: October 2, 2020

Good morning! Welcome to Free Friday! How ya doin’, non-subscribers? Hope today’s newsletter finds you shmelts well. And healthy (what?!).

And I hope, if you like what you’ve been reading on these Free Fridays, you take a flyer on a subscription:

It’s stuff like this every day. And yes, it’ll continue all offseason long as well.

The offseason began yesterday for the Reds, White Sox, and Brewers. We’ll talk about that today. And A-Rod. And following the money, Jim Bouton, oddly-placed toilets, plague cups, Enola Holmes, gluten-free pizza, and much, much more.

Let’s get at ‘er.

And That Happened

Here are the scores. Here are the highlights:

Atlanta 5, Reds 0: Atlanta wins its first postseason series since the 2001 NLDS. The Reds complete what were two of the worst postseason games I’ve ever seen a club string together, getting shut out for 22 innings. Credit to Atlanta starter Ian Anderson, of course, who was sharp as a tack for six frames yesterday. Credit to bad breaks and bounces too. Sometimes they just don’t go your way, kids. Although, as my friend Mark, a longtime Reds fan, texted me after the game ended, they haven’t gone Cincinnati’s way for a long time:

If you know, you know. About the Grippo’s I mean. They’re good. They’re no Better Made’s from Detroit, but they’re up there.

As for Atlanta, the bats finally came alive via two-run homers from Marcell Ozuna and Adam Duvall. Much to Alex Rodriguez’s chagrin, I should note, but we’ll get to that down in the Daily Briefing. For his part, Ozuna circled the bases in style:

Athletics 6, White Sox 4: The Braves ended 19 years of postseason futility, the A’s ended 14 years. They had to do it the hard way, coming back from a 3-0 hole early, but Sean Murphy’s two-run homer in the fourth followed by two bases-loaded walks put Oakland up by one. Chicago tied it back up in the top of the fifth but Chad Pinder’s two-run single in the bottom half brought the A’s back into the lead. From there the vaunted Oakland pen deployed five guys to toss four shutout innings — though some of them were shaky innings — and send the precocious White Sox home for the winter.

Padres 11, Cardinals 9: Reports of the Precocious Padres demise were greatly exaggerated. Both in the series and in this game, where they found themselves down by four as late as the sixth inning. That’s when Fernando Tatís Jr. hit a three-run bomb and Manny Machado tied it up with a solo blast. Tatís went deep again in seventh, this time joined by Wil Myers. St. Louis fought back with two in the eighth to make it 9-8, Myers homered again in the bottom half — a two-run shot — and Padres reliever/Cardinals old friend Trevor Rosenthal weathered a Paul Goldschmidt blast in the ninth to allow San Diego to live to fight another today. Today, in fact, at 7PM Eastern/4PM Pacific.

Seventeen — 17! — pitchers were used in this game. I’m too lazy to look it up but that has to be a postseason record for a nine-inning, non-rain-delayed game.

Dodgers 3, Brewers 0: Clayton Kerhaw turned in a vintage performance, tossing eight three-hit shutout innings while striking out 13. Well, not actually vintage, at least in the postseason, where Kershaw has famously had is problems, but it sure looked like him absolutely dominating, say, the 2014 Rockies at Dodger Stadium. Kershaw was backed by a three-run fifth inning featuring an RBI single from Austin Barnes and a two-run double from Mookie Betts. The Dodgers move on and the Brewers go home. L.A. made these first two games look easy. Now they face tougher competition.

Marlins vs. Cubs — POSTPONED: When they postponed this one, they said it would be rescheduled this afternoon, unless all of the other NL series were over, in which case it would be an evening game. That wasn’t decided until the Padres game ended at like 11:30 last night, which put Game 2 starters Yu Darvish and Sixto Sánchez into uncertainty until just before bedtime. If St. Louis had won they would’ve had to wait out the end of the Dodgers game too. Which I’m guessing they didn’t appreciate.

The things Major League Baseball does for TV ratings.

