Cup of Coffee: October 28, 2021

Good morning! And welcome to Free Thursday!

As of last night the Fall Classic is tied up at one, even if neither of the games have been classic. The Mets executive search is classic Mets, the Cleveland Guardians got sued over the name Cleveland Guardians, the Athletics are poised to get a big handout in Oakland, Nelson Cruz won a big award, and I have an update on that Canadian anti-tax group that, in hindsight, should’ve been flamingly obvious to me but wasn’t for some reason.

In Other Stuff, Senator Tom Cotton (R- Antebellum) is dangerously close to an epiphany, I get cranky about what’s going down — and what’s being cut out — of the budget bill before Congress, and for a second day we talk about war games. No, not “WarGames,” the movie, but feel free to talk about that amongst yourselves. I’ll give you a topic:

At one point Dabney Coleman’s character, Mr. McKittrick, says that the system will not accept the launch codes WOPR comes up with (or which anyone enters) unless they are at DEFCON 1. DEFCON decisions, however, are made by humans. As the movie is racing toward its climax, WOPR is trying to guess the code and launch the missiles while they are at DEFCON 1, so why doesn’t Barry Corbin’s General Berninger just switch things back to DEFCON 2? I mean, earlier he said he’s piss on a spark plug if he thought it’d do any good, and now he won’t do the ONE thing that will prevent nuclear holocaust while he watches some snot-nosed kid plays tic-tac-toe? MY GOD.

No, I’m not mad, you’re mad. Shut up. Let’s talk about baseball.

And That Happened

Astros 7, Atlanta 2: Houston strikes back.

This one followed the same basic script as Game 1, with said script flipped. The losing starter, this time Atlanta’s Max Fried, got rocked early, with Houston’s four-run second inning basically deciding it. It was all singles and sacrifices as opposed to big blasts — Jose Siri, Martin Maldonado and Michael Brantley each had RBI singles and the Astros scored another via a throwing error — but runs are runs. A later fielder’s choice and a José Altuve dinger in the seventh closed things out.

Astros starter José Urquidy held Atlanta to two runs across five innings, giving up just six hits and striking out seven on 74 pitches. The Astros bullpen held Atlanta to one hit across the final four frames. It was a solid outing that, combined with today’s day off, resets things nicely for Houston heading into the road games.

In the end it was the second bad start in a row for Fried in these playoffs and, between that and the loss of Charlie Morton on Tuesday night, Atlanta manager Brian Snitker has some problems going forward. They’re off today and will start Ian Anderson in Game 3 tomorrow night. After that, though, it’ll be a scheduled bullpen game on Saturday and, in all likelihood, an unscheduled bullpen game on Sunday which would’ve been Morton’s next turn. Fried made some noises after the game last night about being willing to go on short rest for Game 5, but at this point I don’t know how you can have any confidence in him being able to do that.

At least Atlanta got a few eat-em-up innings from Fried after the outcome was basically decided so as to partially preserve the bullpen for what will be a lot of work in its future, but it’s gonna be a rough go against a tough Astros lineup given that Atlanta has one reliable starter and way too many innings for even its strong bullpen to fully cover. Still, Atlanta leaves Houston with a split, and that’s something I’m guessing Snitker would’ve taken sight unseen ahead of time.

As for the rest of us: after a couple of ho-hum affairs lacking much in the way of drama, we’re still waiting for an entertaining World Series contest.

The Daily Briefing

The Mets executive search sounds like a total clusterfuck

Early yesterday I wrote about how the Mets were keying on Brewers GM Matt Arnold to fill their top baseball operations job. Late yesterday morning we learned that Arnold has withdrawn his name from consideration. He will remain with the Brewers as GM, with a contract extension to boot.

Why is the Mets executive search proving to be so hard? Maybe this, from the Daily News, has something to do with it:

Chris Christie, eh? Now I’m seeing why this is such a mess. Add on to it Chris Christie’s son (why?) and it’s an even bigger mess. And that’s before you get to the whole Sandy Alderson situation.

Alderson is still there and, while he is supposedly moving full-time to the business side upon hiring someone, it’s understandable to be skeptical that this lifelong baseball dude is just gonna turn off his baseball dudeness. Oh, and then there’s the fact that Alderson’s son, Bryn Alderson, is one of the team’s assistant GMs. From what people inside the game have told me Bryn is not just some nepotism case — he knows his stuff and is seen as having a great future — but as anyone who has worked in that sort of situation before can attest, that doesn’t exactly help matters. Hell, it may make things worse, what with knowing that if you screw something up your boss’ kid is waiting in the wings. On top of that you’d have to deal with Steve Cohen himself, who spent his first year in the owner’s chair tweeting stuff about hitters approaches and whatnot.

