Cup of Coffee: October 31, 2024

Good morning! Happy Halloween! And welcome to Free Thursday!

And most importantly, congratulations to the Los Angeles Dodgers, your 2024 World Series champions!

And That Happened 

Dodgers 7, Yankees 6: There were all kinds of things that shouldn’t have happened in this World Series, but the Yankees blowing a 5-0 lead thanks to five unearned runs in Game 5 was definitely something that shouldn’t have happened.

Aaron Judge dropped that ball in center field. Anthony Volpe and Jazz Chisholm Jr. blundered a putout at third. Gerrit Cole failed to cover first base. If any one of those plays had been made the Dodgers likely would not have scored any runs that frame and today would be a travel day in advance of Game 6 in Los Angeles. But none of those plays were made, the Yankees’ jumping out to that early 5-0 lead was a distant memory, and the rest of the game was all about seeing which pitching staff full of shredded arms had more left in it.

Credit to Cole for bouncing back from that disaster fifth inning to give Aaron Boone another inning and two-thirds without allowing another run. Kudos to Blake Treinen for coming into the game in the sixth, throwing 42 pitches, and giving Dave Roberts two and a third. Everyone else was gassed — the teams combined to issue 16 walks, and fatigue was a big part of that — and the Dodgers managed to plate two via sacrifice flies to the Yankees’ one the rest of the way. L.A. had no relievers left at all but Treinen’s long outing allowed Roberts to bring in Walker Buehler in the ninth inning to close it out.

Freddie Freeman was, obviously, named World Series MVP. His personal streak of six straight World Series gams with a home run ended last night, but he had a two-run single in that fifth inning. He homered in four of the five games of the Series, including that walkoff grand slam in Game 1. He drove in 12 runs, tying Bobby Richardson’s World Series record, though Richardson needed seven games to get there to Freeman’s five. The only way he wasn’t going to be MVP was if the Yankees did the unprecedented and came back from a 3-0 deficit to win it all but that possibility ended when Alex Verdugo struck out to end things.

It’s the Dodgers’ eighth championship in franchise history and their second in five seasons. They’ll hold their World Series parade in Los Angeles tomorrow.

Only 102 days until pitchers and catchers report.

The Daily Briefing

Really, ESPN?

For reasons that only he and his ESPN editors know, Jesse Rogers tracked down Austin Capobianco, the Rally Jackass who pried the ball from Mookie Betts’ glove on Tuesday night, and wrote what amounts to a “oh, those Yankees fans sure are passionate!” human interest profile on him early yesterday morning. That Rogers completely whiffed here as far as tone and judgment is evidenced in this passage:

It was absolutely not reminiscent of the Jeffrey Maier situation in that a literal child reaching for a ball in play and catching it a foot or two above an outfielder’s head is a fundamentally different deal than a player catching a ball and then having two grown-ass adults literally grab his arm and glove and physically rip the ball away from him. If Rogers can’t see that — and if he can’t see how equating what these jerks did to “the stuff of October legend” is wildly off — he’s not cut out for this kind of work.

As for Capobianco, here’s what that dipshit had to say about his actions:

Nothing worse than a fan who thinks he’s part of the team. It’s not a mindset that can go anywhere good, for them or for anyone else.

The most surprising thing in that story was Capobianco — a Yankees season ticket holder — claiming that Yankees officials told him he was free to come back for Game 5 last night. I assumed when I read that that he was full of crap, but early yesterday afternoon ESPN reported that “Major League Baseball instructed the Yankees to bar season-ticket holder Austin Capobianco and John Peter from Yankee Stadium on Wednesday night. The source did not know if the ban would apply to any Yankee Stadium games next season.” Rogers himself had said in a tweet that the Yankees were “asked” by MLB to do bar them from the game and that the team planned to refund them for their tickets.

The way that was phrased suggests to me that the Yankees took no affirmative steps to ban this jackass themselves, which is frankly nuts. The Yankees certainly know how to ban fans who assault players on the field. Shame on them if they didn’t take that step here without MLB asking them to. And shame on both the Yankees and MLB if those dudes are not banned permanently, as is almost always the case for fans who do things akin to what Capobianco and his pal did.

I believe him

The Athletic asked Tommy Pham what he would’ve done if he was playing right field and those Yankees fans tried to take the ball from him:

I am 100% certain that if Pham was out there on Tuesday night today we’d be talking about whether his self-defense arguments were sufficient for him to beat a second degree murder charge.

That ain’t it, man

Saw this tweet after Game 4 from a Los Angeles-based reporter:

I tend to be way more Team Los Angeles than Team New York when it comes to preferred mode/speed of urban life, and if I had to live in one or the other I’d choose L.A. for a bunch of reasons personal to me. But this take is absolutely unhinged. Another train will be by in like five minutes and everyone you see waiting here will be on it. Dodger Stadium postgame traffic, in contrast, is a seemingly never-ending miserable circle of hell to which no one should be subjected.

The subway is one of the absolute best things about New York. The driving is the absolute worst thing about L.A. This is not that hard.

A women’s baseball league plans to launch in 2026

The Women's Pro Baseball League, WPBL, announced on Tuesday that it will begin play in the summer of 2026 with six teams, all in the northeastern United States.

The WPBL is being co-founded by Justine Siegal, who became the first female coach of an MLB team when the Oakland A’s hired her to work with its instructional league team in 2015, and Keith Stein, a Canadian lawyer and businessman who has been involved with lower-level Canadian baseball leagues. Japanese pitcher Ayami Sato and two-time World Series-winning manger Cito Gaston have been named as special advisors to the WPBL.