The Daily Briefing

On A-Rod

The sheer number of playoff games, combined with the fact that ESPN announcers are calling the games remotely, meaning that they can call more than one game in a single day, means that we have had a lot of Alex Rodriguez in our lives this week.

I liked A-Rod as a studio talking head when Fox first began trotting him out in the role a few years ago. Despite his generally off-putting persona as a player, the post-suspension and retirement A-Rod was looser, goofier, and brought with him a pretty refreshing perspective as an analyst. Maybe that goofy charm, like so much of the, well, everything about him, was studied and phony, but it was pleasant in a way. It helped, of course, that he knows baseball really, really well and has the kind of stature which allows him to call out players at times without fear of someone getting too pissed off. I mean, let’s be honest, he did it better than you ever did, no matter who you are, so what can you say? At least that’s the general vibe he gave to his studio job. It was appealing.

I have not watched A-Rod much since he became ESPN’s Sunday Night Baseball analyst. That’s less on him than on ESPN’s baseball production as a whole, which is damn nigh unwatchable. It’s a talk show with a ballgame in the background, with the ballgame itself sometimes serving no greater role for the broadcast than the fake New York skyline did for David Letterman’s show. Wait, that’s not true. At least Letterman would engage the skyline by throwing pencils and notecards at it. The ESPN booth will sometimes go innings at a time in which they seemingly do not realize a game is actually afoot.

I do have to listen to A-Rod in the postseason, however, and when I do, I wonder where, exactly, great ballplayers go for their lobotomies in between the time they play and the time they become in-game analysts.

The most notable case of this was Joe Morgan. He was the greatest second baseman in the history of the game and his offensive reputation was built on a foundation of unparalleled plate discipline, considerable power, and all of the little things guys who are into advanced analytics value. Yet, the longer he called games for ESPN, the more and more he came to disdain plate discipline, power, and all of the little things guys who are into advanced analytics value, as opposed to small ball, hitting to contact, and all of the things that decidedly did not make Joe Morgan the greatest second baseman in the history of the game. There’s no law that someone has to be self-aware, but it was weird to me. That’s just how he rolled.

A-Rod seems to be falling into the same patterns. I think it may even be a more extreme case than that which afflicted Morgan.

One aspect of this is probably a bit superficial and may have a good explanation. Here I’m talking about A-Rod’s fairly constant pro-ownership messaging, which includes the lauding of teams who lock players up to below-market deals before they reach free agency. During the Reds-Braves series he mentioned that with respect to Ronald Acuña Jr.’s below-market contract. He also mentioned the dynamic this week while speculating about what the Yankees might do with Aaron Judge. All of this pro-lock-the-player stuff up stands in pretty stark contrast to the behavior of a guy who broke the record for the biggest free agent deals of all time not once, but twice, and who became the poster boy for players using maximal power to get the best possible deals for themselves.

I say there may be a good explanation, but it’s not really a satisfying one. It’s a two-pronged thing. First prong: A-Rod works for ESPN, who has a critical business relationship with Major League Baseball, and neither ESPN nor MLB is gonna much tolerate someone criticizing the business practices of MLB and its owners, so he conforms to their expectations. The second prong: A-Rod wants to become the owner of a baseball team, and to do that he needs to be in Rob Manfred’s and the owners’ good graces. Given his history, he already had already dug himself a pretty deep hole in that regard, so any sentiment from him in favor of players making less money than they might otherwise make probably helps his cause.

Like I said, though, that’s pretty superficial. It’s more significant on the analysis side.

All week A-Rod has been talking about the need for teams to play small ball. To bunt. To hit the ball the other way. All of that stuff you expect to hear from Joe Simpson or guys who, when they played, didn’t have great talent but managed to carve out a nice niche for themselves because of “intangibles” and small ball skills. It’s understandable on some level that those dudes would elevate the skills which allowed them to find the success they found. It makes absolutely no sense that A-Rod would take that tack, but he does, often.

