Cup of Coffee: October 9, 2020

Good morning!

It’s Free Friday, so welcome, all. Here’s hoping you like what you see today and decide to pull the trigger on a subscription:

If not, hey, that’s OK. I’ll get you next week. Or the week after that. Or once the hot stove heats up. Baseball is seasonal, but my writing about it is not. Plus, with all the extra time on our hands in the offseason and the lack of anyone this side of a judge presiding over a libel case to tell me what I can and cannot do, things might get weird during the dark winter months. You’ll want the diversion and I bet you’ll find it’s worth your six bucks.

In other housekeeping news for newcomers, Cup of Coffee has an Instagram page if you’re into that sort of thing. I’m also selling some way-too-on-the-nose merch. Like, literally coffee cups that say “Cup of Coffee.” It’s sort of like this, but in mug form:

Look, I have a complicated life. Anything that can make things less complicated is welcome, OK?

Now, on with the show:

And That Happened

Here are the scores. Here are the highlights:

Atlanta 7, Marlins 0: That was easy enough.

Rookie Kyle Wright tossed six shutout innings and the Braves staff, overall, turned in its fourth shutout in five postseason games this year, allowing only five hits on the afternoon. This time Atlanta didn’t hit any homers, but Travis d’Arnaud and Dansby Swanson played offensive heroes again, each driving in a couple on two hits.

The shutouts are definitely something. The only other team to toss four shutouts in the first five playoff games of a given year were the the 1905 New York Giants. Granted, that was all in the World Series and it was just two guys — Christy Mathewson and Joe McGinnity — blanking the opposition, but the game was obviously a bit different then. For more modern context, the 2016 Cleveland Indians shut out their opposition five times in fifteen games. They probably should’ve won the World Series. Not that falling disappointingly short of their goal is something novel for that franchise.

Atlanta advances to the NLCS after falling in its last eight Division Series. The Dodgers are not likely to go anywhere approaching as quietly as the Marlins.

Astros 11, Athletics 6: As they did in the previous three games, the Oakland Athletics led in this one. As they did in the previous three games they blew that lead. As they did in two of those games, they watched the Astros leave them in the dust.

Here a Ramón Laureano three-run homer put Oakland up early but Michael Brantley and Carlos Correa each went deep in the fourth to put Houston on top. Laureano would homer again but so too would Brantley, after which Houston plated five unanswered runs in the middle innings to give them a seven-run cushion that Oakland’s mini ninth inning rally barely dented. Correa ended up driving in five. He, Brantley, and Kyle Tucker each went 3-for-5. Zack Greinke was not sharp but he and the guys who followed didn’t really have to be given the bats, which powered the Astros to their fourth straight ALCS.

Houston is obviously no one’s favorite outside of their own fan base. As I noted the other day, though, beware of the bad narratives about “redemption” or “proving the haters wrong” or anything like that you might see about the Astros in the coming days.

If Houston goes on to win the ALCS or even the World Series, there will be displeasure on the part of people rooting against them. That may give Astros fans who have assumed an “everyone’s against us” stance some satisfaction, but that’s not functionally different than any disliked team triumphing, which happens fairly often. What it does not do is clean the Astros’ slate or render the broad dislike of the Astros somehow foolish or illegitimate.

While the past may not impact the present, the present does not change the past. Athletic performance now does not absolve moral and ethical violations then. An Astros title in 2020 will stand on its own. The Astros title in 2017 will always be tainted.

Yankees 5, Rays 1: New York lives to fight another day thanks to homers from Luke Voit and Gleyber Torres and thanks to Jordan Montgomery and three relievers combining on a three-hitter.

Now we get a fascinating Game 5 tonight, with Gerrit Cole going for the Yankees on short rest and Tyler Glasnow going for Tampa Bay on even shorter rest. Cole will be expected the carry the weight while Glasnow will be out of the game fairly early regardless to make way for multiple relievers, but the optics of two aces facing off in a deciding game are pretty damn spiffy. Especially given that it’s a rematch of last year’s ALDS Game 5 between Houston and Tampa Bay. In that game Cole, then with the Astros, pitched eight innings of one-run ball while Glasnow was pulled after eight outs and four runs allowed as Houston cruised to a 5-1 win.

The past does not impact the present and the present does not chance the past in this instance either, but there’s a much greater opportunity to even the scales when morals and ethics aren’t involved.

Dodgers 12, Padres 3: When the only question your team has is the back end of its bullpen, having a six-run lead by the fifth inning and not needing to use any of your potential ninth inning guys comes in pretty handy.

