Cup of Coffee: April 24, 2024
A Maddux, duo double dinger days, debuts, signing, injuries, Boomer condescension, Seinfeld, and toilets and stuff
Good morning!
We had a Maddux last night and a couple of guys who each had two homers. They were Michael Tauchman of the Cubs and Riley Greene of the Tigers. I hope they both go to law school after they retire because a law firm called “Tauchman & Greene” sounds so perfect. Beyond that a prospect got called up, an old guy got signed, and some people had injury setbacks, which is basically the circle of life for baseball players.
In Other Stuff I get mad at an old guy assuming that young people are ignoramuses, I’m happy to say goodbye to non-compete clauses, the Bee Movie guy has opinions, and a couple of items about toilets and pooping and things for which I apologize in advance, and I don’t even wanna talk about today’s playout song.
And That Happened
Here are the scores. Here are the highlights:
Atlanta 5, Marlins 0: Max Fried tossed a two-hit complete game shutout and needed only 92 pitches and one hour and fifty-four minutes to do it. That’s a Maddux, folks. The inventor of the Maddux as a stat, Jason Lukehart, wrote to me last night with some additional factoids:
- 2023 and 2022 each had only two Madduxes all season, while 2024 now has two already, with Fried joining Tanner Houck who pitched one last week.
- Before this, the last season with two Madduxes by April 23 was in the year 2000. David Wells and Aaron Sele were the responsible parties that time.
- This was the third Maddux of Fried's career. He is the only active pitcher with three career Madduxes.
- This was the Braves' 25th Maddux since MLB began tracking pitch counts in 1988, which easily leads MLB. The Blue Jays are next with 17.
- Atlanta's 25 Madduxes were pitched by Greg Maddix (10), Tom Glavine (5), Max Fried (3), Shelby Miller (2), Charlie Leibrandt, Steve Avery, Kevin Millwood, Mike Hampton, and Paul Maholm.
And now you know. Thanks, Jason!
Guardians 4, Red Sox 1: The guy who threw the other Maddux this year, Tanner Houck, who did so against this very Guardians team, was keeping the bats quiet for a while, but Tyler Freeman and Bryan Rocchio had an RBI single and a sac fly, respectively, in the seventh and José Ramírez homered in the eighth. An Esteven Florial double in the ninth closed things out on yet another Guardians to victory.
Diamondbacks 14, Cardinals 1: Pavin Smith — who, if I was still doing extended name-related bits, would be the club pro at an upscale exurban golf club through which all of the intrigue of this surprisingly vicious, tight-knight community flows — hit a grand slam and drove in six. Christian Walker and Kevin Newman also homered. I could see Christian Walker as the bartender maybe. Kevin Newman is a club member. He’s the emasculated husband of, I wanna say, Pricilla Newman, who has Smith wrapped around her finger and who may be setting our hero up for . . . murder?
Mariners 4, Rangers 0: Logan Gilbert pitched his nuts off again, shutting Texas out on two hits into the seventh after which three relievers finished the blanking. Cal Raleigh, who is the one who first said “Logan pitched his nuts off,” hit a two-run homer, as did Julio Rodríguez. When I saw it was Rodríguez’s first of the year my jaw about dropped. I coulda sworn he had some already. I feel like I remember writing about it. It put me in a mind to go back and check every Mariners recap I’ve done this year to see— eh, and then I fell out of that mind and got on with my life.
Pirates 2, Brewers 1: Andrew McCutchen homered to lead off the game for the second day in a row while starter Bailey Falter didn’t, pitching shutout ball into the eighth. Connor Joe hit an RBI single in the sixth.
Reds 8, Phillies 1: Cincinnati snaps Philly’s seven-game win streak with authority, scoring eight unanswered runs after the Phillies scored in the top of the first. Elly De La Cruz hit a two-run home run, Christian Encarnacion-Strand went 3-for-4 with two RBI, and Santiago Espinal had three hits including a solo homer.