Perhaps the most absurd example of it came yesterday, during the bottom of the eighth inning, when he, as he had over the previous two days, called home runs “empty calories” and implored the Braves hitters to lay down bunts and stuff. He offered that “empty calorie” line literally seconds before Marcell Ozuna — the NL home run king for 2020 — hit that two-run bomb that iced the series for Atlanta. One mildly self-deprecating comment later, he was back on a “no, seriously, you have to do the little things” jag, at which point Adam Duvall hit another two-run homer. So, yeah, that’s how that went.

I guess I just don’t understand why a guy who hit 700 homers while taking his walks and waiting for his pitch spends so much time preaching the gospel of bunts and small ball. Maybe one just doesn’t last long as a broadcaster if one says fairly obvious stuff like “he should hit the damn ball over the damn fence. Home runs are, like, the best thing you can do.” Maybe, like in so many other fields, the guys who look like they’re working harder get rewarded, even if they aren’t doing as good a job as the ones who make things look easy.

When it comes to politics in sports, follow the money

The return of professional sports in July and August was occasioned by a newfound visibility of social justice messages in sports. Whereas once the notion of protest was enough to get a player blackballed, now movements such as the Black Lives Matter movement are being embraced. And not just by the players, but by teams and leagues and networks who have hung signs, run commercials, and have otherwise engaged in a lot of that sort of messaging. Political progressivism, at least of a certain sort, is now, basically, bog standard in professional sports.

But it only goes so deep. Sure, NBA players can alter their jerseys and no one is (publicly) called out for kneeling for the National Anthem, but if you think the real powers that be in sports are on the side of people of color or those without power, this article from USA Today about the political donation patterns of sports owners will begin the process of disabusing you of that notion:

There was, arguably anyway, once a time when this would not necessarily constitute a disconnect. A sports owner donating to Republican politicians at other times in our history might have at least made a plausible case that supporting them due to some economic or national security reason, say, did not mean that they stood opposed to social justice, racial justice, and the proposition that Black lives do, in fact, matter.

It’s preposterous to say such a thing today. Not when, just this week, the President of the United States refused to denounce white supremacist hate groups like the Proud Boys, and virtually every Republican politician and/or candidate for office have either defended him in doing so or remained silent on the matter. As a result of Trump’s and the Republicans’ very words and deeds, it’s clear that one can support racial justice or one can support Republicans, but one cannot support both. At least coherently.

The owners of sports teams who have made such donations should be asked to answer for that. Indeed, everyone who gives money to Republicans at this point in history should be asked to answer for it. They should be asked if they support white supremacy and, if they say no, they should be asked what is so important to them that their preferred candidate’s support of white supremacy is not a dealbreaker to them.

“Ball Four” 50th Anniversary Edition

I got a lovely surprise in the mail today:

I already own a copy and I’ve read “Ball Four” many times before, but it was really nice to get this 50th anniversary copy of the greatest baseball book ever written.

I love “Ball Four” for all the reasons everyone loves it, but as I wrote last year when Jim Bouton died, the book — and his updates to it over the years and the things Bouton said and did for the rest of his life — resonated with me on a much deeper level than your typical great read usually does. It’s all tied up in the common characterization of Bouton as “a rebel.” And how I have always found that to be misleading.

Bouton was certainly a non-conformist who did not fit in the world in which he chose to make a living, but he as not the kind of guy who reveled in his non-conformity the way people we usually call “rebels” do. He was not some devil-may-care iconoclast or someone who spit in the face of authority for kicks. To the contrary. He was profoundly aware of the costs of his inability to conform and, at times, talked about how much easier things might’ve been for him had he been able to simply put his head down and be like everyone else.

Indeed, much of “Ball Four” deals with Bouton’s fear and anxiety of losing baseball and finding himself on the outside looking in. When he wrote it, the successful and happy second act of his life — Jim Bouton: professional rebel — was by no means guaranteed, and he knew, like everyone else familiar with baseball culture knows, that being unique in the way he was unique made it more likely, not less, that his time in the game will be cut short. It created a tension in “Ball Four” that a lot of people overlook while talking about Mickey Mantle’s hijinks or Joe Schultz “pounding that Budweiser.” A tension in which a man is telling truths about a world which he knows could bite him in the ass. A tension in which humor often attempts to mask the insecurity he feels in the game now that he is no longer a fireballing phenom.