Between a meddling owner, people who know zero about baseball aiding in that owner’s search and, between the Christies and the Aldersons, a double shot of nepotism in play, it isn’t all that hard to imagine why no one wants that job.

Cleveland Guardians sued over their name

Last summer the Cleveland Baseball Club announced that it would rebrand as the Cleveland Guardians this offseason. The only snafu: a co-ed roller derby team, also named the Cleveland Guardians, already exists.

The roller derby team has used the name since its inception in 2014 and uses a representation of the same Guardian statue figures — from a local bridge — that the baseball team teased as their new logo/mascot. They are also the owners of the clevelandguardians.com domain as well as the social media handle @ClevelandGuardians on Instagram and Facebook. There’s also a pending trademark claim on “Cleveland Guardians” going back to last year which predates the team’s application from over the summer.

When all that hit the news, most people assumed that the roller derby team could be fairly easily bought off. Others suggested that its trademark claim was somehow made in bad faith and that the roller derby team was a would-be squatter trying to get rich quick. Either way, most folks speculated that the roller derby team would not serve as a blocker for the baseball team’s rebranding jamming.

Whoops! 

The lawsuit said that the baseball team offered to buy the name and attendant rights from the roller derby team but that the offer was an insult: “likely no more than 15 minutes of annual team revenue,” the lawsuit says.

The plaintiffs also get in this fun jab:

I’m sure this all ends in a larger check than the Dolan family intended being cut to the roller derby team, but I’m still struck by how lazy and amateurish the baseball team has approached this entire renaming process. You ask the roller derby team for their number. Unless it’s facially ridiculous, you match that number. Case closed.

Nelson Cruz wins the Roberto Clemente Award

Nelson Cruz was announced as the winner of the 2021 Roberto Clemente Award yesterday. The award, which goes to the Major Leaguer who “best exemplifies the game of baseball, sportsmanship, community involvement and the individual’s contribution to his team,” was won by Adam Wainwright in 2020. While Cruz played for both the Minnesota Twins and the Tampa Bay Rays this past season, he was the Twins’ Clemente Award nominee. Cruz was previously nominated for the Clemente Award by the Twins in 2020 and the Seattle Mariners in 2018.

The basis for his win: recognition of his generosity and humanitarian efforts both in Minnesota and his hometown of Las Matas de Santa Cruz, Dominican Republic. To wit:

• He helped feed more than 700 families and provided financial support to individuals not able to work due to the pandemic. In total, nearly 1,200 families received direct support from Cruz due to COVID-related hardships;

• After a childhood friend lost his home to a fire, Cruz provided his town with a fire engine, 80 firefighter uniforms and an ambulance to help treat and transport people to the nearest hospital, which is nearly an hour away;

• Each year Cruz brings dentists and optometrists to his town’s clinic to provide checkups, medicine and eyewear. In 2020, 500 patients received a variety of much-needed dental services;

• In an effort to break the cycle of poverty in communities of need, Cruz commissioned studies to understand what resources are needed most in his hometown. This summer, Nelson’s Boomstick23 Foundation began construction on an education and technical center, a place to host training for technical skills and how to better use farmland to produce crops. The training is aimed to provide skills and a path toward employment and income stability. Cruz will equip the center with computers to help young athletes complete their high school education and give an opportunity to go to college; and

• Cruz was a leader in generating support from MLB, the Major League Baseball Players Association and the MLBPA Players Trust resulting in a $400,000 donation to the Dominican Republic to provide medical equipment and address food insecurity during the pandemic.

Yeah, I’d say he earned the award. Congratulations, Nelson Cruz.

Athletics clear a hurdle for a new ballpark in Oakland

On Tuesday night the Alameda County, California Board of Supervisors voted 4-1 in favor of a non-binding resolution to commit tax dollars to the $12 billion Howard Terminal project, which includes the proposed new ballpark for the Oakland A’s and for development surrounding it. Oakland’s mayor Libby Schaaf said the vote, “paves a clear path to keep the A’s rooted in Oakland and build a world-class waterfront ballpark district that will benefit Bay Area residents for generations to come.”

