Cup of Coffee: October 3, 2024

Good morning! And welcome to Free Thursday!

Let’s get to it, shall we?

And That Happened 

Here are the scores. Here are the highlights:

Tigers 5, Astros 2: Andy Ibañez is not the world’s biggest offensive threat — he had only two RBI in 48 at-bats going back to late August and hadn’t driven in a single run since September 10 — but he hit a pinch-hit bases-clearing, two-out double off Josh Hader in a tie game in the eighth to put the Tigers up 5-2, which is where things ended up. Not that I’d call Ibañez lucky here. Hader had him in a 1-2 count, but Ibánez had Hader totally clocked and fouled off a couple of pitches which looked like he might’ve driven hard with just a slight adjustment. He made that adjustment on the fifth pitch he saw and nailed it into the left field corner for what proved to be the winning runs.

In related news:

Seems like the kind of drink that might . . . make you choke.

The Tigers move on the ALDS. The Astros go home. In a little less than two weeks, we’ll have the first ALCS without Houston since Obama was president. For real. You can look it up.

Royals 2, Orioles 1: Two RBI singles — one from Vinnie Pasquantino in the first and an infield job by Bobby Witt Jr. in the sixth — were all the Royals needed here. Well, that and four and two-thirds of shutout ball from the Kansas City bullpen following four and a third of one-run ball from Seth Lugo. Indeed, Only a total of four runs were scored in the 18 innings of this two-game series but three of them were scored by Kansas City so the Royals move on while the Orioles’ season ends with a 12-strikeout whimper. There are four teams left in the American League. Three of them are from the AL Central, just as everyone figured would be the case back when the season began, right?

Brewers 5, Mets 3: For the first time ever we have a Wild Card series going to a Game 3. That’s thanks in huge part to Jackson Chourio, who hit solo homers in the first and eighth, each of which tied the game up and pinch-hitter Garrett Mitchell who smacked a two-run shot later in the eighth to make it 5-3. So we have a decisive game tonight with Brewers rookie Tobias Myers facing off against José Quintana. The winner gets Philly.

Padres 5, Atlanta 4: San Diego jumped all over Max Fried in the second inning with Kyle Higashioka homering, Manny Machado hitting a two-run double and Jackson Merrill hitting a two-run triple. Padres starter Joe Musgrove left in the fourth with elbow tightness, however, and Atlanta chipped back with a Jorge Soler homer in the fifth and a Michael Harris II two-run shot in the eighth to make it 5-4 but Robert Suárez came in and locked it down to send the Padres on to the NLDS to face the Dodgers and to end Atlanta’s season.

Weird that, after complaining so much about the layoff that resulted from them getting a first round bye in 2023 Atlanta didn’t do so well when they got to go right into the postseason with no layoff this time around.

The Daily Briefing

Broadcasting chaos is nigh

So this is fun: Diamond Sports Group, the Sinclair subsidiary and operator of the Bally Sports channels, went into bankruptcy court yesterday, formally announced that it will no longer broadcast games for two teams — the Tampa Bay Rays and Detroit Tigers — and threatened to cease broadcasting all but one of the other major league teams it currently televises in 2025.

The only one it says it will definitely continue to broadcast is Atlanta. It says it will drop Cleveland, Texas, Minnesota, Anaheim, Cincinnati, Kansas City, Miami, Milwaukee, and St. Louis if they don’t renegotiate their TV deals on terms that are better for Diamond Sports Group. It’s worth noting that several of those teams have agreements with both Diamond and other carriers in the form of joint ventures that would almost certainly lead to lawsuits if Diamond carries out its threat and drops the clubs.

Evan Drellich of The Athletic reported that representatives from Major League Baseball said that they were "blindsided" by Diamond's announcement and that they did not have a response at this time. Though they maybe should’ve anticipated this given that in late August the NBA and NHL teams carried by Diamond did, in fact, negotiate new deals with the broadcaster. That MLB didn’t have a response ready, of course, could mean that it simply has no interest in working with the company anymore and would prefer to itself take over the broadcasts of the remaining Diamond teams the way it has with the San Diego Padres and Arizona Diamondbacks.

Indeed, Major League Baseball is believed to prefer, at least over the long term, to decouple itself and its clubs from the regional sports network model and take local broadcasting rights in-house in an effort to sell them as a direct-to-consumer streaming and/or broadcasting package, perhaps in partnership with someone like Amazon or Apple or perhaps on its own. Given that MLB itself attempted to buy the old Fox Sports regionals before Sinclair/Diamond outbid them, it’s certainly been on the league’s mind for years. Major League Baseball obviously believes that holding and managing the rights themselves is the future of sports broadcasting. I tend to think they’re right about that.