I’ve fought similar battles. More than once, actually.

I’ve been very fortunate in my life, but I’ve also never been able to fit particularly well in the places and situations where my fortune has placed me. Like Bouton, I have long since made peace with the fact that that’s how I’m wired and I’ve made the best of it, but it’s also the case that I often wonder what my life would’ve been like if I had been able to play more nicely and easily with the other kids. Or the other lawyers. Or the suburban neighbors and parents of my kids’ friends. Or the other sportswriters or the media companies which employ them. Or the league I cover. I just never could, though. Not out of some sense of rebelliousness. Not because I thought it was fun to be different. Simple because I have never quite known how to fit into established systems. Because I simply don’t know how to be. God knows I’d be richer if I could’ve done that 15 years ago. Maybe even happier in some ways.

I’m not a guy who has many heroes, but for that reason, Bouton was and remains a hero to me. He showed me how to live a life characterized by a fairly constant and mostly unresolvable harmonic dissonance with my surroundings. And he taught me that one can find happiness in doing so, even if it’s hard at times to see where that happiness is coming from. As I wrote last year:

I think I’m going to read “Ball Four” again. If you never have, or if you haven’t read it for a long time, you should too.

Other Stuff

Say It Ain’t Contagious IV

The latest in the series of Zoom discussions about baseball in the Pandemic Era, “Say it Ain’t Contagious,” featuring Lincoln Mitchell, Tova Wang, Frank Guidry, Adrian Burgos Jr., Steve Goldman and me will take place on Sunday — like, this Sunday — at 7PM Eastern. It’ll be an hour, more or less, of the six of us talking about the state of the game, followed up by an open discussion including all attendees. Attendance is free, but you have to RSVP. You can do so by sending an email to [email protected]. Here’s our sexy flyer.

The Tampa Bay Lightning win the COVID Cup

Guys, I realize it’s Florida and that your leaders down there stopped giving a crap about COVID approximately 11 seconds after they first heard the word, but I can assure you, “happiness about your team winning the Stanley Cup” provides no protection from the virus:

And in case that was not on-the-nose enough for you:

The Grim Reaper is insulted how easy you’re making this for him, fellas.

The Brownshirts are coming

Ken Klippenstein reports that, on the same day as the debate in which Trump refused to condemn far-right violence and white supremacy, the FBI quietly issued a warning about the threat of violent, far-right extremists. It identifies the period between the election and the inauguration as a “flashpoint.” The document reads in relevant part:

But sure, keep on worrying about the imaginary threat from the left. And keep on talking about the president’s encouragement of these dangerous radicals only in terms of what it means for the election as opposed to what it means in a moral sense. And what it means for our very safety as citizens.

On the throne

I often waste time online looking at real estate listings. Sometimes they’re of the “hmm, I could buy this” variety, sometimes they’re of the “let’s see how crazy rich people live” variety. Yesterday Allison sent me one of the former sorts of listings. A house not too far from me, actually, out in the country a bit, where we sometimes think of moving when the kids are gone. At least if we don’t emigrate to The Netherlands like I talked about yesterday.

It was cute enough. A modest house on a quiet country road that, with a few updates to finishes and things, would be a fine enough abode for a couple of empty-nesters who just want to be left the hell alone. But when I got to a photo of the master bathroom, I saw this:

Talk about sitting on the throne. I mean, how does one take a dump on that pedestal without calling in courtesans and advisors to discuss this year’s crop yields, the status of tax collections from the barons, and updates on the war with the Duchy of Ferrara who — blast them! — are in league with the Holy Roman Empire?

Honestly, if I had that bathroom, I’d probably never leave. I’d maybe get an end table too.