The Dodgers fell behind early but a five-run third inning, with every run scoring on a single, righted that. The Dodgers only had one extra base hit before the ninth inning, actually, when Will Smith doubled in two and Cody Bellinger tripled in two. Each of those two drove in three and Smith had five hits on the night. The pitching was handled by Dustin May leading a parade of relievers, with Julio Urías handling the bulk of things with five innings of one-run ball in the middle.

The Dodgers now head to the NLCS for the 14th time since its advent in 1969. They’ve won seven of their first 13. If they win this one, it will be the franchise’s 25th pennant. They face Atlanta in the postseason for the fourth time. Atlanta swept the Dodgers in 1996 NLDS and Los Angeles beat Atlanta in the NLDS in four games in both 2013 and 2018. The Dodgers also swept the Milwaukee Braves in the 1959 NL tiebreaker playoff, but those were counted as extra regular season games, not postseason games.

Have I mentioned that the past does not impact the present?

The Daily Briefing

Wainwright: Half the Cardinals are flat-Earthers

Cardinals starter Adam Wainwright did analyst work during the Braves-Marlins series. He was fine. Made some good points. He doesn’t have a dynamic voice but he’s not annoying either. He could really have a future in broadcasting after his playing days are over, I think. Seems like a bright guy.

But none of that is going to be remembered as much as this thing he said during yesterday’s game:

Paul DeJong, it should be noted, was a biochemistry and pre-med major at Illinois State and earned an Academic Excellence Award from the Missouri Valley Conference when he played there. Just throwin’ that out there.

Is the Flat-Earther stuff true or was Wainwright joking around? I guess I could see either one of those things being the case.

On the one hand, ballplayers, as a group, believe a lot of messed up things. If you’ve spent any time reading about Flat-Earthers, meanwhile, you know that DeJong’s eduction is no sure-fire evidence that he’s not one of them. There are a lot of those kinds of people who’ve been to school and who are otherwise bright. Falling for conspiracy theories and nonsense has less to do with intelligence than it does with existing in uncertain times combined with social isolation and the placing of oneself in situations where one’s beliefs, be they rational or otherwise, are not challenged.

On the other hand, if I wanted to mess with a teammate, I can’t imagine a better way to do it than to use my guest commentator gig to accuse him of something that is neither illegal nor immoral but which is still deeply weird and somewhat stigmatized. This is more severe than simply saying things like “Paul DeJong slices his bagels St. Louis style,” but not as bad as saying that the Rule of Goats applies to him. It’s actually pretty masterful.

I guess we’ll hear if it’s true or not soon enough. Likely from some Cardinals beat writer who will now be forced by some editor to get the story here, all while questioning the life choices that brought him to this moment.

Home runs are good. Then, now, and always.

Every year you hear some baseball commentator worrying about some team’s lineup being “too home run-dependent” or “relying too much on the long ball.”

Mike Petriello reminds us that that’s basically crap. It was crap 100 years ago. It was crap 50, 20, 10, and two years, ago, and it is crap today. It is crap in the regular season and it’s crap in the postseason. Home runs are good, always. They are better than any alternative, always. There is literally no data or logic that proves or even suggests otherwise.

Yet, next year and maybe even next week, you’ll once again hear someone making $500K+ a year to analyze baseball on TV that, no, actually, it’s bad to rely on home runs. At which point I suppose Mike will close his eyes, swallow hard, and repost this article once again, while wondering why he’s surrounded by idiots.

Shocker: the secondary market for World Series tickets is flat

World Series tickets went on sale three days ago. According to the website TicketIQ (whatever the hell that is), the secondary market for World Series tickets is pretty flat so far. I suppose it’s not a shocker that people don’t want to pay a premium from a scalper to go to a sporting event that (a) will have no parties or festivities associated with it because of COVID; and (b) actually, presents a pretty great opportunity for you, yourself, to go get COVID. Some things are just kinda self-explanatory

Yet some people are still optimistic enough that they’re peddling tickets on the secondary market for seemingly hefty sums. At the moment the average secondary market listing is $979 per seat which seems pretty insane in my view. Relatively speaking, however, that price is 49% less expensive than the average price for last year's World Series between the Nationals and Astros. Indeed, it’s the second cheapest for World Series tickets in the last decade. Only the 2011 Rangers vs. Cardinals series was cheaper, with a $902 average secondary market ticket price.

How embarrassing it has to be for the 2011 Rangers and Cardinals. The demand was so low to see those miserable teams than you could get in cheaper there than you can for this year’s Plague Series.

The Qualifying Offer is set at $18.9 million

You know how the qualifying offer works by now: most free agents to be can be made a qualifying offer following the conclusion of the postseason. If they accept it, great, that’s their salary on a one-year deal with their most recent team. If they reject it, any team that signs that player in free agency has to surrender their highest non-protected draft pick in next June’s draft.