The problem: there remain several teams — mostly the rich teams — which either own their own RSNs or do very well on the RSNs with which they’re currently doing business and would have no real incentive to abandon them for an MLB direct-to-consumer thing. We’re taking the Yankees with YES, the Mets with SNY, the Red Sox with NESN, and the Dodgers with Spectrum, among others. One would assume that, somehow, a deal could be made that meshes those arrangements with some league-wide broadcasting product, but it would require some owners to take a hit — possibly a temporary one, possibly a longer term one — for the overall good of the league which is not something modern baseball owners ever tend to do. Which sure as hell makes this one of those times in which it'd be really useful to have a commissioner who could help broker a tough but necessary deal for the good of the sport. Too bad Major League Baseball doesn’t have that!

Anyway: Diamond will be back in bankruptcy court next month, by which time MLB is expected to have made some sort of move, be it telling them to get bent or beginning to renegotiate deals. I sort of hope they tell Diamond to get bent because continuing on with this crap-ass company that is engaged in what very much looks like a dying business model seems like a bad idea.

In the meantime, keep an eye on the clubs who may have their deals yoinked away, because I have a strong feeling that this short-term broadcast uncertainty is gonna cause a bunch of them to ratchet back their spending plans for this offseason. Or at least to serve as a good excuse for them doing so.

The Marlins are firing everyone

On Tuesday word began circulating that there was a “blood bath” afoot in Miami and that virtually every Marlins coach and member of the training staff was being let go. That was confirmed yesterday when Craig Mish of the Miami Herald reported that the entire staff has been informed it will not be returning for the 2025 season. This includes all uniformed personnel, trainers, and even the clubhouse attendants. Just a complete and total purge.

I assumed that there would be some pretty significant turnover in Miami given that manager Skip Schumaker was departing and Peter Bendix, still less than a full year into his tenure as the Marlins president of baseball operations, would want to hire his own manager and have that manager help name his staff. Still, this is a deck-clearing like I cannot remember. This obviously sucks for the people losing their jobs, but I figure a lot of them saw the writing on the wall early in the year when Bendix agreed to void the team option on Schumaker for 2025 and let him walk. You don’t do that if you plan to maintain even a semblance of status quo.

I don’t think that an entirely new coaching staff — or the new clubbies! — will magically make the Marlins better, but it’s not like there’s some existing winning tradition on which to build in that organization at the moment, so it probably doesn’t hurt to start from scratch in any way they can.

The Twins fire four coaches

It’s not a house-cleaning like Miami but yesterday the Minnesota Twins dismissed hitting coaches Rudy Hernandez and David Popkins, assistant hitting coach Derek Shomon, and assistant bench/infield coach Tony Diaz. Hernandez, it should be noted, has worked for the Twins in one capacity or another for 29 years.

This comes in response to the Twins’ offense cratering in the final couple of months of the season and blowing a five-game lead in the American League Wild Card race as late as mid-August. The poor hitting definitely contributed to that but they also got bad pitching and bad defense and they had poor depth to cover for injuries or poor-performers and I’m pretty sure the hitting coaches didn’t have anything to do with any of that.

Fernando Valenzuela is having health problems

On Monday I noted that Dodgers legend Fernando Valenzuela had abruptly left the team’s broadcast booth and that word was he was not going to return during the postseason. There had been no official word about this for a week but yesterday the Dodgers released as statement saying that Fernando has “stepped away from the broadcast booth for the remainder of this year to focus on his health.”

There were no other details released by the club, but the Los Angeles Times said that Valenzuela “has reportedly been hospitalized.”

Keep a good thought in your heart for Fernando.

“Charlie Hustle”

I missed this from the other day, but over at CBS, Mike Axisa reminds us that Pete Rose’s nickname “Charlie Hustle” was actually bestowed upon him derisively due to his displaying what a couple of well-known veterans — Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford — considered to be false hustle.

I’ve known that story for many years now but it still makes me smile. And, no, not in a “ha ha Mantle and Ford made fun of Pete Rose” kind of way, though there may be a little of that. I smile because for as much as I disliked Pete Rose, he was aware that they were making fun of him and nonetheless embraced the nickname. On some level that was part of Rose’s whole self-aggrandizement-at-any-cost thing, but I honestly have a certain respect for the act of defanging the attempted mockery of others by embracing and owning it on your own terms.

