Cup of Coffee: October 24, 2024

Good morning! And welcome to Free Thursday!

Only one more sleep until the World Series. Unless you’re a napper or one of those old people who insist that they’re not sleeping, they’re just resting their eyes, in which case it’d be two or even three. In the meantime, read this newsletter. And maybe share it since it’s free today. Tell all the cool kids you know to subscribe too. That’d be swell.

The Daily Briefing

Fernando Valenzuela: 1960-2024

This news hit after I went to bed and after the newsletter was in the can on Tuesday night, but as you have all seen by now Dodgers legend Fernando Valenzuela has died. He was 63. No cause of death was announced but Valenzuela had left the Dodgers broadcast booth for health reasons three weeks before his death, suggesting an ongoing illness.

Valenzuela was scouted out of Mexico as a teenager at a time when MLB scouts paid little if any attention to the country, believing the talent and development of young players there to be inferior to that of the U.S. and other Latin American countries. The Dodgers, however, had sent legendary scout Mike Brito to look at a shortstop playing for the Central League club in Guanajuato when he happened to see the young Valenzuela pitch. The Dodgers signed him, sent him to the California league, and after teaching him to throw a screwball, which would become his signature pitch, Valenzuela made his MLB debut at age 19 during a brief cup of coffee at the end of the 1980 season.

That ten-game audition, which featured 17.2 scoreless innings, was enough to convince the club to put Valenzuela in the rotation to begin the 1981 season. Due to a late spring training injury to Jerry Reuss, Fernando got the Opening Day star and tossed a five-hit shutout. He would go on to toss shutouts in four of his first five starts and would win his first eight starts, five by shutout, seven in complete games, and the eighth in a nine-inning performance in which he earned the win thanks to the Dodgers putting up a five-spot in the tenth. It was the greatest start to a season by a pitcher in living memory, perhaps in history, and it made Fernando Valenzuela a superstar before Memorial Day. “Fernandomania” had arrived, and Valenzuela was all over TV, newspapers, and magazines. He was the biggest thing to hit baseball in ages.

While the 1981 campaign was interrupted by a lengthy work stoppage, Fernando continued to pitch wonderfully all year, starting the All-Star Game for the National League and becoming the first, and to this day only, player to win the National League Cy Young and Rookie of the Year awards during the same season. He also led the league in strikeouts — the first rookie to do so — and won the Silver Slugger Award. He continued to build his legend that postseason, making five starts in the span of 17 days and accumulating 40.2 innings. Valenzuela’s most impressive performance in the 1981 postseason came in Game 3 of the World Series when he gave up 9 hits and 7 walks as he gutted out a 147-pitch complete game victory. It was not, statistically speaking, his best game that October, but it showed just how much heart and determination the guy had.

Valenzuela would never put together another season like he did in 1981 — who could? — but he remained a workhorse for the Dodgers for the rest of the decade. After his 192.1 innings in the shortened 1981 campaign he’d log over 250 innings every year from 1982 through 1987. He led the league with 21 wins and 20 complete games in 1986. He threw a no-hitter against the St. Louis Cardinals in 1990. He’d make six All-Star teams, win a Gold Glove, picked up a second Silver Slugger in 1983 and would collect MVP votes in four different seasons.

But while Valenzuela’s impact on the field was undeniable, what he did for the Dodgers organization was way, way bigger than that.

From the time the club moved to California in 1958, the Dodgers fanbase was a predominantly white one. Part of that was a simple function of how baseball marketed itself in those days but the city’s fathers and the Dodgers had created a serious rift with Los Angeles’ Mexican community due to the club’s takeover of Chavez Ravine, the once-vibrant community which was forcibly uprooted in the 1950s to clear the way for the eventual construction of Dodger Stadium. The club was aware how big it would be to have a Mexican superstar to help it better connect with the city’s Latino community and it had finally found one in Valenzuela.

Valenzuela’s presence and his star power would transform the Dodgers fanbase in ways that are still obvious over 40 years after the days of Fernandomania. You still see number 34 jerseys all over Dodger Stadium and around the city at large. And while the celebrities and wealthy white people in the expensive seats are the most conspicuous Dodgers fans to a TV audience, anyone who has sat farther down the lines and in the upper decks of Dodger Stadium know that the club draws a huge number of Mexican fans. Way, way more, it is certain, than they ever would have had Valenzuela not have done what he did and if he was not who he was.

After years of heavy use Valenzuela began to develop shoulder problems in the late 1980s. That kept him out of the 1988 postseason, when the Dodgers won their second World Series during his tenure. The team would release Valenzuela just before the 1991 season — and just before a contract option would vest — after which the player and the club would become estranged for over a decade. He’d continue to pitch, however, first for the Angels, then a year back in the Mexican League, before joining the Orioles, the Phillies, the Padres, and the Cardinals, with whom he retired in 1997. For his career he went 173-153 with a 3.54 ERA (104 ERA+) in 17 seasons.