It’s a tax on signing free agents, basically. It’s intended to be a tax and it has done a really good job of helping to depress the free agent market. But we’ll have all winter to talk about that. For now let’s just talk about it in isolation.

The qualifying offer is set by a formula. Major League Baseball takes the average of the top 125 salaries across baseball and, bam, that’s the qualifying offer. When the qualifying offer system was implemented in 2012 it was $13.3 million. It rose each year between then and 2019, sometimes by a couple hundred thousand bucks, sometimes by over a million. For this past year, however, it actually went DOWN, from $17.9 million to $17.8 million.

Yesterday we found out what it’ll be for free agents in the coming offseason: $18.9 million. Hooray, it went up.

The coming free agent class has at least a few guys who are certain to receive qualifying offers: J.T. Realmuto, Trevor Bauer, George Springer and DJ LeMahieu will almost certainly turn down such qualifying offers, banking on big long term deals. Some more borderline calls include Marcus Semein, Andrelton Simmons, and Didi Gregorius. I’d guess no on all three, but you never know. Guys who will be free agents but who cannot receive qualifying offers include Nelson Cruz and Justin Turner, each of whom have received such offers in the past. The rules say you can only be slapped with it once.

Next year I feel like the MLBPA will do whatever it can to get rid of the qualifying offer altogether in the new Collective Bargaining Agreement. For this coming offseason, though, it remains in play.

Sharon Robinson wants Jackie Robinson’s photo taken out of a Trump campaign ad

There was a new campaign ad released by the Trump campaign this week entitled “Say What You Will About America.” The ad features a montage of Americana porn, from famous American historical figures to photos of buildings being built, hay being bailed, airplanes taking off, man landing on the moon and all that stuff. The message: “we’re Americans, dammit, and we kick ass.”

Not that it’s a positive ad: towards the end it shows a Black person standing in front of graffiti and a flag burning with a voiceover about how some people want to destroy the American way of life. Like everything else about Trump and that which he represents, it’s not subtle.

Among the historical figures in the ad: Jackie Robinson. Which did not make Robinson’s daughter, Sharon Robinson, happy. She wants it removed:

As long as Trump’s campaign has the rights to use the image — and it’s likely either licensed from a photo service or is, perhaps, in the public domain — there’s no way to make them stop using it. But the objection is noted.

At this point someone usually pipes up and says, “well, actually, Robinson was a Republican.” Yes, he was. But if anyone thinks that even remotely suggests that he’d support the modern GOP let alone Trump they’re insane.

Robinson was a Republican because he was opposed to the Democratic Party's Dixiecrat wing which was as segregationist and racist as the day was long (he was born in Georgia and his parents experienced racism at the hands of southern Democrats their whole lives). Robinson attended the Democratic convention in 1960 because he was open to switching parties, but ended up supporting Nixon because he, correctly, realized that JFK was not going to stand up to the segregationist Democrats.

In 1964, still nominally a Republican, Robinson attended the GOP convention which, for the first time, actively courted southern Democrats to join their cause in negative reaction to Lyndon Johnson signing the Civil Rights Act. That effort worked in the long run, and most southern Democrats switched parties, as part of a great realignment, between the mid-60s and the 1980s, and their political heirs remain the staunchest part of Republican party today. Either way, Robinson was repulsed by what he saw at the 1964 GOP convention and in 1968 he supported Hubert Humphrey against Nixon. In October 1968 he told reporters that “the election of Nixon would be death to the Blacks.”

Which is to say, if you think for a moment that Jackie Robinson would support a race-baiting, white-supremacist-courting man like Trump simply because at one time he happened to be a Republican, well, you’re crazy.

Gary Sánchez is a spectator in the ALDS

Gary Sánchez is normally one of New York’s big guns, but he’s been one of the few spectators in attendance for the ALDS. He was benched for the third time in four games, in favor of Kyle Higashioka, last night.

Higashioka went 2-4 with an RBI last night, he is 4-for-11 with a solo homer in the ALDS and is 5-for-16 with two RBIs in the postseason overall. Between Higashioka’s hot hand and the fact that he has basically been Game 5 starter Gerrit Cole’s personal catcher in the final month or so of the regular season, Sánchez will almost certainly ride pine again tonight.

Sánchez, a two-time All-Star, hit only .147/.253/.365 this season and he was 0-for-4 with three strikeouts in Game 2. He’s only 1-for-9 in the postseason overall.

