Cup of Coffee: February 13, 2024
Alonso and the Mets, a couple of signings, some hope for an umpiring breakthrough, rock and roll, dipshit billionaires, and when realism is defeatism
Good morning!
There wasn’t a lot of baseball news yesterday, but we learned that Pete Alonso and the Mets aren’t likely to reach a long term deal, the Pirates signed a guy, the Padres signed a guy, and we may soon have a woman umpire in Major League Baseball. It’s about damn time.
In Other Stuff we talk about rock and roll, the danger of not telling dipshit billionaires no, and we talk about how people who claim to be realists are often defeatist enablers for whom I have absolutely no time.
Let’s get at ‘er.
The Daily Briefing
Stearns: Pete Alonso likely to hit free agency
Mets first baseman Pete Alonso is set to hit free agency after the 2024 season. Most folks have assumed that Steve Cohen would whip out his wallet and ink Alonso to a long-term extension before that can happen. Mets president of baseball operations David Stearns, however, doesn’t seem all that optimistic about it. Yesterday he said he thinks Alonso hitting free agency is “the most likely outcome.”
Obviously none of us know if that’s just a negotiating tactic or if, rather, the sides are so far apart that Stearns is simply being realistic in saying that a deal won’t be struck before the season starts, which is when most guys entering their walk year cut off negotiations. But man, you’d sort of hope that a long-term deal would’ve been struck by now.
All of that said, the Mets are sort of in a transition period. It’s not quite a rebuild, but it’s definitely a year in which they’re taking a step back from their all-in approach from the past couple of seasons. Stearns, who is new to the job, may very well want to see if Alonso’s step back in average and on-base percentage in 2023 was a blip or not before committing to him for several years. To be sure, Alonso’s power is so great that he can still be an extremely valuable bat even if he’s hitting in the low .200s, but I’d guess Stearns wants some more data from which to predict the arc of Alonso’s aging curve before writing the check.
Pirates sign Yasmani Grandal
The Pittsburgh Pirates have signed free agent catcher Yasmani Grandal to a one-year $2.5 million contract.
Grandal is the latest entry into a somewhat jumbled Pirates catching mix, which includes 2021 first overall pick Henry Davis, Jason Delay and Ali Sánchez. It does not include Endy Rodríguez, who started 57 games in 2023 as a rookie but who will miss all of 2024 after undergoing Tommy John surgery in December following an injury sustained playing winter ball.
The Pirates no doubt want the 24 year-old Davis to assert himself as the starter and view Grandal, 35, as insurance. How valuable that insurance policy is is open for debate, of course. While once one of the top power threats at his position, he’s not been an offensive asset since 2021 and hit a none-too-impressive .234/.309/.339 (77 OPS+) with eight home runs and 33 RBI in 118 games.
All that being said, it’s fun to say “Yasmani Grandal.”
Padres re-sign Jurickson Profar
The Padres are bringing Jurickson Profar back on a one-year, $1 million contract. He’s eligible for an additional $1.5 million in incentives based on plate appearances.
Profar split 2023 between the Rockies and Padres, for whom he had played from 2020-22, finishing with a line of .242/.321/.368 (80 OPS+) with nine homers, 46 RBI in 521 plate appearances. His late season stint with San Diego featured much better production, however. He seems to like it there. One would normally assume that, at this point in his career, he’d be slated for super utility duty, but the Padres outfield is extremely thin apart from Fernando Tatís, so he could see a good amount of time on the grass.
Finally, as I am obligated to do every time I bring up Profar, I must ask how on Earth this guy os still only 31. I’m too busy to check at the moment but I’m pretty sure he’s been the league for roughly 39 years. Maybe longer. Like, I’m pretty sure he missed his first season and a half because of Korean War duty.
Jen Pawol to ump big league spring training games
Britt Ghiroli of The Athletic reports that Jen Pawol, the first female umpire to reach Triple A since 1989, will umpire major league spring training games in Florida next month. She will become the third woman to do so following Pam Postema in 1989 and Ria Cortesio in 2007.
Both Postema and Cortesio were let go as umpires following those seasons. Pawol, who has been promoted to crew chief for 2024, is looking to buck that trend and become the first woman to umpire a regular season major league game. As a Triple-A crew chief you’d think she’d be in line for in-season fill-ins for vacationing umps. Here’s hoping it happens. We’re way past the point where it should have already.