Enola Holmes

I’m a sucker for Sherlock Holmes. I’m not some super fan with an encyclopedic knowledge of the character and the works involving him, but I read most of the original stories when I was younger and I’ve watched most movie and TV adaptations when they’ve come around over the past 20-30 years or so. I love the BBC “Sherlock” like nobody’s business. I think “Elementary,” while not quite as fun as “Sherlock,” is a great show. I’m not as big a fan of the Robert Downey Jr. movies, but again, I’m a mark, so I saw ‘em both and will probably see the new one when it comes out. And, of course, one of my favorite movies of all time — “Zero Effect” — is basically a Holmes adaptation as well.

I have not read any of the “Enola Holmes” books — again, I’m a fan, not an obsessive, and those things weren’t really aimed at me — but I did watch the “Enola Holmes” movie when it came out a couple of weeks ago. It was . . . fine. Millie Bobby Brown is extraordinarily talented and she does a good job of carrying it, but overall I was a bit cold on it. Probably because a big thing I like about Holmes stuff, be it Sherlock or a stand-in, are all the little Holmes observation/deduction bits. That can, when writers are not careful, be gimmicky as hell — Cumberbatch’s version of it amped all of that up to superpower levels and, even if I love that show, it got to be a bit much at times — but I do like that stuff, and “Enola Holmes” didn’t have much of it. It was an adventure story, mostly, not a mystery, and it was an only OK one at that.

Based on what I’ve read from people who know the property better, it was not the best representation of the source material, but the general sentiment is that Brown’s casting was good (it better have been; she was the producer), it was at least a decent attempt, and that if they got a better-written script for a sequel it could potentially be an excellent franchise. I have no reason to doubt that. There’s a lot to work with, even if it didn’t gel here.

Which makes this somewhat disappointing:

Cavill’s Sherlock Holmes had very little to do in “Enola Holmes” and the little he did have to do was not particularly interesting. I know Cavill is famous and that his stock is rising because of “The Witcher,” but honestly, I have little desire to see a Sherlock Holmes vehicle starring him. Not once during “Enola Holmes” did I find myself thinking “if only we had more Cavill!”

There have been countless adaptations and variations of Sherlock Holmes. Hundreds. Maybe thousands. Is it too much to ask, then, that Millie Bobby Brown and the folks behind that movie be given a second shot at an Enola Holmes flick before they go back to the Sherlock well again?

Pizza night

As some of you know, Allison has celiac disease, which means we’re a mostly gluten-free household. I’ll probably write up an Everything Non-Gluten-Free People Need to Know About the Gluten-Free Lifestyle thing in some newsletter this winter, but for now all you need to know is that all of the lazy gluten-free jokes people make are wrong and you’re a big dick if you do that. Just sayin!

Anyway, you can sub almost anything for most food with wheat in it and not have much of a falloff, but pizza is a bit of a challenge. The gluten-free stuff you can get at pizza places tends to be bad unless they specialize in it. This place in Detroit is fantastic and this one in New York, while not 100% gluten-free, is out of this world even though they just do gluten-free on the side.

But we got a gluten-free pizza cookbook recently that was a life-changer. It’s by Kelli and Peter Bronski, and it’s called “No Gluten, No Problem.” Between its precise and well-tested recipes and tips about (a) the specialized gear you need; and (b) how to approximate pizza oven temperatures in your home oven via the use of a super-heated pizza steel, it’ll get you making some high quality stuff in no time.

We’re still getting the hang of it, but we made this flatbread/cracker crust pizza last night:

There’s also New York style (we’re still working on that one) Detroit style (yes, it’s a thing) and almost any other variety you can think of. Just great stuff.

If you’ve got celiac disease or know someone who does, never hesitate to hit me up. Allison has been living with it and I’ve been working to accommodate it for nearly seven years now, and we know most of the tricks. I love to trade notes and advice about it with people.

Finally

My friend Cristóbal sent me this article about how 47.2 is, according to economists, “the most miserable age.” That’s 47 and 2.4 months. I turned 47 on July 14, which means I was 47.2 last Saturday. I spent that entire day cooking and cleaning, after which I felt kinda tired. So, yeah, checks out.

Have a great weekend, everyone. And seriously, non-subscribers. Give it a whirl:

It’s not miserable, even if it’s writer is. According to economists, anyway.