The vote was, technically, on the creation of an Enhanced Infrastructure Financing District. Which is California’s name for a tax increment financing district, or a TIF, which abates property taxes to help incentivize and finance a development project.

On one level that looks like a straight handout of tax dollars, in the form of foregoing tax revenue. And yeah, it kinda is. The argument in favor of it, though, is that if the A’s and whoever else develops that site does not get the tax breaks, nothing would’ve happened on the site to begin with, so the county is really out nothing. By doing the TIF now, sure, there are no tax revenues flowing — and there is risk to the County of cost overruns and the need to commit policing and other infrastructure costs — but down the line there will be a big shiny development there which will be a civic good and, eventually, will generate tax revenue.

Most of the time that’s a totally B.S. argument. In this case it may be slightly less b.s. given how massive an undertaking the Howard Terminal project is, what with toxic waste and the conversion of industrial areas and all of that. Unlike some projects which get TIFs for development that, actually, probably would’ve happened without a TIF, it’s not like some strip mall or apartment complexes were going to get put up at Howard Terminal if the county stayed out of it.

Still, this whole project — like every stadium project — is promising way, way, way more than it’ll ever deliver. Indeed, according to some claims, a stadium, 3,000 apartments, and a few offices and restaurants will generate something like $2 billion in economic activity in the county that would not have been there at all if the A’s had stayed in a different part of the county. That is laughable in the extreme. As is the idea that the project will lead to the creation of a bunch of affordable housing, as these projects never fulfill that promise. Indeed, at the meeting on Tuesday night approving the resolution, even the four County Commissioners who voted in favor of the plan talked about how uncertain they were about any of this but appeared to feel obligated to vote in favor of it lest they be blamed for allowing the A’s to leave town. Which is to say: same-old, same-old.

There are, apparently, still a number of things to be resolved. The A’s still, I gather, believe that these subsidies are not enough and are holding out for more. Those four County Commissioners, meanwhile, may actually learn something about this project at some point and maybe they won’t like it. There are still twists and turns to navigate.

But it does seem like Oakland and Alameda County are foregoing the best option here: telling the A’s to kiss their butts and go have fun in Las Vegas. Eventually, I suspect, the A’s are going to get what they want.

Update on the Canadian anti-tax people

Yesterday I highlighted a Canadian group which erected a billboard in St. Petersburg, Florida telling the Tampa Bay Rays that Montreal would not give them a publicly-funded stadium. In it I referred to the group, the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, as a nonpartisan group. Many of you have informed me that that is not the case and that they are your bog standard right wing anti-tax people who, while they happen to be in the right about the stadium thing, are generally jackwagons.

I should’ve guessed that given how almost all of those sorts of groups roll. Alas. In the meantime, I’ll just skate on some “the enemy of my enemy” vibes until they cease to be useful and move on to other things.

Other Stuff

Tom Cotton: dangerously close to an epiphany

Over the past couple of years Republicans have cast critical race theory and the study of America’s history of slavery and racism as, perhaps, their biggest enemy. The primary focus of their ire is the New York Times’ award-winning 1619 Project which endeavors to reframe United States history around the country’s dependence upon slavery and the exploitation of Black Americans. Republicans have lashed out at the project — and have moved to block the 1619 Project from schools’ curricula — disparaging it as “divisive.”

It does not take a genius to appreciate why a critical examination of our country’s racist past — and the consequences of it which persist and prevail to this day — is threatening to modern Republicans. It’s a party, after all, that primarily seeks to protect the position of the wealthy and the powerful and does so in large part by appealing to the fear and racial resentment of an overwhelmingly white constituency. If more people were to understand and appreciate how the conditions which exist today are rooted in the conditions which existed 60, 160, and 360 years ago, well, that would present a pretty big problem for a party which is deeply invested in the status quo and people believing the erroneous notion that everyone has a fair shot at the American dream.

Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton — who likely has designs on the 2024 GOP presidential nomination — has cast himself as the foremost enemy of the 1619 Project and that which is seeks to teach us. Last year he proposed the “Saving American History Act of 2020,” which would prohibit K-12 schools from using federal funds to teach curriculum related to the 1619 Project, and to make schools that otherwise did so ineligible for certain professional-development grants. Cotton has said that “The 1619 Project is a racially divisive and revisionist account of history that threatens the integrity of the Union by denying the true principles on which it was founded.”