Other Stuff
Rock and roll, baby
Cher, Mariah Carey, Sinead O’Connor, Oasis and Sade are among the first-time nominees for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame’s class of 2024, which were revealed Saturday.
And here’s one of those nominees on social media:
While it can be difficult, it is possible to hold conflicting thoughts in one’s mind at the same time. At the moment those conflicting thoughts are (a) I hate the very idea of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which I find to be stupidly reductive and antithetical to the very notion of art; but (b) Liam Gallagher’s response to Oasis getting nominated is pretty damn rock and roll and should thus ensure his immediate election.
We must simply learn to live in ambiguous mental spaces.
Bill Ackman is a friggin’ moron
Bill Ackman is the billionaire hedge fund manager and Harvard donor who made news recently as the most vocal critic of former Harvard University President Claudine Gay. Indeed, he spearheaded the effort to get her fired. This was all part of his larger effort to root “wokeness” and what he believes to be antisemitism out of college campuses, to end diversity, equity, and inclusion policies and stuff like that. Ackman is nominally a Democrat and claims he hates right wingers, but he just so happens to agree with them on everything of consequence in public life these days, so you do the math.
He’s also a fairly ridiculous figure in a lot of ways.
The primary means of ousting the Harvard president was via the revelation that she had committed plagiarism in her academic work. While that was pretty clearly pretext given that Ackman and others’ beef with her was actually based on other things entirely, it was nonetheless fair in a vacuum because she did do it, and plagiarism is bad. However, since turnabout is fair play, people quickly sussed out that Ackman’s own wife, the noted academic Neri Oxman, likewise plagiarized a bunch of stuff and they threw it back in his face. That sent Ackman off the deep end. He spent a couple of weeks obsessively tweeting increasingly unhinged defenses and excuses for his wife’s work which (a) went on for thousands and thousands of words at a time; and (b) quickly caused everyone to realize that Ackman is a total crackpot.
In case there was any doubt about Ackman’s crackpot nature, a New York Magazine profile of him came out yesterday which serves as a fantastic argument for billionaires to spend way more time in their massive compounds and/or private islands enjoying their dragon’s horde of gold and less time trying to make themselves into formal or informal policymakers.
The most immediately mock-worthy thing in the profile is this bit:
Ackman believes that our lives are often fated from birth. “I have a view that people become their names,” he told me. “Like, I’ve met people named Hamburger that own McDonald’s franchises.” We’d been talking for nearly an hour and a half when Ackman asked me what my name was, hoping to offer a diagnosis. After he seemed momentarily stumped by my surname, I offered him my first name, which he misheard as Reed. “Read … write,” he said, before turning back to himself. “So, my name is Ackman — it’s like Activist Man.”
Jokes about nominative determinism can be hilarious, but actively believing in this kind of thing is evidence that no one has ever had the guts to look you in the eye and call you a stupid dipshit.
That’s truly the weakness of the billionaire class, by the way. Yes, they face legal risks and sometimes personal risks by virtue of their high profiles, but their true achilles heel is the lack of people around them who are empowered to tell them when they’re being stupid dipshits. It’s the sort of thing that leads them to embarrass themselves in national magazines like this, to become best buddies with sex traffickers of minors, or to spend $44 billion on money-losing social media concerns because you want to be one of the cool kids. Seriously, every billionaire should take a page out of Bill Simmons’ old writings and hire a Director of Common Sense who is empowered to tell them when it’s time to stop.
A deeper problem arises when Ackman relays the reason why he decided to turn his attention to fighting wokeness on college campuses:
His nephew enrolled at Harvard, as did his eldest daughter — which, Ackman told me recently, is where the trouble started.
“She became, like, an anti-capitalist. Like practically a Marxist,” Ackman said in January, leaning across a large conference-room table at the offices of his hedge fund, Pershing Square. “We’d talk about capitalism, and she would freak out at the table.” His daughter was in the social-studies department just like her father, and rowed crew, too, but she had chosen to write her thesis on “The Concept of Reification in Western Marxist Thought,” having come to very different conclusions than her father had about how the world should work. Ackman said it felt as though she “had been indoctrinated” into a cult . . . in hindsight, Ackman saw it as an early warning. “That was an indicator, but I didn’t know if that was just my daughter or what,” he said. “I didn’t think, like, the biology department was involved.”