Rose certainly won the P.R. war on that front for a few decades, with a hell of a lot of baseball fans buying into the notion that Rose played the game the best way it can be played. And while it’s hard to separate the Rose mythos from the Rose reality, he did play hard and did hustle and all of that while Mantle and Ford were a couple of guys who, however great they were, could’ve been better if they had Rose’s focus and drive.

I don’t want to make too big a thing out of this. Rose was still horrible for all the reasons I’ve talked about this week and no amount of hustle even comes close to making up for that, even if his Boomer fanboys loudly claim it did. And, of course, false hustle is one of the more eye-rolling things in sports. But there’s something in that story which gives one a glimpse of what made Rose a great ballplayer and I’ve always found it rather interesting.

Other Stuff

“The executive branch has no authority or function to choose the next president”

Back in July our corrupt Supreme Court issued an audacious ruling which made Donald Trump immune from criminal prosecution for anything done in his official capacity as president. The Trump case was wholly unsupported legally speaking and it was and remains utterly repugnant in the context of a democracy. It will, one day, I hope anyway, be talked about in history books as one of the Supreme Court’s lowest-ever moments and properly called out as an act of craven politics on the part of partisan justices who sought to personally shield Donald Trump from the consequences of his illegal actions.

The decision’s practical effect was to freeze multiple criminal cases against Trump. The most serious case was special prosecutor Jack Smith’s prosecution of Trump for his role in attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 election via a scheme in which he baselessly declared victory, launched a zillion frivolous lawsuits, attempted to install panels of fraudulent electoral college electors from key states and, on January 6, 2021, fomented a deadly riot intended to disrupt the official tabulation of electoral college votes. The prosecution was stopped in its tracks upon that Supreme Court ruling in July, but the trial court hearing it gave Smith and his team an opportunity to file a brief establishing that Trump’s transgressions were not perpetrated in his official capacity as president but, rather, in his personal capacity as a private citizen/political candidate, thereby allowing the case to move forward.

That’s a pretty narrow wire to walk, but Smith filed that brief and, yesterday, it was unsealed. While I will grant I’m biased against authoritarians who attempt to perpetrate bloody coups, I found it pretty goddamn compelling.

At its center is a bit of logic that seems to me inescapable: that any effort by Trump to prevail in the election, legal or illegal, is something that, by definition, is being done by a political candidate for office, not by the President of the United States. That’s because there is no official act a president can do or ever has done that plays a part in the mechanics of the electoral process. Or, as Smith put it in his brief, “the executive branch has no authority or function to choose the next president.” Which he or she doesn’t. A sitting president who is defeated or reelected executes zero official acts to count votes or confirm election results in any way.

I get that that’s a legal point — I would hope the definitive legal point — and that that can be sort of boring compared to all of the details of what Trump and his team of co-conspirators did up to and including January 6 which constitutes the bulk of what is now being reported about the brief. I also get that even if the trial court agrees with Smith that the matter will likely go back up to the corrupt Supreme Court which will almost certainly set aside all law and reason to protect Donald Trump once again. But dammit, if democracy and the rule of law are going to be swept into the ash heap of history, let no one say that it was done without a crystal-clear understanding that that is exactly what happened.

Troy Evans’ Random Roles 

The A.V. Club has a long running feature called “Random Roles” in which an interviewer names off some of the roles an actor had been in on TV or in movies over the years, and the actor then just riffs on their experiences making the show or picture. It’s usually a b-lister or a character actor, but not always. It’s a fun format given that it’s conversational and anecdotal and rarely if ever is used as a means of promoting something new. It’s usually just some unvarnished Hollywood talk, though on occasion it gets pretty weird and out there. I read them all the time.

The latest installment of it involves character actor Troy Evans, whose name you probably don’t know but whose face you likely do know from some show or another. I’d guess most people know him as Frank the desk clerk on “E.R.” This is him:

I don’t think I’ve ever had a single thought about Evans the actor as opposed to any character he’s played — which is sort of the point of being a character actor I suppose — but this installment was all kinds of fun.

The Michael Jackson anecdote was good. He talked shit about Sylvester Stallone. His “Planes, Trains and Automobiles” anecdote is fantastic. His “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” story was great. The Steven Seagal one may be better. Evans also talked about his life when he came back from Vietnam, which involved the phrase “extreme drunken jackassery” and involved a prison stint. He had a between-acting-jobs one-man show called “Troy Evans: Montana Tales And Other Bad-Ass Business.”

Evans sounds like someone whose stories you’d like to listen to all damn day. One of the best installments of “Random Roles” ever. I wish it went on for 5,000 more words.