Valenzuela reconciled with the Dodgers in 2003 when he returned to be the Spanish-language radio analyst. In 2015 he switched to TV and held that job through this past season. He was inducted into the Mexican Professional Baseball Hall of Fame in 2014. In 2019 the entire Mexican League retired Valenzuela’s Number 34. The Dodgers retired it 2023. This despite a team has a rule that requires a player to be in the Baseball Hall of Fame before receiving the honor. Valenzuela was only the second exception to that rule, after Jim Gilliam’s number 19 in 1978. Gilliam, like Valenzuela, died just days before a Yankees-Dodgers World Series was to begin.

Fernando Valenzuela was a living legend for over two-thirds of his life and he will remain a legend for as long as there is a game of baseball. His influence is incalculable. The love Dodgers fans have for him is as well. May he rest in peace.

Baseball’s ongoing struggle with racial bias

Over at The Guardian Rob Arthur, aided by research from Friends of the Newsletter Mark Armour and Dan Levitt, writes about how, nearly 80 years post-Jackie Robinson, Black and Latino players still have a more difficult time reaching the majors than their white counterparts and that significant racial disparities continue to exist in multiple facets of player development.

In reaching his conclusions, Arthur assessed the performance and advancement history of some 40,000 minor league ballplayers, sorted by race/ethnicity. What he found was eye-opening:

What’s more, Arthur found a correlation among Black and Latino players between the physical color of their skin and whether they moved up to the next level of the minors, with Blacks and Latinos with lighter skin being promoted at a considerably higher rate than those with darker skin but comparable performance. That difference in promotion rates was the same as if the players with lighter skin had an OPS that was 40 points higher than it actually was. Those disparities have created a disadvantage separate and apart from other discriminatory factors such as the baseball’s demonstrable track record of shifting Black players to the outfield and away from more specialized and thus more valuable positions like starting pitcher, catcher, or middle infield.

As Arthur notes, many people in and around the game assumed, perhaps understandably, that baseball’s move toward statistical analysis and the elevation of objective data over subjective scouting assessments would reduce this sort of racial bias. It turns out, however, that a great deal of that analysis and the models created by analysts were based on data collected from periods when more overt racial bias was being exercised, thus baking discrimination into the models teams continue to use. And of course, subjective analysis is still used, so the old chestnuts with which we’re all familiar — how white players are more likely to be described as “gamers” and “leaders” with “good makeup” and scouting reports of Black and Latino players are more likely to include references to a “questionable” makeup, “laziness,” or to contain information about their background or superficial deportment which are informed by racist attitudes — still impact advancement decisions.

Major League Baseball declined to comment on the results of Arthur’s study. Maybe they were too busy planning next year’s Jackie Robinson Day celebrations. You know, the ones in which the league’s words and deeds tend to imply that racism in baseball ended on April 15, 1947.

The Mets look poised to spend

Yesterday Mets president of baseball operations David Stearns spoke to the press and, when asked about the ability of the team to add talent and payroll next year, he said "The entirety of the player universe is potentially accessible to us. That's an enormous opportunity. I envision us taking advantage of that opportunity and being aggressive in certain spaces."

I consider this to be official notice to the Yankees that, if they plan on re-signing Juan Soto, they’re gonna have to outbid baseball’s wealthiest owner to do it.

One-knee catching

A couple of weeks ago I got into a dumb argument with a bunch of people about one-knee-down catching. Traditionalists like John Smoltz dislike it and, because they dislike it so much, they are inclined to falsely claim that one-knee-down catching leads to more passed balls and wild pitches and that that’s not worth whatever benefit the stance gives a catcher in framing pitches.

At the outset it’s probably worth noting that (a) major league clubs can and do track such things; and (b) the fact that they uniformly mandate, or at least strongly encourage, one-knee-down catching strongly suggests that one-knee-down catching is beneficial. They wouldn’t do it otherwise. And it’s not just a net benefit with the framing/blocking tradeoffs favoring it. Contrary to what Smoltz and others believe, passed balls and wild pitches are actually down since one-knee-down became the standard. JJ Cooper of Baseball America has written pretty extensively about that and I shared that stuff with my haters. Most of the haters rejected that information, however, probably because most haters are idiots.