How much of what is ailing America right now is a function of billionaire dickheads being freaked out that their kids are thinking for themselves? Or, in the case of people like Elon Musk, billionaire dickheads being absent fathers for kids who they know, deep down, will one day resent them? Sure, the notion that the next generation will reject the teachings of the last has long been with us, but these days the older generation controls crazy amounts of wealth, possesses a tremendous amount of power, and has never been told no, so they’re gonna take their personal insecurities out on the rest of us and do maximal damage to civil society in the process rather than simply let their young birds fly.
It’d all be hilarious if it wasn’t so damaging.
“Realism” is often cowardice
You may have heard that Warner Brothers recently produced an animation/live action hybrid film called “Coyote vs. ACME,” featuring our old friend, Wile E. Coyote, Super Genius. You may have also heard that, despite the movie being essentially completed, Warner Brothers decided not to release it, either in theaters or on any streaming services. What’s more, last week they rejected multiple eight-figure offers from other studios and streamers to release the film and now seem intent on destroying it in its entirety, preferring to take a tax write-off than to let it see the light of day.
That news, which follows on a similar decision for a live action “Batgirl” movie a couple of years ago, angered a lot of people. And I totally get why. It’s wasteful, anti-creative, and sorta depressing and serves as a reminder that today’s movie studios and media companies really don’t give a crap about anything. Possibly even money, as there’s a decent chance movies like this could make some good money if WB put in even a little bit of an effort. They simply don’t want to do what they’re putatively in the business of doing, however, out of what seems like laziness, spite, base nihilism, or greed, even if it’s hard to pin down the exact mode of greed this represents.
Honestly, I don’t know enough about the movie business or the tax laws or whatever else is motivating this decision to say anything super intelligent about it, so I won’t discuss that decision any more than I just did. But I saw one reaction to news about the movie being shitcanned that truly pissed me off and I do wanna talk about that:
This tweet, which comes from a film critic, didn’t piss me off in isolation, though. It came on the heels of some interaction I had with some folks on social media last week following the latest news about the Oakland A’s problematic move to Las Vegas. I said something to the effect of “if we had a real commissioner he’d try to stop John Fisher from embarrassing himself and take control of this situation.” In response I got some people telling me “you don’t understand: the commissioner works for the owners, he’s never going to tell an owner what to do and it’s silly to think he would.”
Anyone who has read my writing for even a little bit knows that I’m no sunny optimist or believer in the inherent benevolence of humanity, but both of these reactions are laden with a brand of cynicism and faux-wisdom that pisses me off to no end. It’s a stance that says “we can’t possibly have better things and you’re an idiot for thinking we can ever have them.” It’s defeatism disguised as realism. It’s the abdication of even the slightest bit of advocacy for The Better in the interest of looking savvy.
Look, I’m no idiot. I know that Hollywood executives are usually gonna do things that piss off movie fans if it means either making some more money or saving some money. I likewise know that Rob Manfred would walk into traffic if one of the billionaire team owners told him to because he’s too afraid to assert even a little bit of authority or even attempt a little bit of persuasion with respect to those guys. But it is not written anywhere that these people MUST behave that way. Indeed, both the CEO of Warner Brothers and Rob Manfred have had predecessors or counterparts who did not behave that way in similar situations and who, at least on occasion, did the right thing instead of the most expedient thing. Should we ever expect that they do the right things? Of course not. But that does not mean that we should cease advocating for the right things let alone bashing people as stupid or naive for merely suggesting that the wrong thing is, in fact, wrong.
Most of you know that my outlook of the world skews pretty dark. I’m a perpetually frustrated idealist who wants good things to happen but who does not expect good things to happen because I’ve seen evil prevail far, far more often than good in my lifetime. Indeed, over time I’ve come to believe that evil has a built-in advantage in this damn world and that there’s not a hell of a lot we can do about it.
But I will never stop advocating for the good nor will I ever stop criticizing bad things and bad actors, even if the position seems hopeless. Sometimes that advocacy and criticism will relate to relatively unimportant or silly things like cartoon movies or baseball teams. But it applies just as much if not more so to the truly important things in life. The people who tell you that you’re dumb for thinking we can have better things in either arena are cowards. They’re defeatists. Worse, they’re enablers of the evil they profess to understand oh so well and they’re too stupid to realize that, even if the cause is ultimately hopeless, making things even slightly more difficult for evil now could help lay the groundwork for it being defeated later. One can be skeptical that good things will come, but behaving as though evil is inevitable is to render it inevitable.
And if evil nonetheless prevails? Well, at least we didn’t lose via forfeit. And maybe we landed a few punches in the process. Either way, don’t ever go down without a fight.
Have a great day everyone.
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