I used to understand things

Robbie Williams is a massive pop star in England. He first came up in 1990 as part of a popular boy band, Take That, went solo in 1996, and then got even bigger. Sort of a British Justin Timberlake I suppose, though he did it before Timberlake did. For whatever reason Williams never managed to hit terribly big in the United States, but he can still fill arenas and headline massive festival shows in the UK and Europe at the age of 50. Even if you’re not entirely sure who he is, there are a handful of songs of his you have absolutely heard before.

My wife Allison is a big fan of Robbie Williams. Me not so much — it’s basic pop star stuff which I can appreciate but which I don’t necessarily get into — but Allison convinced me to watch his Netflix docuseries and she has shared a bunch of stuff with me from his social media accounts. Though I’m not likely to ever spin a Robbie Williams album myself or make a point to see him perform, I have developed something of an admiration for the guy.

Like a lot of pop stars Williams had his problems in his 20s and 30s, but these days he’s a pretty damn self aware fella who comes off like an affable goof, and I mean that in a legitimately complimentary way. It’s not often you encounter massive pop stars as seemingly guileless as he is and who you could totally picture back in the working class circumstances they came from if things went sideways. Indeed, one gets the sense that if it all went away for Williams next week he’d say “well, that’s disappointing,” sigh heavily, and then go try to get a job at a distribution center in Stoke. Maybe I’m wrong about all of that but that’s the impression that I get.

Yesterday I learned that there is a biopic coming out about him late this year. I learned about it when a teaser trailer came out. I also learned that, in the biopic, Williams is a chimpanzee. To be clear: this is not a fictional biopic of a chimpanzee musician voiced by Robbie Williams. It is the story of Robbie Williams’ life and career, with basically everything as it actually happened, except he is replaced by a CGI chimpanzee:

As soon as I saw this I shared it with Allison and we had this exchange:

So I guess, at some point soon, I’m going to go see a biopic about a British pop star in which he is portrayed by a chimpanzee, rendered “Planet of the Apes”-style via motion-capture. I’ll let you know how that goes, at least if the massive amounts of drugs I’m going to have to take to get through it enables me to form memories of the experience.

Money

Pink Floyd has agreed to sell their recorded music and name, image, and likeness rights to Sony Music for approximately $400 million, Variety reports. This does not include publishing/songwriting rights, which the individual band members hold separately. But it does include all recorded output and, just as important in the case of a band like Pink Floyd, the rights to the artwork created for its albums, its concerts, and it other various projects.

This deal was supposed to have gotten done years ago, but (a) David Gilmour and Roger Waters fighting; and (b) Waters’ many incendiary public statements delayed it over and over again. Specifically, the two main songwriters’ fighting delayed a deal getting done but once a deal was in place a couple of years ago it was delayed in closing several times because Waters has become pretty goddamn toxic. Variety speculates that the Waters-is-toxic factor ended up reducing the amount of the deal by as much as $100 million. And you think Gilmour, Nick Mason, and the estates of Richard Wright and Syd Barrett had reason to loathe Waters before.

While this deal is not a publishing thing, it falls in line with a great many rights sales by Boomer-era artists in recent years. Dylan, David Bowie, Queen, Tom Petty, KISS, and many others have done it. When these things first started happening whatever was still left of my dumb, reactionary, “don’t SELL OUT, man!” mindset from the 1990s kicked in and made me dislike them. But upon even a little reflection I decided that they make all kinds of sense.

Some of these artists are dead and most of the others who enter into these deals soon will be. They have families. They have pretty damn sophisticated estates. It’s much easier to divide up a couple hundred million bucks than it does to divide up all of the legal rights to a big pile of complicated and sometimes legally-fraught intellectual property. Do I love the fact that Sony now has the right to put one of my top-five all-time songs, Bowie’s “Heroes,” in a commercial for Wal-Mart which was pretty clearly aimed at creating P.R. cover for the exploitation of its workers during the pandemic? Of course not. But it doesn’t take away from my experiences with that song and it makes Iman’s and their daughter’s life a lot easier, so who cares? It’s pretty naive to expect that, in a world where nearly everything is commodified, commercially-successful rock and roll music won’t be too. Hell, it already was, from the moment it was written and performed.

Anyway, if you soon start to see 800 different reissues of Pink Floyd’s catalog and a whole new level of merchandise with the “Dark Side of the Moon” prism, that’s why.

What? You think I’d be so obvious to pick “Money?” Please.

Have a great day everyone.