 The league's website says that team owner selection is underway. It plans on securing a national broadcast deal for its inaugural season

Other Stuff

Some savvy political analysis for y’all

Yesterday Arnold Schwarzenegger — a longtime Republican — endorsed Kamala Harris for president. Back in August Jesse Ventura, a political independent but one whose politically unorthodox base of support no doubt contains a great many people who have voted for Trump twice and who plan to once again, also endorsed Kamala Harris. This means that both former governors who starred in the movies “The Running Man” and “Predator” have endorsed Kamala Harris.

Yeah, I know that’s somewhat random, but if the political press can spend decades pretending that “soccer moms,” “security moms,” and “Home Depot dads” are a coherent voting demographic I can pretend that “80s action star governors” are.

The Democrats save the McFlurry

You drive up to a McDonald’s drive-thru, thinking you’re gonna get a delicious McFlurry or perhaps a soft-serve cone. The person on the intercom tells you, however, that you cannot get your delicious McFlurry or soft-serve cone because the machine is broken. It’s a thing that is so common that “McFlurry machine is broken” has long since become a meme. Someone has even created McBroken, a website where you can check and see if your local machine is up and running. 

The reason the McFlurry machines are always broken is that every single McDonald’s soft-serve machine is made by one company: Taylor Company. What’s more, Taylor Company owns a copyright on the machines — protected by Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) — which mandates that, if one breaks, only Taylor is authorized to come fix it. Indeed, McDonald’s franchise owners who try to fix it themselves can be sued or possibly even be subject to federal prosecution as a consequence. So if a machine breaks it’s all on Taylor to fix it and Taylor will get there if and when it damn well feels like it. McDonald’s stores sometimes have to wait months before a repair person can get them up and running again. The repairs, when they come, are MASSIVELY expensive because fuck you, franchise owner, that’s why.

If this seems like horseshit, you’re right, and the FTC and DOJ recently got involved in an effort to create an exemption to the DMCA which would allow for owners of commercial and industrial equipment to repair their own machines. The U.S. Copyright office granted the exemption as it relates to retail-level commercial food preparation equipment which allows third parties to bypass digital locks on machines for repairs. The exemption went into effect this past Monday, which means that McDonald’s franchisees can now fix their own McFlurry machines or hire a handyman to do it for them. Which, according to various articles I’ve read since I became aware of the McFlurry memes, is actually not that hard once the digital locks are out of the way.

Whether or not you care about McFlurries, this is the sort of thing that consumer-friendly, as opposed to corporate-friendly regulators, such as the Biden Administration’s FTC, which has been led by Lina Khan, are capable of doing. In a normal world such a thing would not even be remotely newsworthy, but given how business-oriented the country’s regulatory scheme has become over the past 40 years, it’s actually quite remarkable when something that makes loads of sense and makes things better for everyday people happens.

“There are hundreds of trails hidden in the pavement and dirt”

In early 2023 I went out to California for a few days to hike with my friend Ethan. The plan was to hike in three or four different places in as many days, with the hike up Mt. Tam being the centerpiece of it all. And yes, hiking up Mt. Tam was a load of fun, no question, as was Mt. Diablo and the Purisma Creek Redwoods Reserve. But I knew all of those would be cool. What really surprised me was hiking the San Francisco Crosstown Trail.

That last one was exactly what it sounds like: a 17 mile trail — well, a route — through the middle of San Francisco starting from Candlestick Point in the southeast to the seaside cliffs at Lands End in the northwest. The route connects a number of city parks, urban green spaces, and various neighborhoods where tourists rarely if ever go. And, of course, because it’s San Francisco, there was a lot of up-and-down to it all, so in addition to being super interesting, it was a still a nice workout.

Outside recently did a feature about the San Francisco Crosstown Trail and similar urban trails which it calls “instant trails.” Meaning that they have simply been mapped out by people and shared online as opposed to being trails conceived and constructed by park authorities over a long period of time. There’s a second San Francisco one in there, as well as some in Boston, Seattle, New York, Chicago, and Denver. There’s also a how-to section if you’re interested in creating an instant trail in your own town.

Traveling to an exotic, faraway place to hike is wonderful, no question. But it’s also hard to get the time and money to do that. The key part of walking and hiking is the actual walking and hiking, and there are interesting places for you to do it that are far closer than you may realize.

Cats, man

Yesterday we got a carpet runner installed on our stairs:

One of our cats now insists on going up and down the stairs on the thin, uncovered strip on either side because, apparently, we bought carpet made of lava. And this is the smarter of our two cats.

OK, Buzz

Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin endorsed Donald Trump for president yesterday, citing Trump’s prioritization of space exploration while he was in office.

Trump did some superficial things while in office that made it appear as though he prioritized space exploration. Most of that was either eyewash related to manned Mars missions that will likely never happen or the creation of an unnecessary bureaucracy in the form of Space Force which is basically just doing what the Air Force was already doing but now with more bloat and P.R. He also made a big deal out of the privatization of space exploration which just so happened to shovel a bunch of tax dollars to Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.

Meanwhile, he spent his entire term trying to gut NASA’s work in studying climate change. He attempted, unsuccessfully, to end NASA’s Carbon Monitoring System and the Orbiting Carbon Observatory 3 mission. He wanted to cancel NASA’s ocean-observing PACE mission and the climate-studying CLARREO mission. NOAA, meanwhile, was subjected to decreases in funding for its environmental satellite programs and, of course, Project 2025 plans to basically eliminate NOAA altogether.

Not that I suppose Buzz Aldrin really dug into all of that when deciding to endorse Trump. I mean, sure, Buzz has often been on the side of the angels during his long public life, but given that his claim to fame would not have been possible without working with a Nazi, I suspect on some level he’s just choosing a candidate based on personal comfort level.

Have a great day everyone.