On Sunday Cotton sat for an interview with the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. In it, he tried to thread a needle in which he could show himself to be strongly opposed to the 1619 project while not coming off as a defender of slavery and the United States’ racist past. He failed in that regard, I think, because he said the quiet part out loud:

Nikole Hannah-Jones, who won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary for her introductory essay to the 1619 Project, said in response, “If chattel slavery – heritable, generational, permanent, race-based slavery where it was legal to rape, torture, and sell human beings for profit – were a ‘necessary evil’ as Tom Cotton says, it’s hard to imagine what cannot be justified if it is a means to an end.”

You can’t argue with that.

Beyond that, I think it’s also worth observing that Cotton does not appear to fully understand what he’s actually saying in that interview. And I do not think that he realizes that he is dangerously close to an actual epiphany.

Cotton and those who follow his thinking advocate the completely phony notion that, actually, the Founding Fathers abhorred slavery. They abhorred it so much, he argues, that they set up a brilliant system of government which ensured that slavery would eventually become untenable and would end! Cotton is a little fuzzy on why they allegedly chose a system that would take close to a century for that to occur, and why, alternatively, they didn’t just create one in which there was no slavery, but I suppose there’s a lot of time between now and 2024 for him to iron out those details.

Key to that whole idea of that long-release poison pill, though, is that phrase “necessary evil.” A phrase that, once you think about it for even ten seconds tells you something that is completely incontrovertible: that without slavery, the United States could not have been created and could not have developed the way that it did. Which . . . is the very point of the 1619 project.

So, congratulations Senator Cotton. I’m pretty sure I agree with you here.

The ever-shrinking budget package

Democratic leaders and White House officials kept negotiating yesterday to resolve a number of key disagreements on Joe Biden’s expansive social safety net and climate bill known as the Build Back Better Act and to try to actually pass something soon. As the negotiations have gone on you have, no doubt, noticed that West Virginia’s Joe Manchin and Arizona’s Krysten Sinema — a couple of donor-captured conservatives who happen to be caucusing with Democrats — are basically rejecting half of everything in it. Not that they’re alone, mind you. They’re just the ones getting the press for tanking all of this because they’re drama queens willing to put their name on their opposition to progress. There are a great many others in the Democratic caucus who fail to care about working people and vulnerable people but prefer to do so far more more quietly.

I’ve refrained from doing a daily blow-by-blow of this because, frankly, I find it all too depressing, but I can’t help but note that yesterday the bill lost increased taxes on billionaires — billionaires! — and even a modest amount of paid family leave, which is something every other industrialized country on the damn planet has. Because, of course, it makes perfect sense to protect the fantastically wealthy from an increase in their tax burden that doesn’t even amount to rounding error on rounding error but which could be transformative for the rest of society while telling working families tough shit if they need time off to deal with emergencies and tragedies.

Everything that is being dropped from this package is wildly popular among Americans of both parties. That which is being preserved or protected by these deletions — mostly the interests of the rich — is supported by virtually no one but the donor class and, thus by extension, members of Congress. Meanwhile the Democrats continue to do little if anything with their power, thus all but guaranteeing that Republicans will return to power, and boy howdy do they know what to do with it when they get it, even if all of it is horrible and destructive. Either way, it’s a never-ending cycle that only benefits the wealthy.

If only we had a democracy or something.

More fixed war games

Yesterday’s item about the rigged 1932 war game in which an American admiral accurately predicted how the Japanese would overwhelm Pearl Harbor years later inspired one of you to hip me to a similar thing which occurred 70 years later, called the Millennium Challenge 2002.

That was a war game in which a simulated United States force squared off against a simulated Persian Gulf country . . . and the United States force got its ass kicked because the general in charge of the Persian Gulf country went old school in some pretty damn creative ways. Think Commander Adama getting rid of all networked computers and things so that the Cylons can’t infiltrate them. Except, as was the case in 1932, the people in charge of the war game didn’t like the outcome so they negated the results. They reset the simulation, put all kinds of unnatural constraints on the General in charge of the simulated Gulf country, and essentially used the war game to validate their preexisting beliefs of inevitable American victory.

Anyone who knows a lot about the military or, for that matter, knows a lot about any large bureaucracy which basically creates its own weather, gravity, and reality, will probably nod their head at this and can probably point to a million examples of it occurring in other contexts. Administrative inevitability is a hell of a drug.

Except, when that administrative inevitability is applied to the military, it might just lose you a war one day. How crazy would that be?

Have a great day, everyone.