Dodgers 4, Nationals 1: If you told me that Patrick Corbin was gonna shut out the Dodgers into the sixth inning I wouldn’t have believed ya. It didn’t matter because his boys didn’t score him any runs and the bullpen coughed up four, but let the record reflect it all the same. Shohei Ohtani hit a 450-foot homer that left the bat at nearly 119 m.p.h. I had seen an article yesterday about how Dave Roberts was working with him on his plate discipline but I feel like he’s gonna be fine.
Tigers 4, Rays 2: RIley Greene hit a solo shot in the third and a two-run homer in the eighth and Mark Canha added a solo shot of his own later that inning. Kenta Maeda allowed three hits in five scoreless innings. The Tigers continue to roll on the road. The Rays have lost four of five.
Yankees 4, Athletics 3: New York scored all of its runs in the first thanks to a two-run double from Giancarlo Stanton and a two-run homer from Anthony Rizzo. Marcus Stroman bent but didn’t break in allowing three while pitching into the sixth and four relievers held the A’s hitless over the final three and two-thirds.
Twins 6, White Sox 5: Chicago loses once again, this time despite carrying a 5-2 lead into the bottom of the eighth. That’s when Trevor Larnach hit a two-run homer to bring the Twins to within one. Byron Buxton tied it with a solo shot in the bottom of the ninth, after which one Twin walked and another doubled to put runners on second and third and Alex Kirloff singled home the walkoff run. When you lose as much as the Sox do, some of ‘em are gonna really hurt.
Cubs 7, Astros 2: A five-run first courtesy of a two-run shot from Cody Bellinger and a three-run shot from Mike Tauchman put this one out of reach before it really began. Tauchman would end the scoring with another homer in the eighth. Houston has lost three straight and six of seven. Bellinger had to leave mid-game due to bruised ribs, so that’s worth watching.
Royals 3, Blue Jays 2: A two-run double from Bobby Witt Jr. and four and two-thirds innings of scoreless relief pushed the Royals to victory. Tough luck loss for Kevin Gausman, who pitched into the seventh with only the three unearned runs on the ledger.
Rockies 7, Padres 4: The Rockies were trailing 4-1 when Brendan Rodgers hit a go-ahead grand slam to pace a five-run fourth inning. They also drew a bases-loaded walk and Ezequiel Tovar and Nolan Jones knocked in runs with singles. It was just the second win in ten games for Colorado.
Angels 7, Orioles 4: Mike Trout homered to lead off the game — yeah, he’s hitting leadoff now — and the Angels ran things to 7-0 by the fourth inning and just cruised from there, snapping a five-game skid.
Giants 5, Mets 1: Logan Webb was a ground ball machine, shutting out the Mets for eight innings and extending his scoreless innings streak to 19. Mike Yastrzemski, Thairo Estrada, and Michael Conforto each had two hits. Yastrzemski drove in three while Estrada and LaMonte Wade Jr. drove in the other two runs.
The Daily Briefing
DJ LeMahieu has a setback
Yankees third baseman DJ LeMahieu took the field in a rehab game yesterday as he attempts to come back from a fractured right foot. Then he left the field due to soreness in said foot. He’s returning to New York to be re-examined.
Anyway, get used to the Oswaldo Cabrera Show for the foreseeable future.
Rangers sign Johnny Cueto
The Texas Rangers, who collect old pitchers like your aunt collected Beanie Babies, have signed 16-year veteran Johnny Cueto.
Cueto, 38, made 13 appearances for the Miami Marlins last season. They were not very good appearances. Before that came a pretty decent 25-appearance season with the White Sox in 2022 with whom he signed after his long-term deal with the Giants ended in 2021.
My guess is that outside of some spot starts or mopup work he’s done being a particularly useful big league starter, but I kinda like the idea of Cueto still out there doing what he’s doing. I’ve always liked him as a pitcher.
The Orioles call up another prospect
Now switching to young players.