But hey, let’s try again, shall we? I blocked most of my haters, but if you see any of ‘em, please send them this article from Mike Petriello of MLB.com in which it’s pretty conclusively shown that one-knee-down is the way to go both for framing and for blocking pitches/controlling the running game. This is true both for the best defensive catchers in the game like Patrick Bailey and for otherwise weak catchers like Austin Wells. The article takes a particularly close look at both Wells and the Dodgers Will Smith, who is a much stronger defensive catcher, to illustrate this.

Yeah, one-knee-down catching is weird to see at first. And yeah the old timers hate it. But it’s not the first innovation that baseball old timers hate. Hell, I can’t think of anything new that the old timers didn’t hate, at least at first.

Other Stuff

Jackwagon corporations sue to block “Click to Cancel”

Last week the Federal Trade Commission approved a new rule that makes it easier to cancel recurring subscriptions or memberships. The rule is nicknamed “Click to Cancel” and the idea is that it should be just as easy to cancel a recurring subscription as it was to set it up. The rule will make it so that, say, the gym you joined doesn’t make you jump through a billion hoops, endure high-pressure “exit interviews” and other Kafkaesque nonsense simply to cancel. Same for “free trial” subscriptions or memberships which, if you don’t affirmatively opt out before a set time, automatically charge your card. It specifically bans companies from making you call or do an online chat with customer service people if you didn’t have to talk to them to set up the subscription in the first place, thereby bypassing the hard sell sales pitches they’re trained to give you if you say you want to cancel.

“Click to Cancel” is a rare thing in this day and age: a simple government-imposed rule which removes an annoyance from the lives of everyday Americans and prevents them from being taken advantage of by corporations which would love nothing more than to extract money from people against their will and who have the means and the technology to make doing so pretty damn easy. It’s the sort of thing the government should be doing a hell of a lot more of.

So, of course, those corporations are suing to block the rule:

That trade group represents Comcast, Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, among others. Companies which operate all of the big streaming services, a great many of which people continue to pay for out of inertia or ignorance either because cancelling is a giant hassle or because people think they cancelled but did not. What’s more, the companies filed the appeal against the FTC rule in the 5th Circuit, which is a popular spot for businesses challenging regulatory action because it’s stacked with Trump-appointees and pro-business conservatives.

We’re at a place in our country’s history where it’s almost impossible for government to do anything to help everyday, ordinary people. Corporations won’t have it and the courts, appointed by politicians who value corporations over people, are more than eager to stop anything which might make Americans’ lives better. This applies to environmental rules and laws, health and safety regulations, stuff like student loan forgiveness, and now a rule which is specifically aimed at stopping transparent gouging.

We simply cannot have nice things because our having nice things might harm a corporation’s bottom line.

A different Black Dahlia suspect

I’ve never been obsessed with the Black Dahlia murder case like some people are but one of the first books I ever read after I was introduced to hard boiled crime fiction was James Ellroy’s, The Black Dahlia, which features a fictionalized version of the investigation into Elizabeth Short’s murder. I loved the book and, because of that, I’ve read a handful of non-fiction books and articles about the still-unsolved 1947 case.

Yesterday the Los Angeles Times published a story about the case focusing on the work of Larry Harnisch, a retired Los Angeles Times copy editor, who is now arguably the world’s top authority on The Black Dahlia. He is currently working on his own book about it which, per the article, is currently over 150,000 words and counting. The story — which, unfortunately, is paywalled so I can’t share an accessible link for non-subscribers — provides a good overview of the crime and the futile efforts which many have made over the years to solve it, these days almost exclusively in the form of non-fiction writing. Harnisch is not impressed with any of them, including a couple I read and which seemed plausible at the time:

The Hodel book was the last one I read and it seemed fairly convincing to me at the time. At least as convincing as that kind of thing can be given that we’re pretty much at the mercy of these authors who are not, by any stretch of the imagination, rigorous historians or, in most cases, experienced criminal investigators.

All of which makes me want Harnisch to finish his damn book so I can see if his suspect — a surgeon whose estranged wife lived near where Short’s body was found and who knew Short’s sister — adds up. Given how much of a sucker I am for this kind of thing I’m guessing my first impression will be “yup, works for me!”

Help Matthew Sweet

On Tuesday morning a music account I follow said it was the 33rd anniversary of the release of Matthew Sweet’s power pop masterpiece, “Girlfriend.” I loved that album and, while it’s been a good bit since I gave it a spin, I listened to it a zillion times in the 1990s. The tweet made me think about putting it on some point soon and revisiting it.

Then, about two hours later, a link to this GoFundMe crossed my timeline:

One day I hope we’ll have free, universal healthcare for all in this country, but for now that’s a long ways off. So, if you ever jammed out to “Girlfriend” back in the day and if you have a couple of bucks laying around to help with Sweet’s transport, care, and rehabilitation, I’m sure it would be used and appreciated. Thanks, all.

Have a great day everyone.