The Rays make a roster adjustment

Tampa Bay Rays right-hander Oliver Drake was replaced on the AL Division Series roster by right-hander Trevor Richards just hours before last night’s Game 4. Drake has a flexor strain. Richards was not used in last night’s loss to the Yankees.

Drake would be ineligible to return if the Rays advance to the ALCS but would be eligible to return if they reach the World Series.

Other Stuff

Shopping is always gonna be different

The Pandemic has changed everyone’s habits. Mine maybe a bit less than others, given that I’ve worked at home for years. It’s probably changed my shopping habits less too, as my flexible hours and the fact that I live in a sorta small townish suburb means that I can do my grocery shopping when the stores are pretty empty. As a result, I don’t do the curbside thing there either.

Still, I do probably buy more things online now — can’t remember the last time I bought something at a mall — and overall in the country, online orders and curbside service have surged. There’s in an interesting story in the New York Times about all of that, talking about how all of this may now have a permanent impact on the way people shop.

The Michigan Coup

Back in April, multiple armed gunmen stormed Michigan’s State House, attempting to gain access to the house floor. They did so because they were mad that the state’s governor, Gretchen Whitmer, had the nerve to . . . try to impose some safety requirements to keep thousands of people from dying in a deadly pandemic. The nerve.

The armed gunmen roamed the halls of the state capitol in part because, just before that, Trump tweeted this:

“Yes sir!” some domestic terrorists apparently replied:

Best part: they met to discuss their plot in Dublin, Ohio at one point. I don’t know if any of you are familiar with Dublin, Ohio, but I can assure you, when I think of domestic terrorists plotting to violently overthrow the government, I do not think of them meeting at a golf course or in the “great room” of a 4,000-square foot soft contemporary with 25-foot ceilings and a palladium window. But that’s what you get for stereotyping, I suppose.

Anyway, it’s hard not to read about all of this and not think (a) that the president had at least some hand in encouraging a violent overthrow of a state government; and (b) that all of the references to these people as a “militia” in all of the news stories about this would be different if they were not white conservatives.

Anyway, sure, America seems healthy as hell right now.

Will democracy save us?

Not if Republicans have much to say about it.

Wednesday night and Thursday morning Mike Lee, a sitting U.S. Senator tweeted that “we’re not a democracy” and that “democracy isn’t the objective; liberty, peace, and prospefity [sic] are.” In this Lee sounds like every conservative dickweed you met in your first week of Poly Sci 101. The guy who then says “technically we’re a republic” and then thinks he made a good point instead of stating something technically correct yet functionally pointless.

There’s more than smug pedantry going on with Lee’s tweets, however. This “we’re not a democracy, we’re a republic” thing has grown dramatically among conservative pundit types in recent years, not in the interests of explaining a technical point of the Constitution, but as an effort to cover for the GOP's assault on voting and minoritarian Federalist Society-style legal theory. It’s a pseudo-intellectual fig leaf aimed at distracting critics from the sharply anti-democratic bent of the modern Republican Party.

And it’s a necessary one, because the current bent of the modern Republican Party is a decidedly unpopular one.

Their presidential candidates have lost the popular vote in six of the past seven elections and their overall vote totals in Congressional elections have been lower than that of Democratic candidates. They have retained power, however, due to structural anti-democratic institutions like the Electoral College and the makeup of the Senate and less formal and more ethically questionable means such as aggressive gerrymandering. In more recent years those anti-democratic impulses have progressed to blatant voter-suppression efforts.

Lee and other Republicans cite the Founders when they talk about the “dangers of democracy,” but the Founders were not against the concepts of majority rule in the aggressive manner in which current Republicans are. Their concern was direct democracy — people voting on literally every issue, Ancient Greece-style — rather than the election of representatives by popular vote. No one is suggesting the Greek model here. And the Founders, I strongly suspect, would be appalled at the notion that minority political factions could gain a stranglehold on all three branches of government and then seek to pull up all the ramps and block political opponents from gaining power in the way that Republicans are hellbent on doing.

When your ideas are loathed by a majority of the country and you've set out to rig the system to protect those ideas from popular democracy, however, you either have to admit that you consider our system of governance to be the enemy or else you have to pervert our system of governance. In inveighing against “democracy” in this way, Lee and his cohorts seek to do both.

And you think I write a lot

I send thousands of words to your inbox every morning, five days a week. Some people have asked me how I write so much and whether I’m worried about burning out.

A thing they never ask me: “are you actually a real person?”

Maybe they should.

I’m real, though, I swear. If I wasn’t, would I constantly be asking you for money? Like this?

Clearly only humans do that.

Have a great weekend, everyone. And thanks for stopping by.