The Baltimore Orioles system has been spittin’ out prospects like a cranked up Xerox. Their latest promotion: outfielder Heston Kjerstad from Triple-A Norfolk.
Kjerstad was the No. 2 overall pick in the 2020 draft. He made his big league debut last season, but it was only a cup of coffee in which he hit .233 with two home runs in 13 games. So far he's hit 10 home runs in just 21 games for the Tides. A space opened up for him when outfielder Austin Hays hit the injured list with a calf strain.
While the highly-touted Jackson Holliday has been pretty awful in the early going, the O’s have a seemingly never-ending supply of young talent at the ready. Losing as much as they did for as long as they did contributed greatly to that, of course, but even a lot of losing teams draft and scout poorly, so kudos to the front office for doing well in that regard.
Tristan Casas update
Boston Red Sox first baseman Triston Casas was placed on the injured list the other day due to rib “discomfort.” Yesterday Alex Cora told reporters that it was more than mere discomfort: Casas has a rib fracture. If you need a technical prognosis, know that Cora said Casas will be out for "a while."
Casas is hitting .244/.344/.513 (142 OPS+) with six home runs and 10 RBI in 22 games this year.
Kyle Hendricks goes on the IL
The Chicago Cubs placed starter Kyle Hendricks on the 15-day injured list with a lower back injury.
Hendricks has been awful this year, posting a 12.00 ERA and a 16/7 K/BB ratio across 21 innings while allowing 37 hits, eight of which have been homers. It’s so bad that one can’t really know for sure if he truly does have a back injury fueling such awfulness or if such awfulness has led to the Cubs creating a pretext for putting him on the shelf or a while.
Other Stuff
Ok, Boomer
As you know, I have been consciously avoiding commenting on what’s been going on in Gaza in this space and I have extended that to the U.S. policies and the protests surrounding it. This is not because I have no opinions, because I fear what anyone thinks of those opinions, or because I believe the matter not worthy of discussion. Rather, it’s born primarily of the fact that I, personally, possess nowhere approaching the level of expertise or insight to say anything that uniquely illuminates such a difficult and highly-contentious matter in a public way combined with my desire to not allow such a difficult and highly-contentious matter consume what is, in essence, a space where we come to fart around. I get that some people disagree with my drawing that line — I’m obviously not a “stick to sports” guy — but it’s a line I just felt it necessary to draw for the sake of sanity and comity and trying to maintain both of those things in this community.
That being said, there are some tangential matters that I can’t simply let pass.
On Monday night Atlantic columnist Tom Nichols was interacting with some folks online and was being scornful and dismissive of students protesting at Columbia. The basis of his scorn and dismissal was rooted, essentially, in the notion that young people are ignorant of the world in which they live and that they’re cosplaying as 60s radicals.
In one tweet he said of college-aged students that, “a generation that has grown up in peace and prosperity jonesing for the rush of having their own version of the 1960s, and looking desperately to shoehorn every cause into a replay of what they think their boomer grandparents were doing.” In response someone said “also a generation that grew up watching 20+ years of war in the middle east that went nowhere and killed a bunch of innocent people.” Nichols was not having that:
This is unadulterated horseshit.
My kids are the same age as those protesting at Columbia. They grew up in post-9/11 America and between what I taught them and what they saw and continue to see with their own eyes they are well aware of the bullshit militaristic/imperialist policy that has shaped it. Nichols, who is 63 years old, may have himself grown up in a world in which the only things he knew he learned by watching Walter Cronkite, but does he think young adults don’t know anything that wasn’t on CNN or on the front page of the New York Times in 2017?
Actually, I’m not even giving Nichols that much benefit of the doubt as I am certain that he read a book or a magazine or two or had conversations with older people when he was growing up and knew about things that happened in the world when he was a child. I was born in 1973 and Vietnam was not in the national news when I was becoming politically socialized, yet I, somehow, was aware of its wrongness and its tragedy well before I was 21. The same goes for Nichols and, I dunno, the Civil Rights Movement or the JFK Assassination. The same goes for young people today and America’s tragic wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
As I said, I am not going to get into debates with Nichols or anyone else as to the substance or merits of the Columbia protests in this space. There is a lot that can be said about all of that that I am not going to discuss here. But I am not going to tolerate such bullshit condescension, the likes of which I am quite certain a 21 year-old Tom Nichols would never have accepted if it was leveled at him.
The surest sign that you or your generation is spent as a source of leadership or influence is when you blithely dismiss those who you purport to lead or influence. When you mock those who are younger than you and presume they are idiots who know not what they do, your time is fucking up.
Bye-bye non-compete agreements
The Federal Trade Commission banned employee non-compete agreements yesterday. It is now illegal for bosses to make workers sign non-competes in any situation. Previously existing non-competes are now void.
This is an excellent, and long-overdue piece of policy.
While the original idea behind non-competes made some sense — protecting a business’s trade secrets and other confidential information when high-value employees switch jobs — the scope of use of non-competes has exploded over the years, with the FTC estimating that as many as one in five workers were subject to one. They had increasingly been applied to even low-wage employees in non-technical roles who had no access to anything which could reasonably called a trade secret. Security guards. Factory workers. Secretaries. Interns. Janitors. Even fast food restaurant employees and store clerks.
There was a method to this madness. Rather than being used to actually protect trade secrets, non-competes were really used by businesses to keep wages down by keeping workers from switching jobs for bigger paychecks or better benefits. Though conservative types don’t want to admit it because it undoes a great deal of their agenda, the labor market is a market just like any other market and non-competes represent and create inefficiencies in that market. Inefficiencies the sort of which the FTC literally exists to combat.
There will still be a lot of beefing about the new FTC rule. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is promising to sue and has spent tens of millions of dollars lobbying Members of Congress in an effort to beat back the FTC on this, among other things. But screw them. Despite their fancy and official sounding name, all chambers of commerce are business trade groups, nothing more. They exist to protect the wealthy and they hate this rule because it represents a rare victory for working people. Let ‘em bleat about it, but I don’t think they’ll ultimately be successful in undoing this.
Quote of the Day: Jerry Seinfeld on the movie industry
Jerry Seinfeld, interviewed by Variety:
“Film doesn’t occupy the pinnacle in the social, cultural hierarchy that it did for most of our lives. When a movie came out, if it was good, we all went to see it. We all discussed it. We quoted lines and scenes we liked. Now we’re walking through a fire hose of water, just trying to see . . . Disorientation replaced the movie business. Everyone I know in show business, every day, is going, ‘What’s going on? How do you do this? What are we supposed to do now?'”
Jerry Seinfeld has been in show business for nearly 50 years. In that time he has made exactly two non-documentary, non-cameo appearances in films of any kind. “The Bee Movie” and the new Netflix movie about the invention of Pop-Tarts. That doesn’t mean he has nothing interesting to say about the entertainment business specifically or the disappearance of the monoculture at large, but I feel like there may be more authoritative and insightful people who can make such judgments and declare the death of Hollywood.
Vindication
When it comes to toilet paper and the paper towel roll, are you an over-the-top or underneath person? Personally, I’m an over-the-top person. My wife is an underneath person. My kids — hahaha, like they’ve ever replaced a roll in their lives.
Anyway, people fight about this stuff, but thanks to science, we now know that everyone who does it underneath is aberrant. And as we all know, all aberration is, by definition, wrong. Thanks for listening.
Finally . . .
Yesterday I talked about junk products and gave a shoutout to Wirecutter. Just above I talked about toilet paper. Viva synergy:
This doesn’t necessarily tell me if Wirecutter’s toilet plunger ratings are good or bad, but it sure as hell tells me that they don’t have kids at home.
You may not like that song but I heard that it made it to number two on the charts!
Have a great day everyone.
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